Following the performance of Graupner’s 1743 Passion Cycle, The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, Les Idées heureuses now turns to another Passion Cycle of Graupner set to music two years earlier, from which are taken the three cantatas proposed today. They were composed by the prolific writer and poet Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, who was also Graupner’s brother-in-law. The texts were published under the title “Considerations on the principal conditions of the great suffering of the sacrifice of reconciliation of our Saviour.”
