Mendelssohn, Paulus

For its 4th Haydn-Mozart Festival, Gli Angeli Genève will perform Mendelssohn’s “Paulus”, conducted by Leonardo García Alarcón.

Paulus is the first of Mendelssohn’s two great oratorios. Created ten years before Elias, its genesis was long and complex. In contrast to librettists for whom the oratorio could only follow the English form, Mendelssohn was unwavering in his desire to bring his work closer to Bach’s Passions, introducing numerous chorales, for example. He won his case, but nothing was easy, and more than five years passed between the commissioning of the work and its creation. What could be more logical for Mendelssohn, grandson of a philosophically avant-garde rabbi and son of a prosperous Jewish banker who converted his family to Lutheranism, than to examine the destiny of St. Paul, the Jewish-born apostle who first persecuted the followers of Jesus before a mystical encounter with the risen Christ that changed his life and the young history of Christianity?