Bach: The Master of the Baroque
St Matthew Passion
St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, Passion music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Its earliest verified performance was April 11, 1727—Good Friday—at Thomaskirche in Leipzig. It is the longest and most elaborate of all works by this Baroque master and represents the culmination of his sacred music and, indeed, of Baroque sacred music as a whole.
The St. Matthew Passion is one of hundreds of sacred pieces Bach wrote during his long tenure as director of church music and cantor of the school at Thomaskirche. The story for the work was taken mostly from the Gospel According to Matthew, but the actual verses that Bach set to music were provided by several contemporary poets. His principal contributor was Christian Friedrich Henrici, a poet who wrote under the name of Picander and also supplied the text for Bach’s secular Peasant Cantata (1742).
The St. Matthew Passion is divided into two parts, and its performance takes somewhat less than three hours. The first part concerns Jesus Christ’s betrayal, the Last Supper, and his prayers and arrest in Gethsemane. The second part presents the rest of the biblical story, including the Crucifixion, death, and burial of Christ. Throughout the work, there is more music for the four soloists—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass —than for the chorus. Often the chorus is called upon to present Bach’s new settings of existing chorales. Most prominent of those is the chorus “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (“O Sacred Head Now Wounded”), which stands as 54th of the 68 sections.
The soloist’s parts are less solos than duets—not with each other but rather with performers drawn from the orchestra. The alto air “Buss und Reu” (“Guilt and Pain”; section 6) opens with a gently flowing flute line, and, even after the alto joins in, the flute remains prominent. That same effect happens in several other airs, sometimes with the singers receiving woodwind partners and sometimes viola da gamba and always further support from continuo parts. The soprano air “Ich will dir mein Herze schenken” (“I Will Thee My Heart Now Offer”; section 13) is distinct not only in that it matches the soprano with two oboes, rather than just one, but also in that it is the only genuinely cheerful section in the entire work.
The St. Matthew Passion was performed several times during the composer’s life, and a copy of its original manuscript exists in Bach’s own handwriting. However, at his death in 1750, the St. Matthew Passion, along with most Bach compositions, was forgotten. Nearly eight decades later the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn reintroduced the work when he conducted a 400-member chorus and a full orchestra in a 19th-century premiere at the Berlin Sing-Akadamie on March 11, 1829.
(Betsy Schwarm)
Mendelssohn Revives St Matthew Passion
Bach is Reborn!
Hard as it is to imagine, there was a time when JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion was virtually unknown outside Leipzig, where it was first performed in 1727. Sporadic performances continued at the city’s Thomaskirche, where Bach had been music director, after his death in 1750. But the broader world knew nothing of what we nowadays view as one of the supreme choral pieces.
Until, that is, a precocious youth named Felix Mendelssohn was given a copy of the St Matthew Passion by his grandmother nearly 100 years later. Mendelssohn was 15 at the time (1824), and already the composer of 12 dashing String Symphonies. But his encounter with the Matthew Passion, one biographer wrote, was ‘revelatory’, and became ‘a cornerstone of his musical faith’. Could he get a performance of this long-unheard masterwork organised?
St John Passion
The Passio secundum Joannem or St John Passion (German: Johannes-Passion), BWV 245, is a Passion oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach, the earliest of the surviving Passions by Bach.It was written during his first year as director of church music in Leipzig and was first performed on 7 April 1724, at Good Friday Vespers at the St. Nicholas Church
The structure of the work falls in two halves, intended to flank a sermon. The anonymous libretto draws on existing works (notably by Barthold Heinrich Brockes) and is compiled from recitatives and choruses narrating the Passion of Christ as told in the Gospel of John, ariosos and arias reflecting on the action, and chorales using hymn tunes and texts familiar to a congregation of Bach's contemporaries.Compared with the St Matthew Passion, the St John Passion has been described as more extravagant, with an expressive immediacy, at times more unbridled and less "finished".
The work is most often heard today in the 1739–1749 version (never performed during Bach's lifetime). Bach first performed the oratorio in 1724 and revised it in 1725, 1730, and 1749, adding several numbers. "O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß", a 1725 replacement for the opening chorus, found a new home in the 1736 St Matthew Passion but several arias from the revisions are found only in the appendices to modern editions.