Mendelssohn, Felix - Paulus - Hagel, Doris (conductor)

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Ending a period of stagnation that had resulted in the genre becoming archaic and eclectic, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's composition in 1836 of Paulus, in English St. Paul, brought about an upheaval within the history of the oratorio. Mendelssohn combined the new, aesthetically (and not merely historically) rooted artistic perception of Bach's passions and oratorios with the belief that a modern religious work of art was viable outside the framework of the liturgy. In Paulus he created a work that underlined the great compositional traditions of Bach and Handel while simultaneously embracing the most recent developments of his day in terms of compositional technique. The sources indicate just how complicated and even thorny this creative process was: The fact that they are numerous - in part deviating one from another - and that the work is ambiguous in terms of its formal layout points to a complex history of composition and performance.