St Matthew Passion

The two-part structure of the St Matthew Passion is not a musical choice; it is a liturgical one. Good Friday Vespers at Bach's own St Thomas Church required a sermon lasting an hour or more roughly halfway through the service, so Bach composed the Passion in two large halves specifically to be split by it, part one closing with Judas's betrayal and part two opening after the sermon with Jesus before the high priest. A modern concert performance, freed from the sermon, usually just plays the two halves back to back with a short interval, which quietly changes the pacing of an experience Bach designed around a real interruption.

The scale of the forces Bach assembled was itself unusual for its time: two full choirs, two separate orchestras each with its own continuo group, and, in Bach's own performing forces, a third choir of boy trebles doubling the chorale melody from a gallery, so that the hymn tunes the congregation already knew from ordinary Sunday worship would ring out from a different physical location than the main musical action, as though the whole church itself were joining the story rather than merely watching it performed.

That layered spatial and liturgical design largely disappeared once the work became a concert-hall staple after its 1829 revival, performed in secular halls to seated audiences with no sermon, no gallery choir and no shared congregational memory of the chorale tunes. What survives on any modern recording is the notes Bach wrote; what is much harder to recover is the specific liturgical event those notes were written to interrupt and complete.

For nearly a century after Bach's death in 1750, the St Matthew Passion went essentially unperformed. Musical taste had moved on, and Bach's reputation, while never entirely forgotten among specialists, had settled largely around his instrumental and keyboard writing rather than his large-scale sacred vocal works, which were considered old-fashioned and were rarely staged.

That changed in 1829, when the twenty-year-old composer Felix Mendelssohn, who had been given a manuscript copy of the score by his grandmother years earlier, mounted a performance in Berlin with the Berlin Singakademie, cutting roughly a third of the original score to fit contemporary concert expectations. The performance was a sensation, and it is conventionally credited by music historians as the single event that launched the wider nineteenth-century Bach revival, a rehabilitation of Bach's reputation that eventually restored not only the Passion settings but the cantatas, the Mass in B Minor and the instrumental works to the core of the Western classical repertoire.

Mendelssohn was twenty at the time and Jewish by birth, raised largely without religious instruction before his family's later conversion to Protestant Christianity, a biographical detail that has drawn its own scholarly attention given the specific antisemitic strand within the Passion narrative's reception history that this same work, unrelated to Mendelssohn's revival of it, has separately and repeatedly had to be examined for over the centuries since.