Dear David, When we discussed Betrachte Meine Seele before on this list, it became clear that people have found many ways of playing it: theorbo, archlute, renaissance lute, baroque lute, and mandora; playing all the notes, omitting some notes, and omitting all the bass notes. One of the arguments in favour of using the mandora is that they bought a couple for the church at Leipzig when Bach was there. There were over 40 tunings for the mandora, and the number of strings can vary. I think I am right in saying that Lynda Sayce uses a mandora for this piece.
I once counted the occurrences of the bass notes in Betrachte Meine Seele: C = 4; D = 14; Eb = 49; E = 8; F = 12; F# = 2; G = 20; Ab = 4; A = 8; Bb = 20. >From that it is clear that one of the bass courses must be tuned to Eb. Ideally there would be an open G and an open Bb too. When I played the piece a few years ago, I used my 7-course bass lute in D as a substitute mandora, and tuned it as follows: d', a, f, c, G, Eb, C. It meant that I could play all the notes reasonably well, but it would have been easier to have had a couple more courses available to allow more bass notes to be played on open strings. The advantage of using an unfamiliar tuning, is that you can set the lute up in such a way that the music is at its most playable. There is no problem coping with an unfamiliar tuning, as long as it is notated in tablature. The disadvantage is, that you would have to intabulate any other movement you wanted to play along with, which would be time-consuming, and frustrating if your lute is drowned out by the rest of the orchestra. If I remember right, and I would need to check to be sure, there are something like four sources for this music, of which only one mentions the word lute. It seems to me somewhat extravagant to hire a lute player for just one piece, which should probably be played on a keyboard instrument anyway. Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Rastall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "lutelist Net" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 9:13 PM Subject: [LUTE] St. John Passion > Dear luters, > > I know we've discussed the topic of the lute part in "Betrachte Meine > Seele" from the SJP before, but at the time I never paid much > attention. Well, I've been asked to perform this with a bass > soloist, and so I'm now paying close attention to whatever I can find > out about it! > > Is there a written-out lute part available somewhere? I could > intabulate it directly from the piano reduction, but a part already > realized would be a huge help. Also, the singer wants to know if I > can suggest a second Bach aria to act as a companion-piece to > "Betrachte Meine Seele," probably to be performed with just the lute > continuo only: preferably Bach, or something that would fit into a > program of High Baroque arias. I don't know much about the vocal > solo repertoire of the High Baroque, especially as it relates to the > lute. Anyone got any ideas????? > > Best wishes, > > David Rastall > [EMAIL PROTECTED] To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
