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St Matthew Passion
by Steven Ledbetter

The worshippers of Bach must not forget that the great light dawned upon them from the 1lth of March, 1829, and that it was Felix Mendelssohn who gave new vitality to the most profound of composers.
Edward Devrient

An epochal reawakening

No single event in the rediscovery of Bach’s music was more important than the performance of the St Matthew Passion with the Berlin Singakademie under the direction of the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn on March 11, 1829. This marked the first time in history that a major work by a composer who had fallen markedly out of favour had been reconsidered and hailed as an important masterwork. The excitement that surrounded the performance led quickly to further revivals of Bach as well as scholarly investigation into the music of other old masters whose works had been lying unperformed for generations. By the mid- nineteenth century, the new wave of enthusiasm for J. S. Bach sparked the founding of the Bach-Gesssellschaft, which was created to provide a non-commercial scheme for the publication of Bach’s works. It was the first ‘complete works’ edition to publish a composer’s music essentially without editorial tampering, to include almost every composition, and to provide some kind of critical apparatus, serving as a model for virtually every such edition since that day. In a larger sense, then, the rediscovery of all early music and the entire enterprise of musical scholarship and historical performance are direct results of Mendelssohn’s 1829 concert.

The forgotten Bach

Of course, the Music of J. S. Bach had never entirely disappeared from the European tradition. Some of his keyboard music was published and circulated after his death among musicians, who gave it a considerable measure of respect. Beethoven went further than that in his famous dictum, punning on the composers name, which means ‘brook’ in German: ‘He should not he called Brook, but Ocean!’ But the great vocal works that constitute the large proportion of Bach’s output remained entirely unknown, even at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where his successors ignored or belittled his work. As Johann Reichardt remarked in 1782: ‘Had Bach possessed the high integrity and the deep expressive feeling that inspired Handel, he would have been much greater even than Handel; but as it is he was only more painstaking and technically skillful’.

This is faint praise indeed. we can hardly imagine the thought that Bach did not possess ‘the high integrity and deep expressive feeling that inspired Handel’, but it is clear that Reichardt’s view was, if anything, generous for his time. The gradual rebirth of interest in Bach grew from a combination of impulses, including Romanticism’s general interest in the cult of the past, a renewed search for strong German traditions in the height of the Napoleonic threat, and a religious revival that sought to highlight the most edifying aspects of the cultural heritage. The triangulation of these various cultural impulses focused on the figure of the old Thomaskantor, J. S. Bach, and led to a real interest in his music on the part of Carl Friedrich Zelter, director of the Berlin Singakademie, who rehearsed the Mass in B minor as early as 1811 and the St Matthew Passion four years later, but did not perform them in public.

Mendelssohn’s own picture of Leipzig

The Mendelssohn connection

The Mendelssohn family had long been closely connected with the Singakademie. Felix himself began composition studies with Zelter in 1819 and joined the chorus as an alto on October 1, 1820 (he was then eleven), moving on to the tenor section in 1824 when his voice changed. As a Christmas present in 1823, Felix’s grandmother gave him a manuscript score of the St Matthew Passion (there was, of course, no printed edition), and the budding composer began to pore over the work, though without any hope of hearing a performance. By the winter of 1827, he began serious rehearsal of passages from the work — still without a performance in view. Finally, at the beginning of 1829, Mendelssohn and his friend Eduard Devrient persuaded Zelter to let them have a public performance, in which Devrient would sing the part of Jesus. Mendelssohn prepared the score from which the performing parts were copied and took charge of the performance. We know a great deal about the event thanks to the memoirs of Devrient, who describes the growing excitement of the partcipants as they become more and more familiar with the work. ‘All were amazed, not only at its architectonic grandeur of structure, but at its abundance of melody, its wealth of expression and of passion, at its quaint and affecting declamation, and at its dramatic power. No one had ever suspected old Bach of all this.’

We might be astonished at the physical arrangements for the concert. Mendelssohn divided the two large choirs (numbering several hundred people in all) and stood between them with his back to Chorus I (the regular members of the Singakademie) and facing the orchestra and Chorus II (which consisted mostly of amateurs). A piano was placed between the two choirs, on which Felix would sometimes play an accompaniment with his left hand, continuo style, while conducting with his right. The wind instruments were above and behind the other musicians, extending out through three open doors. It was primarily the responsibility of the conductor Eduard Rietz to keep them together. According to Devrient, ‘Felix was as calm and collected in his difficult post as though he had already conducted a dozen Festivals.’ But his idea of conducting differed greatly from ours. He felt it unnecessary to conduct throughout a performance; once a movement was underway and going well, he dropped his hands and simply listened intently, taking up the beat again only when there was a particular difficulty — a change of tempo or a tricky entrance.

The performance was a sensational success; it had to be repeated ten days later under Mendelssohn and then again on Good Friday (April 17) under Zelter, since Mendelssohn had left Berlin. Other choral organizations began to look into Bach’s works and to perform the Passions and eventually also the Mass in B minor. This led to a renewed investigation into the composer’s instrumental works as well, and finally the founding, on the centennial of the composers death, of the Bach-Gesllschaft, with the avowed intention of publishing every single piece he had composed. And all of this came from the enthusiastic, committed efforts of a young genius of twenty, still barely started on his career.

Bach’s passion

Bach almost certainly composed the St Matthew Passion in 1727, performing it in the Good Friday service on April 11 that year. The text is drawn from the Gospel according to Matthew, chapters 26 and 27, with the addition of traditional Lutheran and ‘madrigalesque’ poetry for the ariosos and arias by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici). The St Matthew Passion stands at the summit of Bach’s output for the Protestant church service. It is his most elaborate and most demanding score, the longest in running time, and largest in performing forces required. Bach laid out the entire score for two separate choirs and throughout the score he is careful to indicate whether any given passage is intended for ‘Choir I’ (which includes its attendant at orchestra) or ‘Choir II,’ or all the forces combined. For many years the assumed date of the premiere was Good Friday (April 15), 1729; certainly Bach did give a performance of the St Matthew Passion on that day. But recent evidence supports the inference that the 1729 performance was a revival. Ironically, one of the reasons that the 1729 date has remained so persistent in the literature is the notion that Mendelssohn revived the work on its 100th anniversary!

Bach himself regarded the St Matthew Passion as a work of special significance. His normal full score for a large vocal work was a final draft copy, but he went to the effort of writing out a fresh copy of full score of the St Matthew Passion — and in two colors of ink, his normal dark-brown for the staff lines, the music, the chorales and the aria, and red for the words of the Evangelist; and at some time, when the first several pages had suffered some damage on the outer half each page, he repaired them, carefully pasting blank paper over the damged part and rewriting the missing notes. Such attention indicates that this particular score meant far more to him than the fulfillment of a clause in his contract.

Most Passion settings of Bach’s day were based on librettos derived, of course, from the Gospel but elaborated in an operatic fashion, with recitatives and arias. Picander’s verses for Bach are of this type. But Bach chose also to retain the actual Biblical text from Matthew to tell the story, thus making the work vastly stronger than if had used the febrile and stilted poetic paraphrases popular in his day and found in so many other composers’ Passion settings. (Those who know Bach’s Passion well will be surprised to find that Mendelssohn further accentuated this element by cutting many of the arias so as to put the Gospel text into higher relief.) Moreover Bach, almost alone among composers of his time, loved the texts and melodies of the Lutheran chorale, the communal congregational song that had been the backbone Protestant music in the previous century. He employed them, in imaginative reharmonisations, throughout the Passion.

From all the diverse elements — dramatic recitative, expressive arioso, reflective aria, chorus, and chorale — Bach constructed his score as a mosaic of different textures and sonorities. The thread that runs throughout is the Gospel story, broken up into individual ‘scenes’ and related in light, rapid recitative (with choral interjections for the turba). The scenes in recitative are the heart of the Passion, a direct link to the manner in which the tale had been re-enacted liturgically for centuries. But everything that Bach added to that text may be considered a response to Luther’s injunction to preach the Word: each ‘scene’ first depicts the tale dramatically, then interprets the reaction of the individual believer in the arias, and finally offers the reaction of the entire community in the chorales. Rhythm, harmony, melody, and orchestral colour are at the service of the text, providing an exegesis phrase by phrase, even word by word, though the whole opens and closes with two great set-pieces to anchor the action — the great opening chorus depicting the slow and painful procession to Calvary, which is at once a dramatic, almost operatic scene and a formal chorale prelude with the introduction of the boychoir in the melody ‘O Lamm Gottes unschuldig’ (‘O innocent Lamb of God’), and the gentle and subdued fmal chorus, virtually a lullaby closing with the words ‘Gently rest.’ The music consoles here, because for Bach and his congregation, the darkness and despair of Good Friday will be followed by the Iightness of Easter morning. The catharsis of grief that has been expressed will be changed to great joy.

Steven Ledbetter, 1999