History
Sometime during Eastertide 1920, the Revd Dr Eric Milner-White, recovering in the Cambridge Nursing Home after an appendicitis operation, wrote a letter to Charles Wood, asking for him to consider a possible collaboration on a new piece of service music. As Dean of King's College, Cambridge, he had been asked by the school to provide more Passion music for the Easter season. He explains in the letter to Wood: the Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach would be too unwieldy for their resources, and the Bach cantatas would be theologically inappropriate. John Stainer's The Crucifixion (1887) had been regularly performed during Passiontide in Anglican Churches in England, and Milner-White was anxious to provide an alternative to the popular work.
Milner-White's ideas for a Passion cantata based on the Gospel of Mark divide the Passion into its five traditional parts, termed "Lessons": the Last Supper, Gethsemane and Betrayal, the Jewish Trial, the Roman Trial, and the Crucifixion. The intervals between the Lessons he proposes should be filled with either prayers and psalms, hymns, or interspersed stanzas of the hymn Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle, which is based on the plainchant tune Pange lingua gloriosi.
Wood responded by visiting Milner-White as he convalesced. During their meetings, the two refined the shape the musical setting of the Passion would assume. Wood composed the piece over the course of nine days 1 August to 9 August 1920. It received its first performance Good Friday 1921 or 1922 at King's College Chapel.
Read more about this topic: St. Mark Passion (Wood)
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