Johann Sebastian Bach, Christoph Poppen, The Hilliard Ensemble

Morimur sets Bach's Partita in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004, among the Lutheran chorales that the musicologist Helga Thoene believes are hidden inside it. Her reading treats the closing Ciaccona as an epitaph for Bach's first wife, Maria Barbara, who died suddenly in 1720. Violinist Christoph Poppen and The Hilliard Ensemble turned that analysis into sound. The result was reviewed from Gramophone to the Chicago Tribune, and argued over as much as it was admired.

Thoene, of the University of Düsseldorf, published her findings in the Cöthener Bach-Hefte in 1994. She combines chorale quotations with number symbolism. In the Partita she also finds the encoded formula "Ex Deo nascimur, In Christo morimur, Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus", from which the album takes its title. Poppen brought the idea to Manfred Eicher, who invited the Hilliard singers. The recording was made in September 2000 at the Propstei St. Gerold, a monastery in Austria, with Poppen on baroque violin. The voices are Monika Mauch, David James, John Potter and Gordon Jones, and Peter Laenger was the engineer.

The five movements of the Partita alternate with chorale verses and fragments chosen for their association with death and Easter, among them Christ lag in Todesbanden and Jesu, deine Passion. A recurring fragment, Den Tod..., returns like a refrain between them. The Ciaccona is heard twice. The first time Poppen plays it alone, in a reading of over fourteen minutes. At the end it returns with the four singers placing the chorale lines that Thoene traced against the violin part, so the hidden melodies become audible.

Stereophile made it a Recording of the Month and Fono Forum its Stern des Monats. In Gramophone, Lindsay Kemp conceded that Bach never heard anything like this in performance, yet called it "a moving and intelligently programmed disc that is effective from beginning to end." John von Rhein in the Chicago Tribune described "an absorbing piece of speculation that lets us hear what might have been running through Bach's mind". Other writers questioned the premise itself, and the debate over Thoene's theory still follows the record.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1765, first released in September 2001.