Above: Photo of the music for the beginning of the aria in Bach’s Easter Oratorio provided by Gregory Butler.
The source history of Bach's Easter Oratorio is complex. The work was first performed with its sacred text as a cantata on Easter Day, 1725 but it did not become an oratorio until over a decade later in 1738. A particularly thorny movement is the tenor aria "Saget, saget mir geschwinde." The earliest version of the movement includes in its scoring the normal oboe whose range is a minor third above that of the oboe d'amore. The commonly held view among Bach scholars is that the movement was rescored for oboe d'amore only when the work became an oratorio. A study of an early set of parts undertaken by me in Leipzig in the spring of 2024 suggests that an even earlier version of this movement which has not survived must originally have been scored not for normal oboe but for oboe d'amore. As well, in the Easter cantata a segment of the text has been altered, a revision believed to have been part of the overhaul of the movement when it became an oratorio. But the parts indicate beyond a doubt that the alteration of the text was made not by Bach's scribe but by the composer personally. It took place not as part of the overhaul of the work as an oratorio in 1738 but earlier for the performance of the Easter cantata. Both findings make possible the reconstruction of the version of this aria performed as part of the Easter cantata.
In May of this year, I presented my findings before a meeting of the Bach Colloquium at Harvard University.