St Matthew Passion

The narrative layer resists the subtractive test absolutely: Matthew 26 and 27 are set whole, and nothing in the Gospel is cut. The responses are placed with intent. The chorale “Ich bin’s, ich sollte büßen” answers the disciples’ “Herr, bin ich’s?” at once, and “Erbarme dich” follows Peter’s weeping where nothing else could. Length is not charged. The test finds real give in the arias: Mendelssohn cut many of them in 1829 and the work was still itself; the da capo returns repeat what was just heard; several numbers took new words in the Köthen funeral music of 1729; and Part I’s close was exchanged between versions. A movement that can be transplanted was not compelled by this work alone.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: the witness is the guilty party, and compassion cannot be separated from complicity. The disciples ask whether they will betray him, and the congregation answers for itself, “Ich bin’s”. The alto of “Erbarme dich” takes Peter’s place, not his side, and the chorales put the believer’s sin where the Gospel puts the crowd’s. This holds without the faith. Held down because the theology was stated before Bach set it, in Gerhardt’s hymns and Lutheran preaching, so the work makes it audible more than it finds it; and because the crowd’s words in the Gospel carry a history the work does not answer: “Sein Blut komme über uns und unsre Kinder”
“His blood be on us and on our children”.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Height stands at the ceiling and returns across three hours. The opening chorus is grandeur and lament at once: two choirs crossing over a 12/8 pulse in E minor, the ripieno chorale in G major above them. “Sind Blitze, sind Donner” breaks out of the arrest duet as fury. “Erbarme dich” is beauty under grief; “Barrabam!” is terror in one chord; “Aus Liebe” rises by taking the bass away. Part II’s last stretch brings the torn veil, the centurion’s two bars, “Am Abend, da es kühle war” and the closing chorus in close succession. Held from the top by long stretches of secco recitative, and by arias, such as “Ich will dir mein Herze schenken”, that charm rather than elevate.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Myth built, not only received. The archetype is the sacrificial death of the innocent: the god betrayed by a friend, chosen against by the crowd and killed by the state. The work fixes its figures, bridegroom and lamb, before a word of the Gospel is sung, and its daughters lament at a wedding that is an execution. The scapegoat is chosen aloud. “Am Abend, da es kühle war” lays Adam’s fall, the dove’s return to Noah and the burial over one another, folding the history of salvation into one evening. The particulars stay sharp: the thirty pieces, the cock, the maid, Pilate’s wife’s dream. Held below the top because the spine is Matthew’s; the work builds the frame and the response.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The inheritance is the Lutheran oratorio Passion: the Gospel sung word for word, with madrigal verse and chorales between. Leipzig had heard it at Good Friday Vespers since 1721, and Bach had written one, the St John (1724). The departures are of scale and design: double choir and double orchestra used for dialogue, not only for weight; a frame in which one choir calls and the other questions; the string halo around Jesus, withdrawn at “Eli, Eli”; the arioso and aria as a steady second layer; a closing farewell, not a victory. What holds the axis here is the path: genre, liturgy, libretto type and the St John were all in place, and most of the turn is intensification.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that the believer stands inside the story. The form makes it true by tense. The Gospel is past, carried by the Evangelist; the crowd choruses are the dramatic present; the arias are a single soul, now, stopping the story to answer it; the chorales are the congregation, outside time. As an opera it would lose the congregation; as a sermon, the voices; as a plain Gospel Passion such as Schütz wrote, the present tense of response. The double choir is the form of dialogue, one choir calling, the other asking “Wen?” and “Wie?”. Held below the top by da capo returns longer than the meditation needs, and by stretches where the two choirs sing as one.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Evidence, not promise, and three centuries of it, two of them active: Spitta’s biography (1873–80) and Schweitzer’s J. S. Bach (1905); the dating dispute, settled for 1727 by inference and still not by a document; the case for one voice to a part, opened by Joshua Rifkin in 1981; Pelikan’s Bach Among the Theologians (1986) and Chafe’s tonal-allegory readings (1991); Celia Applegate’s Bach in Berlin (2005), on 1829; John Butt’s Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity (2010). Performance is unsettled: choir size, boys or women, tempo from Mengelberg’s and Klemperer’s breadth to period speed. The work’s own questions stay open, such as whose voice the arias are. Held below the top because the formal literature is narrower than the theological.

Score: 9.6 / 10

The work took the oratorio Passion to a scale and a depth, dramatic and contemplative, that no Passion had attempted, and showed that a liturgical genre could carry a whole theology. In its own time it was given in Leipzig a handful of times, and the genre declined after Bach. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: a century passed, and much of the reach is shared with Bach’s work as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the revival began with this work. Mendelssohn’s performance of 1829 is the usual date for the Bach revival and the concert life of old music; Penderecki’s St Luke Passion and Pärt’s Passio stand in its line; Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice opens with “Erbarme dich”.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Survival is demonstrated. The score came down in Bach’s fair copy and in manuscript copies, and since 1829 the work has been performed without interruption, every Holy Week, in churches and halls across Europe, the Americas and East Asia, with local traditions of its own, the Dutch among them. The surface fixed to its moment is real: the libretto’s pietist imagery of blood, wounds and the soul’s sweetness, and a Lutheran Vespers with a sermon between the parts. It has outlived both, heard by audiences who share neither. The cost particular to this work is the gap: for about eighty years before 1829 it survived on paper and not in performance.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The making bears weight throughout: the opening chorus, two choirs in dialogue and a chorale above, over one 12/8 pulse; the Evangelist’s recitative, setting Luther’s German so that stress, pitch and harmony carry the sense, and rising to a long melisma on “weinete bitterlich”; the crowd choruses, from “Barrabam!” on one chord to the canon-like violence of “Laß ihn kreuzigen!”; obbligato writing matched to each aria, the violin in “Erbarme dich”, the gamba in “Komm, süßes Kreuz”, flute and oboes da caccia without bass in “Aus Liebe”; the Passion Chorale harmonised five times, never alike. The cost is in the words. Picander’s verse is serviceable, often fine, sometimes conventional, and it is part of the work. The making is load-bearing everywhere; the verse is not.

Score: 9.6 / 10

The two most distant elements are the crowd’s “Barrabam!” and the hushed “Mein Jesu, gute Nacht!”, and one law governs them: every sound belongs either to the story or to the answer to it, and the answer is always a voice that might be the listener’s. The chorale after the crowd’s shout takes its guilt onto the believer; the farewell answers the burial. The law holds from secco speech and two-bar shouts to da capo aria, chorale fantasia and a sarabande-like close. The string halo is a law kept until it is broken, at “Eli, Eli”, and the break is the meaning. The strain is in the arias’ idiom, near opera and the dance, and in Picander’s sweetness beside the Gospel’s plainness.

Score: 9.5 / 10

The Gospel gives the work more orders than most music can hold, and the setting holds them in one frame: the sacred, from the anointing at Bethany to the torn veil; the state and the law, in the high priest’s trial, the false witnesses, the governor and the guard at the tomb; the crowd, which chooses Barabbas; friendship and betrayal, in Judas, Peter and the sleeping disciples; money, in the thirty pieces and the potter’s field; the body, anointed, scourged and buried; the natural order, in darkness, earthquake and the cool of evening; history, in Adam and Noah’s dove; consciousness in the arias, community in the chorales. What holds the axis here is absence: labour does not appear, and the family is thin.

Score: 9.0 / 10