Bach’s Great Passion

The Plough Music Series is a regular selection of music intended to lift the heart to God. It is not a playlist of background music: each installment focuses on a single piece worth pausing to enjoy.

Living for years in Germany, in Bach’s home state of Thuringia, it often struck me how his music was everywhere you looked, whether at churches, in concert halls, or on the radio. This was especially true at Advent and Christmas, but even more so around Easter, and on into early summer, when the state’s yearly Bach-Wochen (Bach Weeks) draw musicians and music-lovers from around the globe.

For many in this part of Germany, the musical highlight of the year is attending a performance of the composer’s great St. Matthew Passion. But this is not just a regional phenomenon. Google it, and you’ll come up with a staggering number of matches. Recordings – hundreds of them. Announcements for past and future performances from the smallest rural church choirs to the largest halls of New York, Moscow, Johannesburg, Berlin, Tokyo, and Sydney. Scholarly articles on its structure. Discourses on historically accurate performing standards and instrumentation. Endless critical appraisals, from the academic to the heartfelt, including an unlikely appreciation by a London Muslim who says that the work is so “devastating” in its power that even non-Christians can find meaning in it.

Leaving the cyber-world for the real, it’s much the same. Look at any big-city newspaper around Easter, and you’re sure to find a performance advertised somewhere. When my wife and I lived in New York, the Brooklyn Academy of Music was offering a series of special Passion concerts each spring that dispensed with the customary stand-and-sing presentation. (Instead, the choir, dressed in street clothes, was arranged on a round stage with the audience around it, to invite maximum participation in the experience.) Each of these performances sold out quickly, despite tickets ranging from $30 to $80 apiece. We used to go to similar (free) concerts at St. Peter’s, a church on the Upper East Side, where the audience was invited to sing along with each chorale. Some of these events were so well attended that you had to come several hours early if you wanted a good seat.

What sort of piece is the St. Matthew Passion, that it has such a wide reach and such tremendous staying power? Has anything else lasted, culturally speaking, from the early eighteenth century to the present? In an age when churches are normally dark and empty, why are crowds still flocking to hear such an overtly religious piece – an age when any song you could ever want can be had with the flick of your finger, via Spotify? Is it really just the music drawing people?

No one but the individual concertgoer can answer that question, but in the interest of piquing the interest of those to whom Bach’s “Great Passion” is a foreign, inaccessible enigma, here are a few thoughts. Based largely on gleanings from other sources (see the end-notes), they’re not especially original. I compiled them simply in order to share an ongoing fascination with this unrivaled depiction of Christ’s final sufferings – unrivaled in its poetic and musical scope, its spiritual depth, and its uncanny ability to stir the soul.

Background

Johann Sebastian Bach is widely regarded the greatest musical genius of all time. He was born in 1685 in Eisenach, Germany, the same year as Handel, though the two never met, because Handel spent most of his adult life in London. Bach came from a family of prominent musicians. He began earning his own living at fifteen as a chorister and violinist in a court orchestra, and later became a church organist. In 1707 he married a second cousin, Maria Barbara, and had seven children. He was, by now, working as a violinist, organist, and consultant to organ builders.

Bach’s first wife died in 1720, and he remarried the next year. His second wife, Anna Magdalena, was a singer, and bore him thirteen more children and assisted him by copying his scores. There was a lot to copy: during his life Bach wrote some 250 cantatas, plus scores of sonatas, concertos, trios, oratorios, masses, motets, keyboard exercises and variations. (Despite this prodigious output, by the way, Bach was not known so much as a composer during these years, but first and foremost as a brilliant organist, organ builder and technician, and teacher. Only a dozen or so of his works were published in his lifetime.)

In 1723, the family moved to Leipzig, where Bach spent the rest of his life, mostly at St. Thomas, where he was cantor, though also at the city’s other big church, St. Nicholas. Among other duties, his post required him to instruct the members of the Thomanerchor (the boys’ choir of St. Thomas) in singing and in Latin, and to provide weekly music at both of these churches.

Notes at the Bach Museum in Leipzig contain complaints by his contemporaries suggesting that he was too easy on the pupils in his care, who, instead of doing their studies in the evening, ran wild through the streets. In a way, it’s hardly surprising. After all, he had his own children to look out for, and was simultaneously busy turning out, during his Leipzig years, more than two full cycles of cantatas (a cycle consisting of a complete cantata for each Sunday of the year). Many were written around Lutheran chorales, such as “Wake, awake” or “How brightly beams the morning star.”

Bach completed his St. Matthew Passion in time for Good Friday, 1727 (he revised it later, at least once). It was performed only a few more times, “always under his own direction and with his apparently meager ensemble of church musicians.” (Gordon). In the 1740s, he began to go blind. He died of a stroke (after an unsuccessful eye operation) in 1750, at the age of 65, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Writing about the place of the Passion in Bach’s life, the musicologist David Gordon writes:

An indication of the special regard he held for this work is that Bach went to considerable trouble in his old age to repair the large manuscript score of the St. Matthew Passion. This presentation-quality copy, still in existence today, is unique among Bach manuscripts: he designed it beautifully, painstakingly bound and re-sewed it by hand, and carefully highlighted the biblical words in red ink. Those few who saw it after Bach’s death considered the manuscript unperformable and left the huge work unpublished and unheard until 1829 [a full century after it was composed] when Felix Mendelssohn organized [and conducted] a performance, heavily abridged, in Berlin.

With this performance Mendelssohn revived, almost single-handedly, interest in Bach. He was only twenty, and a recent convert to Christianity.

Speaking of faith, Bach was a staunch Lutheran. At the Bach House in Eisenach, where he was born and raised, numerous Bibles, hymnals, and multi-volume works by Martin Luther (in some cases heavily marked in the margins) attest to the fact that he had more than a passing interest in theology, and that he took his faith seriously. Indeed, it is clear that his devotion to Christ was deep and personal.

In the case of the St. Matthew Passion, this devotion seems to have extended even to the care with which the text was shaped. According to the Japanese Bach scholar Tadashi Isoyama, recent research indicates that Bach’s librettist (the Leipzig poet Christian Friedrich Henrici, who went by the pen name Picander) drew on collections of passion sermons included in Bach’s personal library, and that “it seems probable that Bach did not simply select verses and set them to music, but rather influenced the construction of the texts.”

Back to the composition of the music itself, Bach was also keenly aware that his talent was a gift. As he noted, in a scribbled comment in the margin of his Bible, “In music of true worship, God is always present with his grace.” Many of his scores are inscribed with an abbreviated heading or footer expressing devotion, for example: S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria, which means “to God alone be glory”), I.N.J. (In Nomine Jesu, which means “In Jesus’ name”) or J.J. (Jesu Juva, which means “Help me, Jesus”).

The Title

Why the odd title – St. Matthew Passion – when the “passion” is Christ’s, not Matthew’s? The full title, from the cover of Bach’s fair copy, makes it clear: there, it appears as Passio Domini nostri J. C. secundum Evangelistam Matthaeum; that is, “The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the Gospel of Matthew.” Of course, the word “passion” does not refer to “love” in this instance, but comes from passio – a participle of the Latin verb “to suffer.”

Bach sets out to make this suffering palpable in the first chorus by its mood: turbulence, anguish, minor chords, and then light breaking through with what Leonard Bernstein called the “redemptive clarity” of the ripieno. That’s the simple choral melody set above the swirling accompaniment. Note Bach’s use of a simple, childlike tune – an old French street song that recalls “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.” Writing about the way the ripieno (in G major) cuts “like a beam of light” through the “dark, pulsing texture” of the double chorus (in the relative minor, E) the critic Damian Thompson notes that this juxtaposition is not just “a masterstroke, but – incredibly – an afterthought: Bach wove in the hymn tune only in a later version of the Passion.” Listen to track 1 – “Come ye daughters.”

The Cast

St. Matthew Passion is an oratorio, which is a musical drama. Unlike the opera, the best known type of musical drama, the oratorio does not use costumes, makeup, or musicians who act while they sing. Rather, the composer restricts himself to creating a drama whose full force comes to expression through the musical delivery. (This is because most religious music was written for and performed in churches, as part of the regular order of services. There was no room for a stage, and no time for scene changes.)

Like operas, though, oratorios do have casts. In St. Matthew Passion we have the narrator, who is called the evangelist, because he recites, in “recitatives,” the story of the crucifixion as told in the gospel, or evangel (from the Latin evangelium). Specific actors – Pilate, High Priest, Judas, the crowd – have roles too. In the short choruses “Not upon this feast!” and “To what purpose is this waste?” it is clearly a crowd speaking, if not shouting, in response to the words of the evangelist. (This sort of emotionally charged musical outcry is known as a turba (“turbulence”).

Even the larger “double” choruses, divided in today’s editions simply as “Choir I” and “Choir II” were originally conceived with specific roles in mind. Whereas Picander designates Choir I as “the Daughters of Zion” (Jesus’s contemporaries, who witnessed his crucifixion firsthand), he marks Choir II “the Faithful” – us latter-day witnesses to his death.

The last “actor,” of course, is Jesus himself. Note that whereas Bach used the organ and other instruments to accompany most voices of the cast, he used strings alone as accompaniment whenever Jesus himself speaks, resulting in what Bernstein called a shimmering “halo” effect (the musicologist Richard Taruskin calls it an “aureole”). David Gordon notes, “Only at the moment of Christ’s death does this halo fall away, and Jesus utters his poignant final ‘Why have You forsaken Me?’ accompanied by basso continuo alone.” Listen to track 2 – and note the evangelist, the turbae, and the strings accompanying the voice of Jesus. The story here is as follows: Caiaphas consults with leaders to kill Jesus. The crowd says, “Not upon this feast!” Then the evangelist sings of the anointing of Jesus in Bethany, and the crowd reacts, “To what purpose is this waste?” to which Jesus responds by singing of how the woman who anointed him will always be remembered.

Returning to the idea of a cast: there are also commentators. Some of what they sing is reflective, as the piece that addresses the evil of Judas’ betrayal; other pieces consist of a soliloquy in which the singer pours out his or her heart, the best-known example being the aria, “Have mercy on me, O Lord.” In numbers like this one, Bach puts the spotlight on our own condition, and forces us to deal with the words on a personal level.

Finally, Bach employs a sort of Greek chorus to respond to the events. These take two forms: there are eleven chorales which “step outside the action at significant spots and react to the story…They provide commentary and create a sense of a community response to the events just described by the soloists” (Gordon). Then there are the four longer choruses that frame each half of the Passion, like bookends. They are written for soloists (both instrumental and vocal) and a single or double chorus, and often involve dialogue, as in the first piece, where Choir I asks questions (“What?” “Come where?”), and Choir II answers them (“A spotless lamb.” “To Jesus’ bosom”). David Gordon writes:

In these pieces, the singers do not depict actual characters in the narrative, but rather comment introspectively on the meaning of the events, often explicitly inviting the listener’s heart to become involved in the unfolding drama, to react to it and be changed by it. This skillful and repeated invitation to the listener actually to join the story is a crowning touch of Bach’s genius, and it is this element above all which makes the entire work so moving and powerful.

The best example of this is the so-called “Lord’s Supper sequence.” Note the accompaniment (and the interplay of narrator and cast). Jesus says that someone will betray him, and the chorus, representing the disciples, responds, “Lord, is it I?” The phrase is repeated eleven times, once for each faithful disciple. There’s a certain irony here: the missing phrase, of course, belongs to Judas, and highlights him as the only disciple impudent enough to ask the question.

Just at this point, Bach interrupts the narrative to insert the chorale “‘Tis I who ought to suffer,” a stark reminder that the real responsibility for Christ’s betrayal is not Judas’s alone, but that each of us must bear our part. Whether a singer in the choir, or as a listener, we are thus drawn into the story.

It is this sort of device that makes the oratorio so heart-rending. Again, it doesn’t just describe Good Friday, but invites everyone to participate in remembering it, and to thereby re-live the emotions of the anxious, tired, or faithless disciple, the watcher in the crowd, or Christ’s grieving mother.

At this point, listen to track 3: the Passover story; Jesus’ prediction that one of his disciples will betray him; the evangelist’s depiction of their growing sorrow; and finally, the question, “Lord, is it I?” The following chorale (track 4) answers their question from our perspective: “Lord, it is my sin that binds thee - I am the one who ought to be suffering such tortures.”

With respect to the chorales, their poetic lyrics are perhaps just as moving as their musical power. Whereas the recitatives and arias dramatize the agony of Gethsemane and Golgotha, the chorales give one a chance to “breathe in,” as it were, and respond on an even more personal level to the unfolding story. Even the deepest aria – take, for instance, “Have mercy” – remains a solo, performed by one person; everyone else remains a listener. Singing a chorale, on the other hand, presumes the participation of everyone in the choir (and in Bach’s day, the entire congregation as well), and allows each singer to voice – and thus admit – his complicit guilt in relation to Christ’s death, and his longing for redemption.

According to the critic Alex Ross, all this is a fruit of Bach’s intent, which was not merely to set an important text to music, but to bring to life a theological truth. He notes that in a 1519 treatise on the Crucifixion, Martin Luther had

grim tidings for those…who wished to lay the blame for Christ’s death entirely on the Jews. You killed Jesus, Luther told them: “When you see the nails piercing Christ’s hands, you can be certain that it is your work.” Luther’s message served as a warning to those who felt secure in their faith, their virtue, their worldly position. To him, guilt for the crime committed at Golgotha is ubiquitous, seeping forward in time… This [view] lies at the core of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which, scholars argue, takes that 1519 treatise as a model.

Speaking of the unchristian habit of assigning guilt for Christ’s death not only to his Jewish contemporaries, but to every Jew since, Bach has had his fair share of detractors when it comes to the question of anti-Semitism in the texts of his musical compositions. Naturally, the criticisms are focused on his Passions. For anyone interested in the ins and outs of the arguments at hand, there is sufficient literature; suffice it to say here that Bach generally comes out clean, and that the accusations have rarely, if ever, really stuck.

Mood

In the Passion, as elsewhere, Bach uses his mastery of musical forms to create powerful contrasts of mood. The best example is (again) the chorales, which often have similar (if not identical) melodies but are harmonized differently in order to evoke different emotions. Bach actually uses the melody of his best-known chorale, “O sacred head now wounded” five times in this Passion, but they are harmonized so differently that the repetition is not at all tedious. Instead, it works to give the oratorio coherence, the way a literary motif might in a novel.

One setting of “O sacred head” is unrelievedly somber, as when Jesus has just been crucified. Another is anguished, set in a minor key with an unsettling chromatic bass line that never really finds its footing till the end. Still another is solid and confident, representing strength and faith. In the best recordings, these nuances are taken into account, avoiding the tedious delivery that so many people unfairly (but understandably) associate with chorales; in other words, the delivery is varied according to the context. (For a peerless example of such chorale singing, listen to tracks 5, 6, and 7.)

A fine example of Bach’s use of repetition to make connections is noted by the scholar Christoph Wolff, who suggests that the use of the same melody for “O blessed Jesus,” the first chorale in the oratorio, and one of the last “O wondrous love” is intentional. In the first instance, the text refers to Christ’s prediction of his sufferings. In the second, which follows the crowd’s shouts of “Let him be crucified!” the crucifixion has become a concrete reality.

The chorales, by the way, are not Bach’s own melodies, but familiar tunes that he borrowed and harmonized or otherwise arranged. We might think of them as sober, earnest hymns, but some were originally street tunes. (According to the Bach scholar Z. Philip Ambrose, the most famous one “O sacred head,” by Han Leo Hassler, was originally a secular love song.)

This tradition of borrowing music is still going strong; though whereas three centuries ago serious musicians were borrowing popular tunes, it’s now working the other way around: popular musicians are borrowing from classical tunes. A familiar instance of this in recent years is Carlos Santana’s use, in his album Supernatural, of a melody from Brahms’s Third Symphony. For a specific example relating to Bach, there’s Paul Simon’s song “American Tune,” which is almost identical to “O sacred head.”

Tone Pictures

In St. Matthew Passion as in his other choral works, Bach devised specific “tone pictures” or “musical pictures” to help deliver his narrative. Some of these are obvious because of the interplay of music and text; others are open to interpretation and have been “discovered,” so to speak, by critics over the years. Here, a few examples:

In one number, the cello ascends a major scale, as the singer describes Christ’s ascent of the Mount of Olives. In the same sequence, a flurry of chords dissipating in different directions illustrates Christ’s words about the scattering of his flock. To hear both examples, listen to track 8.

In another number, the oboe seems to represent Mary running first one way in the garden, and then the other, looking for Jesus. In yet another, the basses stumble over and over the same phrase, illustrating Jesus’s footsteps as he stumbles under the weight of a heavy wooden cross. There’s also a number where the woodwinds play repetitive triplets that evoke the soloist’s words: she says that her heart is swimming in a sea of tears. Listen to track 9 to hear the rippling motion.

Then there’s the dramatic point where the soloist sings Jesus’s words, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” On the word “weak,” the accompaniment crumbles. Peter’s weeping, after his betrayal of Christ, is also vividly depicted by the vocal line Bach gives the soloist at that point in the story. Listen to track 10, which depicts the whole sequence of Peter’s betrayal, and ends with him weeping. And in the aria where the soprano sings about the scourging of Jesus, a harsh, rhythmic motif in the violin part represents Christ’s being lashed with a whip. Listen to track 11 to hear this.

To me, the most vivid tonal depiction comes in the alto aria “Have mercy,” which Alex Ross calls “the most beloved passage in the St. Matthew Passion.” Evoking Peter’s bitter weeping after his denial of Christ, the “keening melody” is interwoven with a “sad, serene, gently dancing violin solo… The singer tries to emulate the violin’s endless melody but keeps falling short, because parts of it lie outside her range. It is an audible symbol of human frailty, akin to Peter’s failure of courage.”

Numerology

Like the Jewish cabbalists, and like Christians down the centuries who have highlighted the significance of numbers in everything from seven-armed candelabras to the triune God and the twelve gates of the Holy City (or the twelve disciples), Bach was interested in mathematical symbolism. For example, he wrote melodies comprised of fourteen notes, fourteen being the sum of the letters of his name, with each letter representing a number (A = 1, B = 2, etc).

Bach sometimes wrote “symmetrically” too: if the melody would go up or down by a certain interval, the bass line would mirror it by doing the opposite. Some of his music can even be played, simultaneously, by two musicians on opposite sides of a table, one reading the music upside down, to form a second part. (There’s a whole book devoted to this subject called Bach and the Physics of Music.) John Eliot Gardiner has written about the schematic symmetry in the larger structure of the oratorio too – that is, the way the sequence of choruses, arias, and chorales in Part I is mirrored in Part II.

Some illustrations: In No. 17, the bass accompaniment consists of 116 notes, a not-so-subtle reference to Psalm 116, which contains the verse, “I will take the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.”

In No. 40, while the tenor sings “My Jesus remains silent before the liars’ falsehoods,” the accompaniment is made up of 39 brief chords. This is a reference to Psalm 39, which contains the line, “I will keep my mouth with a bridle while the wicked stand before me.”

Then there’s the so-called Lord Supper sequence, where, as mentioned earlier, the phrase “Lord, is it I?” is repeated eleven times – once for each faithful disciple.

Conclusion

When all is said and done, the best testimony to the meaning and power of the St. Matthew Passion is the music itself, and the best way to approach it is simply to listen to it, whether by means of a recording or a live performance, and to let it work in you. As Paul Kilbey cautions, “picking out individual moments from a work of such overwhelming intensity” – and not moving beyond that – “is to miss the point: this is a piece whose scale and seriousness reflect its subject sincerely, and an experience of anything less than the whole cannot convey the sense of Passion integral to this work.” Tadashi Isoyama writes in a similar vein: “Put simply, the Passion is music that calls for mankind to reflect and to awaken. It prompts repentance, urging us to turn from vice toward freedom and salvation. It moves the spirit toward self-reflection and the exercise of the conscience.”

As with all great religious art, there is no need to explain or justify such an assertion: the piece has, in and of itself, sufficient power to touch the heart, awaken the imagination, and enliven faith. In short, you don’t need to understand it to be moved by it. In that spirit, three anecdotes:

At Easter 1870, the great atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in a letter to a friend: “This week I listened to the Matthew Passion of the divine Bach three times, each time with the same feeling of immeasurable astonishment. Whoever has completely forgotten the meaning of Christianity may hear it here, truly as the Gospel…”

In a book of letters by Hans and Sophie Scholl, the famous German siblings beheaded in 1943 for their outspoken resistance to Hitler, a letter from their mother, Magdalena, admonishes Hans not to forget to the importance of receiving Communion at Easter. In Hans’s reply (from Munich, where he was studying medicine), he tells her that he went instead to hear St. Matthew Passion on Good Friday, and that it shattered him.

Fast-forwarding to our day, the same seems to have happened to one of the best-known music critics of our time, Alex Ross, who attended a performance of the Passion by the Berlin Philharmonic in early 2014 and was so deeply affected by it that he wrote an entire piece about the concert in the normally cynical-witty pages of The New Yorker. Extolling the “invasive beauty of the lamenting arias, which give the sense that Christ’s death is the acutest of personal losses,” he said they had the effect of “pulling all of modern life into the Passion scene….By forcing the singers to enact both the arrogance of the tormentors and the helplessness of the victims, Bach underlines Luther’s belief in the inescapability of universal guilt.”

Moving on to describe the recitative where the baritone sings Jesus’ final cry of “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” Ross writes that

a more uncanny symbol of the loneliness of death can scarcely be imagined. From there to the end [of the performance], many of us were in a trance, out of which the chorus jolted us with one last unexpected gesture: in the silence after the final chord, the singers turned…and stared outward, with cold, expectant glances. They seemed to say, “You, too, are responsible.”

To some, this may sound like a dismal way to end an evening. On the other hand, as the writer Johann Heinrich Arnold, a lifelong lover of the Passion, stresses in his book Discipleship (1995),

One cannot encounter Jesus without encountering the cross. His person emanates suffering. If we love him, the desire to suffer with him will well up in us quite naturally. I cannot imagine how one can follow Jesus without having a deep understanding for his way of suffering…

The thought that God is all-loving can insulate us from the power of his touch. People know that God forgives sin, but they forget that he judges it too. There is something in modern thinking which rebels against the Cross and the Atonement. Perhaps our idea of an all-loving God keeps us from wanting to face judgment. We think that love and forgiveness is all that is needed, yet that is not the whole Gospel…

In the end, perhaps it is Bach’s insistence on reminding us of this “whole Gospel” that gives his Passion such depth. By drawing us right into the shadow of the Cross and prying open our hearts to Christ’s agony there, he invites us to share in it as fully as possible.

Obviously, our anguish is vicarious, limited to the realm of Bach’s (and our) imagination. Even so, the experience is vital. For until we are willing to open ourselves to the suffering that took place at Gethsemane and on Golgotha, it cannot work its redemptive powers in us. Without guilt, forgiveness is meaningless, and without death – without Good Friday – there could not possibly be such a thing as resurrection and the joy of Easter.

Listen to tracks 12 and 13 - the last recitative, followed by the powerful closing chorus, “In tears of grief.”

Sources and Endnotes

1. Though Bach had twenty children in all, three of his first wife’s seven children died in infancy, as did six of his second wife’s thirteen. Though undeniably tragic, and shocking from a twenty-first-century perspective, such a high rate of infant mortality was not uncommon in Bach’s time.

2. Writing on the history of musical “passions,” the scholar Paul Kilbey says the following: There can be few more evocative words in music than “passion.” As well as its familiar English definition, in a musical context it also suggests the commemoration of that most emotive Christian story, the journey of Jesus to the cross. The word has also come to be all but synonymous in music with its two greatest exemplars: the St. John and St. Matthew Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The passions of John and Matthew were in fact the first two to gain a place in the liturgical canon, though this was a good twelve centuries before Bach’s settings materialized: Pope Leo the Great established that these two accounts of the events leading to the crucifixion should be presented during Holy Week as early as the fifth century AD.

Performances of the passions from this time onwards appear to have developed in much the same way as religious music generally: initially the texts would have been recited or chanted by a single priest, and by the twelfth century there is evidence of musical notation being used to determine pitches. Also apparent in the early sources are indications of a sense of drama: many distinguish clearly between passages relating to the Evangelist/narrator, Christ, and the crowd (or “turba”).

By Bach’s time, passion setting had morphed into a dramatic form with much in common with the oratorio: Bach writes a dynamic and complex part for chorus (or double chorus) and characters with strongly delineated musical styles.

Although the Evangelist’s part in Bach’s settings is composed as “secco” recitative (a speech-like narrative style, accompanied only by the continuo section), moments of immense drama still remain, and the Evangelist’s part in the St. John Passion surely contains some of the most affecting recitative sections ever written. Bach goes to great lengths to emphasize the horrors of the story, the reality of the death of Christ, and he does this with incredible mastery, fashioning a deeply moving and cathartic experience through his hugely imaginative and memorable scores.

Though a contemporary catalogue lists Bach as having composed five passions, only music for the St. John and St. Matthew works survives. But these two pieces are so musically rich that we can hardly complain. The larger, later and more famous of the two, the St. Matthew Passion is for orchestra, double choir, children’s choir and soloists. It was first performed in 1727, but received relatively few hearings from this time until its famous 1829 revival in Berlin with the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn.

The huge interest which Mendelssohn’s performance sparked was a key factor in the resurgence of interest in Bach’s music generally, which grew throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And as Bach has become more and more revered and loved over the years, the St. Matthew Passion’s status as one of music’s masterpieces has only been confirmed; as a large-scale Baroque work it has few competitors in terms of fame or popularity.

3. The following extended quote on this matter (from the critic Alex Ross) specifically relates (in the first of the following paragraphs) to Bach’s St. John Passion, but goes on to discuss his St. Matthew Passion as well. Ross begins by comparing the potential anti-Semitic tone of Bach’s libretto to that of other composers who set the same story to music:

Bach’s libretto is somewhat less severe. The…scourging of Jesus is ascribed not to Jewish soldiers but to Pilate. Were these enlightened choices on the part of Bach or his collaborator? There is no way of knowing, but Marissen [Michael Marissen, author of Bach and God] speculates that Bach, following Lutheran convention, wished to shift emphasis from the perfidy of the Jews to the guilt of all participants in the Passion scene and, by extension, to present-day sinners.

Still, the Jews retain enemy status, their presence felt in a series of bustling, bristling choruses. Many of these pieces share an instrumental signature – sixteenth notes in the strings, oboes chirping above. Several exhibit upward-slithering chromatic lines. Bouts of counterpoint create a disputatious atmosphere. All this fits the stereotype of “Jewish uproar” – of a noisy, obstinate people.

At the same time, the choruses are lively, propulsive, exciting to sing and hear. When the Jews tell Pilate, “We have a law, and by the law he ought to die,” the music is oddly infectious, full of jaunty syncopations. This incongruous air of merriment conveys how crowds can take pleasure in hounding individuals. Moreover, the chorus in which the Jews protest the designation of Jesus as “King of the Jews” echoes a chorus of Roman soldiers sardonically crying the same phrase. Ultimately, Bach seems interested more in portraying the dynamics of righteous mobs than in stereotyping Jews. The choicest irony is that he uses his own celebrated art of fugue as a symbol of malicious scheming.

The Jews behave similarly in the St. Matthew Passion, where the crowd’s cry of “Lass ihn kreuzigen!” (“Let him be crucified”) is articulated as a driving, demonic fugue. Marissen highlights Bach’s handling of the phrase “his blood be on us and on our children,” which was widely taken to be a curse that Jews cast upon themselves.

The St. Matthew mitigates this threat of eternal damnation with the magisterial alto aria “Können Tränen meiner Wangen” (“If the tears of my cheeks”), in which an image of dripping blood, palpably notated in the music, is transmuted into one of melancholy grace. Marissen discerns a theological message: the Jews’ curse is borne by all and, on pious reflection, turns into a blessing.

Such gestures help to explain why the Bach Passions have long found an audience far beyond Lutheran congregations. In 1824, Bella Salomon, an observant Jew living in Berlin, gave a copy of the St. Matthew to her grandson, Felix Mendelssohn, who resolved to lead a performance. His revival of the work, in 1829, inaugurated the modern cult of Bach. Although Mendelssohn had converted to Christianity, he remained conscious of his Jewish origins. The scholar Ruth HaCohen speculates that Bach’s “ecumenical, inclusive dialogue” opened a space in which Jewish listeners could find refuge….

Sources

Ambrose, Z. Philip. J.S. Bach: Texts of Vocal Works in Translation, with Commentary
Bernstein, Leonard. The Joy of Music (2^nd Edition)
Gardiner, John Eliot. Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013)
Gardiner, John Eliot. “Programmatic Notes to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion” (1999)
Geiringer, Karl. Notizen zur Matthäus-Passion
Gordon, David. “Bach’s St. Matthew Passion” (2001)
Hildel, Winifred. Conversations (1996-1998)
Isoyama, Tadashi. “St. Matthew Passion” (1999)
Jens, Inge, ed. At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl
Levang, Rex. “The St. Matthew Passion” – notes for Minnesota Public Radio, (2001)
Ross, Alex. “Atonement: The St. Matthew Passion at the Armony,” The New Yorker, (Oct. 27, 2014)
Schweitzer, Albert. J. S. Bach: Leben und Werk, Bd. I, II
Wolff, Christoph. “Bach’s Große Passion,” (1989)

The recorded excerpts in the notes are from John Eliot Gardiner’s recording with the Monteverdi Choir (Archiv Produktion, © 1989)