“Jesus, tortured and dying for the sins of the world”: this is how the Hamburg librettist and senator Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680–1747) titled his dramatic adaptation of the Passion narrative – a text so popular that it was set to music nearly a dozen times in Hamburg alone. Composers included Reinhard Keiser, Johann Mattheson, George Frideric Handel, and Georg Philipp Telemann, among others. The jurist and diplomat Jacob Schuback (1726–1784) also composed his version of this so-called Brockes-Passion. And one must not assume that he, the son of a highly respected family, was merely a dilettante in the art of music. What Schuback created around the age of 30 during his musical “leisure hours” is, in the truest sense of the word, a gripping work. Choruses, recitatives, and arias follow one another with an almost operatic intensity, while characters imbued with vivid reality come to life with striking immediacy. Unsurprisingly, this Passion acquires a more profound, secondary significance...