It’s not an overstatement to say that the St. Matthew Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the cornerstones of Western classical music. One of the most profoundly moving and perfectly constructed of all works, it is a masterpiece that set the path for all choral music that followed. But astonishingly enough to a contemporary audience, this piece lay fallow for decades after the composer’s death, a time in which Bach’s music was severely underappreciated; the St. Matthew Passion languished and was not heard outside of Leipzig until 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn--a great Bach champion--brought the piece, albeit in a shortened version, to Berlin.
Bach wrote the original version of his St. Matthew Passion in 1727, during his tenure at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. (He had previously written a St. John Passion for the Holy Week of 1724, though he revised it several times until the 1740s; he may have written one to three other Passions as well, but only the St. Matthew and St. John have survived.) Meant to be performed at St. Thomas’ Good Friday vespers service, the Passion has a narrative taken from the Gospel of St. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ last days and crucifixion; audiences would hear the story of the redemption of the resurrection on Easter Sunday. (Bach had already written wrote the first version of his Easter Oratorio in 1725.)
In the St. Matthew Passion, the Evangelist is the storyteller, and is charged with delivering the bulk of the narrative (taken from the Book of Matthew, Chapters 26 and 27) in recitative form, while there are smaller solo parts for Jesus, Judas, Pontius Pilate and his wife, and four roles for witnesses and maids. Many of the most moving and celebrated parts of the work are the sections for chorus, who often reflect upon the events of the narrative in a reflective and meditative manner (using new poetry by Picander, a.k.a. Christian Friederich Henrici) such as in the closing chorus “In tears of grief.” But the chorus also shifts—sometimes jarringly—between perspectives, such as in “So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen,” in which their reverence is transformed into the hatefulness of the crowd clamoring for Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. The composer also deftly moves between the extremes of emotion: there is the dance of the aria “Ich will dir mein Herze schenken (I Will Gladly Give You My Heart),” situated during the Last Supper to the heartbreak of Peter’s repentance after denying Christ in the duet for alto and violin in one of the most sublime musical moments ever created, “Erbarme dich.”
Also intriguing is the manner in which Bach used music that was already beloved to his fellow Lutherans. The familiar chorale “O Sacred Head Surrounded”—which had been popular in the church as a Passion hymn for well over a hundred years before Bach brought it into his St. Matthew work—reoccurs five times throughout the piece, each time altered. Bach’s supreme gift for dramatic subtlety is also abundantly evident throughout: when Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, Bach strips out the “halo” of strings that surround all of Jesus’ other singing in the Passion; his outburst is all the more stark and anguished for it.
The resonances of the St. Matthew Passion are felt even in contemporary composition: for the year 2000, which marked the 250th anniversary of Bach’s passing, the noted Bach conductor Helmuth Rilling and the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart commissioned four wildly diverse composers to write their own passions from their own creative and cultural perspectives. The four composers selected were the Argentine Jewish Osvaldo Golijov, whose Pasion segun San Marcos has now been performed many times all over the world in one of the internationally warmest receptions of new work in recent memory; Sofia Gubaidulina, a Russian–Tarter composer based in Germany whose fiery Johannes-Passion interpolated excerpts from the Book of Revelation as well as the Gospel of St. John; the experimental Chinese composer Tan Dun, who wrote a piece called Water Passion after St. Matthew that incorporates such elements as actual water and stones as well as more traditional instrumentation and vocal parts, and Germany’s Wolfgang Rihm, whose Deus Passus--St. Luke Passion looks to the twelve–tone lineage which has continually inspired Rihm.
Lovers of the Bach St. Matthew Passion are rarely satisfied to possess just one version of this all–embracing work, and the myriad recordings available speak to nearly every aesthetic and philosophical preference imaginable. Otto Klemperer’s 1960/1961 recording is for many listeners the ultimate standard-bearer. It rivets listeners in its grand sweep and depth, especially in its now rather old–fashioned, large–ensemble numbers. However, the Klemperer’s beauty—paced out extraordinarily slowly--is one of stone–cold, marble grandeur, and it can be hard to get inside of the piece’s essential humanity. On the other hand, the soloists are thrilling in their majesty: tenor Peter Pears, soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, contralto Christa Ludwig, baritone Dieterich Fisher-Dieskau, and tenor Nicolai Gedda project their roles with truly operatic presence. For those looking for the lushness of a “modern” orchestra but with slightly less glacially reverent pacing, Helmuth Rilling’s recording is really hard to beat. With the wonderful baritone Matthias Goerne and bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff among the soloists, is deeply satisfying in its heft. Rilling has made a life’s work out of Bach’s choral music, and his devotion shows.
For those who prefer a period–instrument or “historically informed performance” approach, the one led by John Eliot Gardiner in 1988 stands as a hallmark of a different and dramatically potent approach; other recordings, like Paul McCreesh’s traversal for Archiv, take the “HIP” ethos to a greater extreme, in that, for one example, McCreesh assigns only one voice per part in the chorus. The result is far less emotionally powerful than other interpretations, but this version might be of special interest if you are particularly keen on hearing the finest details of the voicing and counterpoint. However, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, in all its multifaceted and timeless glory, more than stands up to constant revisiting and re–imagining.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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