"Jueden" vs. "Juden" in St. John Passion

[M***@msn.com]

The text for Bach's St. John uses the word "Jueden" for "the Jews", but
many recordings (including Peter Schreier's) pronounce the word without
the umlaut. Is this a case of archaic vs. modern pronunciation or is
there another reason?

[Wimjan]

Post by M***@msn.com
The text for Bach's St. John uses the word "Jueden" for "the Jews", but
many recordings (including Peter Schreier's) pronounce the word without
the umlaut. Is this a case of archaic vs. modern pronunciation or is
there another reason?

Well, according to some earlier discussions [1] there are indeed differences
in the spelling, not only in the performances but also in the different
scores. Probably Bach wrote 'Jüden' and 'Juden' is the modernized version of
it. This modernizing happened more often, apparently: e.g. Hülfe->Hilfe and
darzu->dazu.


Regards,

Wimjan

[1]: see <http://google.nl/groups?q=juden+j%C3%BCden+bach>

[Tom Hens]

Post by M***@msn.com
The text for Bach's St. John uses the word "Jueden" for "the Jews", but
many recordings (including Peter Schreier's) pronounce the word without
the umlaut. Is this a case of archaic vs. modern pronunciation

Yes. "Jüden"/"Jueden" is what Luther used in his Bible translation (and his
anti-semitic diatribes), so that's what Bach set to music. "Juden" is
current standard German.

Post by M***@msn.com
or is there another reason?

Not really. And it doesn't necessarily depend on a decision by the singer
or conductor. Different editions of Bach's music can have differences in
the printed text, dependent on whether or not the editors decided to
"modernize" (by removing the umlaut in "Juden", for instance), or sometimes
"correct" things by replacing variants that to a present-day German ear
sound dialectical, i.e. Saxon (such as replacing "vor" with "für"). The
Neue Bach Ausgabe obviously sticks as closely as possible to the text Bach
used, but older editions often don't, and there are still a lot of those
around.