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Ever since Mendelssohn’s legendary revival of the work in 1829, the St Matthew Passion has been hailed as the greatest setting of the Passion story in Western music, with the Berlin-based academic Adolf Bernhard Marx, for example, actively championing the work in the press at the time of its revival and describing it as the “greatest work by our greatest composer, the greatest and most sacred work of music of all nations”.
Even within Bach’s own lifetime, the performance of a setting of the Passion story on Good Friday was the highlight of the musical year in Leipzig, alternating under a council regulation of 1724 between the two main churches of St Thomas’s and St Nicholas’s. And even at this date the St Matthew Passion was known as the “great Passion” to distinguish it from the four other Passions that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach ascribed to his father in the obituary that he wrote with Johann Friedrich Agricola.
When Anna Magdalena Bach, for example, added the words “for the great Passion” to a continuo part, everyone in the Thomaskantor’s house knew which work she was referring to.
Bach’s first large-scale vocal work for Leipzig, following his appointment as Thomaskantor in 1723, was his St John Passion, which he wrote for Lent 1724 – the tempus clausum between the First Sunday in Lent and Palm Sunday. The St John Passion is believed to have been followed in 1727 by the St Matthew Passion, a setting of sections of St Matthew’s Gospel for double chorus. Four years later came the St Mark Passion, the music for which has unfortunately not survived.
These large-scale Pas- sions were performed at Vespers on Good Friday and far surpassed anything previously heard in Leipzig. In contrast to Hamburg, which was something of a stronghold of the German Passional tradition, Leipzig continued until 1720 to follow the lead laid down by Luther’s musical adviser Johann Walter, with Walter’s own Passion being performed in a revised version by the Nicolaikirche Kantor, Gottfried Vopelius.
In this version, the verses from the Bible were declaimed according to very strict formulas. Churchgoers in Leipzig had little experience of the oratorio Passion that had evolved under the influence of the Italian cantata and of opera, with its recitatives and arias, although in 1717 one of Telemann’s Passions – probably the Brockes Passion – was performed in the artistically ambitious, but musically out-of-the-way Neue Kirche.
And Bach’s immediate predecessor as Thomaskantor, Johann Kuhnau, wrote an oratorio Passion based on St Mark’s Gospel for performance at Vespers on Good Friday in 1721 . But Bach’s Passions, and especially his St Matthew Passion, set new standards.
The Passion for double chorus. The uniqueness of the St Matthew Passion rests not only on its monumentality but also on its overall conception, a conception based in turn upon its use of a double chorus.
Bach himself drew explicit attention to this feature of the work when he added the words “a due cori” to the title-page of Part II. It may well have been the libretto by Christian Friedrich Henrici (alias “Picander”) that encouraged this approach on Bach’s part, inasmuch as the text represents a contemplative dialogue between the daughter of Zion and the faithful.
These two participants in the dialogue – the “Daughter of Zion” and the “Faithful” – are also found in the famous Passion libretto by Barthold Heinrich Brockes first published in Hamburg in 1712. Even so, none of the many other composers who set this text – Keiser, Handel, Mattheson, Telemann or Stölzel – hit upon the idea of using a double chorus.
Even Bach himself appears to have been struck by this idea only when already engaged on the compositional process and, indeed, it may have been only belatedly that he decided to pursue it to its logical conclusion.
Numbers such as “Ach, nun ist mein Jesus hin!” (No. 30) and “Sehet, Jesus hat die Hand” (No. 60) are cast in the form of a dialogue with the solo voice alternating with the choir, whereas in the opening chorus, even the individual voice – the “Daughter of Zion” representing Jerusalem or the Lord’s Bride – is set as a four- part chorus.
In adopting this approach, Bach laid the foundations for the work’s overall design, with the double chorus as an essential element in his musical conception. In more than half the total number of movements, the executants are drawn equally from Chorus I and Chorus II – they are also, of course, combined together as a four-part ensemble in some of the turba choruses, the chorales and in the arrestingly vivid chorale fantasia “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß” (No. 29), which Bach had previously used as the opening chorus of his St John Passion.
Only when he revived the St Matthew Passion in 1736 did he take over this chorale fantasia into this last-named work, transposing it in the process from E flat major to E major.
In reviving the work in 1736, Bach appears to have taken this polychoral design a stage further: according to a report by the sexton at St Thomas’s, Johann Christoph Rost, the Passion that year was performed “with both organs”, in other words, each of the two choruses had its own continuo. The present recording reflects this division.
To quote Nikolaus Harnoncourt: “The performing material was written out in part by Bach himself and shows exactly what he wanted played and sung and by whom. It would have been completely impossible to have the vocal solos of Chorus I and Chorus II sung by the same singers, as they are in the choral parts of their own individual Chorus.
And it would be equally impossible for the instrumental solos such as the two gamba solos to be performed from a single position or to have a single continuo player accompanying both Choruses: the parts are carefully written out and figured, with only rests in numbers allotted to the other Chorus.” With each Chorus having a solo ensemble of its own, the present recording adopts a consistent approach to the dialogue principle, while at the same time underlining the aspect of space as an integral part of the work.
The textual basis of the Passion Whereas the St John Passion, with its numerous revisions, was something of a work in progress and the St Mark Passion was largely based on existing material, the St Matthew Passion is essentially an original work that is unified in its conception. Three layers of text may be distinguished here: passages from the Bible, strophes from existing hymns and free verses.
Large sections of Picander’s lyrically contemplative verses are inspired by the Pas- sion sermons of the Rostock theologian Hein- rich Müller (1631–75), who taught at Rostock University and also served as the city’s superintendent. Müller’s input is particularly significant inasmuch as his theological writings were well represented in Bach’s library, so that it may have been the Thomaskantor himself who drew Picander’s attention to the relevant passages.
If so, the St Matthew Passion would be an important example of the close collaboration between Bach and one of his librettists, a closeness that we can almost certainly assume to have existed with a number of his parodies, too.
Yet even in the St Matthew Passion, of course, Bach ascribed over-riding importance to the words of the Bible, which he took over unaltered. It is an importance, moreover, that could almost be seen as anachronistic when set beside the modish Passion librettos of poets such as Christian Friedrich Hunold and Brockes.
The exceptional status of the Biblical text is clear not least from the fact that in his 1736 score Bach entered the whole of the Evangelist’s text in red ink. Equally untypical of contemporary settings of the Passion story are the numerous four-part chorales that may be thought of as representing the congregation and that similarly stress the liturgical framework.
The “musical” Passion. Even though Bach’s Passions were performed within the context of church services, the local burghers almost certainly regarded Vespers on Good Friday as a good night out, with the “musical Passion”, as it was known, providing the evening’s principal attraction. As early as 1721 one of Leipzig’s theology students, Gott- fried Ephraim Scheibel, wrote:
“I recall that a Passion was to be performed at a particular place on Good Friday both before and after the sermon. I am certain that people would not have come to church so early and in such large numbers on account of the preacher alone. It was presumably because of the music.”
Bach’s music was certainly unique in what it had to offer its listeners. In no other work did he have such comprehensive recourse to the whole formal repertory of con- temporary music: not even opera – the most prestigious of Baroque genres – had anything remotely comparable to offer in terms of its formal variety.
The chorale and the various ways of setting a cantus firmus were by their very nature alien to the world of opera, but so, too, was polyphony, a procedure that is one of the distinguishing features of Bach’s music. A few examples may suffice to illustrate the multilayered nature of Bach’s language.
Even the monumental opening chorus is symptomatic of the scale of the work: it goes far beyond the annunciatory function of a traditional exordium (“Listen to the Passion ...”), unfolding on three levels with its two Cho- ruses and cantus firmus choir. At the same time, Picander’s threnody, which is cast in the form of a dialogue (“Kommt, ihr Töchter”), has been set as a funeral march in the style of a French tombeau.
Its key of E minor was defined by the Hamburg-based writer on music, Johann Mattheson, as “designed to make the listener very pensive, profoundly thoughtful, downcast and sad, but in such a way that he still hopes to be consoled”.
Combined with this threnody is the G major chorale, “O Lamm Gottes unschuldig”, to which Bach repeatedly returns in the course of the musical argument. With its reference to the innocent Lamb as Ruler in Zion, this opening chorus also provides the work with what Christoph Wolff has termed a “theological and eschatological preface”, creating an over- arching structure whose sense of tension is not resolved until the final chorus.
The work’s overall structure is unique, and Bach scholars have long been fascinated by its underlying symmetry. Central to the structure, both musically and theologically, is the sequence of numbers from 46 to 49, in other words from the chorale “Wie wunderbarlich ist doch diese Strafe!” to the soprano aria “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben”. Nikolaus Harnoncourt follows the German musicologist Friedrich Smend in seeing in this section “the central message of the work”, a section around which choruses and arias are grouped that are “musically attuned to each other to the highest degree”.
At the same time, it would be wrong to overlook the processual and dramaturgical element in this structure. As before, it is the Biblical account of Christ’s Passion that forms the basis of Bach’s setting and provides it with its common thread. For all its rhetoric, the part of the Evangelist is predominantly narrative in style. A comparison between the parallel passages at “Und alsbald krähete der Hahn” and the weeping Peter at “und weinete bitterlich” in the St John Passion reveals that the writing for the tenor voice and continuo is less rhetorically intense.
At the same time, Jesus’s words are clearly distinguished from the Evangelist’s recitatives and, in keeping with a tradition dating back to the time of Heinrich Schütz, are accompanied by four-part strings. They are thus set apart in the truest sense of the term, and it is significant that Christ’s final words, “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani?”, are sung without this halo of strings: Christ becomes man at the moment of His death.
The turba choruses, finally, are fully integrated into the dramatic process and, as a result, take very different forms and reflect a whole range of musical models extending from the brief and brutally dissonant interjection, “Barrabam!”, to the extremely long final turba chorus, “Herr, wir haben gedacht” (No. 66b).
As in his cantata arias, so in the St Mat- thew Passion, Bach was at pains to vary the tonal spectrum by means of additional instruments, with a solo violin, for example, leaving its mark on the famous lament, “Erbarme dich” (No. 39), which takes as its starting point Peter’s remorse at his denial of Jesus. The way in which Bach set the text here is a good example of the extent to which tradition and innovation come together in his musical language.
His debt to traditional procedures is clear from his dependency on the musical rhetoric of the 16th and 17th centuries and from the way in which he interprets the text by means of figures drawn from musical rhetoric. Of particular significance is the exclamatio at “Erbarme dich”, with the wide-ranging intervals in the vocal line taken up by the solo violin and ornamented as figures that may be interpreted as sighs or sobs.
The diatonic bass line, meanwhile, depicts the falling tears – the “Zähren” of the text. These figures are, of course, only one aspect of music whose principal Affekt to use a term borrowed from the belief that specific emotions were associated with specific musical elements – is determined above all by the model of the grieving siciliana.
Pictorial rhetorical figures repeatedly leave their mark on the musical textures, regularly going beyond the interpretation of individual words. In the chorale “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß” (No. 29), the musical substance is determined in the main by three figures: the sigh-like figures first heard in the flutes and oboes, the invocatory figures that involuntarily suggest the words “O Mensch” and the cruciform figure in the oboes in bars 5–7.
It is also worth mentioning, finally, Bach’s use of number symbolism, a use which, admittedly, has led to often highly speculative interpretations. The situation is not always as clear-cut as it is at the question “Herr, bin ich’s?” (Lord, is it I?), which is repeated eleven times – before the twelfth disciple, Judas, answers – in the chorale immediately afterwards, “Ich bin’s, ich sollte büßen” (No. 10).
The architectural structure of the St Mat- thew Passion is so overwhelming in terms of both overall conception and musical detail that experts and amateurs alike have repeatedly been moved to draw upon grandiose comparisons.
One of Bach’s 19th-century biographers, Carl Hermann Bitter, saw the image of a “majestic cathedral” rising up before him when he heard the work, while his successor Philipp Spitta was likewise reminded of “miraculous Gothic buildings” when listening to it. Today’s listeners may react in more sober ways.
Yet, however inapposite the comparison between Baroque music and Gothic architecture may seem from a historical perspective, it is symptomatic of the sense of astonishment that we are bound to feel at the almost literally ungraspable greatness of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. END

Ever since Mendelssohn’s legendary revival of the work in 1829, the St Matthew Passion has been hailed as the greatest setting of the Passion story in Western music, with the Berlin-based academic Adolf Bernhard Marx, for example, actively championing the work in the press at the time of its revival and describing it as the “greatest work by our greatest composer, the greatest and most sacred work of music of all nations”.

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