St Matthew Passion, BWV 244

Program notes

About the Work

Bach’s St Matthew Passion was written for the Good Friday vespers at St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, where he had been cantor since 1723. It is now generally thought to have been heard there for the first time on 11 April 1727, although some older accounts place the first performance two years later. If the earlier date is right, the work turns three hundred in the spring of 2027.

The text has three layers. The first is the Gospel itself, chapters 26 and 27 of Matthew in Luther’s German, from the plot against Jesus to the sealing of the tomb. The second is poetry by Christian Friedrich Henrici, a Leipzig writer who published as Picander: arias and choruses that stop the story and reflect on it. The third is the chorales, Lutheran hymns that Bach’s congregation knew by heart. Bach divided his performers into two groups, each with its own singers and its own orchestra, and Picander’s verses often set them in dialogue, one asking and the other answering.

Bach performed the Passion again in later years and revised it. After his death it fell out of use. On 11 March 1829 the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted it in Berlin, cut and adapted to the taste of his day, and the success of that performance set off the revival of Bach’s music in the nineteenth century.

In Amsterdam the piece has a history of its own. Willem Mengelberg, then chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, began performing it every year on Palm Sunday in 1899, with large forces and broad tempos. In 1975 Nikolaus Harnoncourt came as a guest, proposed the St John Passion instead, and cut the orchestra to chamber size. Since then the orchestra has alternated the two Passions and has played them with the lessons of historical performance in mind.

What to Listen For

The opening chorus is a vast lament over a slow, steady tread in the bass. The first choir calls ‘Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen’ (Come, daughters, help me mourn) and the second breaks in with single-word questions: whom? how? what? Above them a line of high voices, here the children’s choir, sings the chorale ‘O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig’ in long notes.

From there the Evangelist, a tenor, tells the story in recitative with only the continuo instruments beneath him. Whenever Jesus speaks, the strings surround his voice with sustained chords, an effect often called a halo. It is withdrawn once, at his last words from the cross, ‘Eli, Eli, lama asabthani’.

The chorus plays two parts. As the crowd it is quick and violent: the one-word shout ‘Barrabam!’, and ‘Lass ihn kreuzigen’ (Let him be crucified), sung twice. In the chorales it is the congregation. One melody, ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’, returns five times with different verses, and its last appearance, just after the death of Jesus, is one of the stillest moments of the evening.

The arias are sung by voices outside the story, each paired with one or a few solo instruments. ‘Erbarme dich’ (Have mercy), for alto, follows Peter’s denial. In the soprano’s ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben’ (Out of love my Saviour is willing to die) Bach removes the strings and the bass line altogether, something very rare in Baroque music, and the voice seems to hang in the air. Near the end the bass sings ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’ (Make yourself pure, my heart), a calm, rocking aria for the evening of the burial.

The Passion closes without any hint of Easter. The two choirs sit down at the tomb in ‘Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder’ (We sit down in tears) and wish the dead man rest.