Had you been in Hamburg in 1719, you would have been treated to not one but four Brockes Passions by different local composers that Easter. You would have needed some serious aural, and vocal, stamina to dramatise Barthold Brockes’s telling of the Easter story. Most of these retellings of the events leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion run to at least two and a half hours and, in good Lutheran style, would have probably been bulked up by a sermon and a few hymns, or “chorales”.
Handel’s Brockes Passion, though long, is actually relatively light on those chorales — maybe he wasn’t a fan of audience participation — as it is, surprisingly, on choruses. Messiah this is not. Which is a shame, in a way,