Program Notes

Passion of Our Lord According to St. Matthew    BWV 244    Johann Sebastian Bach   1685 • 1750

When Bach’s Passion of Our Lord According to Saint Matthew was first performed on Good Friday, 1727, a Saint Thomas Church in Leipzig, the congregation may not have been aware that they were hearing one of the great masterworks of religious art produced by Western  civilization.  This recognition, by now hardly subject to serious challenge, began mainly after the “rediscovery” of the Passion and its performances by Mendelssohn in 1829.  Musical settings of the Gospel accounts of the passion had been a part of Christian liturgy for centuries when Bach composed this work.  During the Middle Ages they were sung in plainsong, with some attempt to distinguish the words of the Evangelist, Jesus, and the other protagonists by changes in music pitch and speed of delivery.  In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, passion settings employed polyphony wholly or in part, while in the seventeenth century the stylistic innovations of opera and oratorio found their way into passion music.  By the early eighteenth century, rhymed paraphrases had altogether displaced the biblical text in Germany, and the musical style was much closer to opera than oratorio.

Bach passion settings thus represent a return  to a “truer” tradition of passion music, as well as a supreme artistic achievement.  In both the Saint Matthew Passion and the Saint John Passion of 1724, the narrative is presented through biblical text, in which reflective interpolations are interspersed.  These are either traditional chorales in settings for congregational singing or poetic texts which are sung by the vocal soloists or occasionally by the chorus, the latter notably at the beginning and end of the entire work.  Both kinds of interpolation present the Christian believer’s reactions to the events narrated in the biblical text.

The Saint Matthew Passion is scored for double chorus and orchestra, making possible the antiphonal effects and rich textures which add much to the monumental quality of the work.  The orchestral instruments play obligato parts in many of the arias and solo ensembles, s is usual in Bach’s cantatas and similar works.  The extensive solo roles of the Evangelist and Jesus are usually sung respectively by a tenor and a bass, while the quartet of vocal soloists performs the parts of other individuals, as well as the contemplative arias and solo ensembles.

Bach’s basic intention must have been to convey the power, agony and spiritual depth of this central event of Christian faith as intensely as possible, and he was so successful that even if the listener’s experience may be enhanced by knowledge of the means employed, it is not materially increased.  The Saint Matthew Passion speaks as directly across the centuries as if it had been written only yesterday.  Bach set the words of the Evangelist, Jesus and other individuals mainly in recitative, and those of groups of people mainly in short interjections of lesser extent than the chorales.  Most of the recitatives are accompanied only by continuo, which includes harpsichord, cello and double bass or bassoon, but the words of Jesus are always accompanied by the string orchestra, producing an effect which has been likened to a “halo” and which is strikingly absent in Jesus’ last words from the cross.  The words of Jesus have also been set in a more songful arioso style at points of special intensity or doctrinal importance.