St. Matthew Passion and B minor Mass
On Good Friday, 1729, came the turn of St. Thomas’ Church to produce the music appropriate to the day. The result of this official duty was the Passion according to St. Matthew, for which Christian Friedrich Henrici, who wrote under the name of “Picander” and provided Bach with innumerable “librettos” for all purposes, compiled the text. The composer himself chose and distributed the chorales which punctuate the score. Bach was still at work on it when his former patron, Prince Leopold of Cöthen, died. Rather than prepare a special memorial piece he asked Picander to adapt appropriate words to parts of the music in the St. Matthew and he performed them in Cöthen at his friend’s obsequies.
It is hard for us to believe that the St. Matthew Passion did not receive on that far-off April 15, 1729, the tribute of wondering amazement which in the fullness of our hearts we bring it today. Yet we are told that the Leipzig worshipers considered its overwhelming dramatic pages “theatrical.” “God help us,” exclaimed a scandalized old dame, “’tis surely an opera-comedy!” We know that, judged by our standards, the first performance of the work must have been inefficient. Whether it was much better done at its repetition in 1736 may be doubted. Be this as it may, the St. Matthew Passion passed into oblivion for nearly a hundred years. The glory of its rediscovery and its reawakening an exact century after its birth belongs to Felix Mendelssohn who, with its resuscitation at the Singakademie in Berlin, performed a service that would have shed immortal luster upon his name had he never done anything else.
The St. Matthew Passion, which is Bach at his most tender, intimate, lacerating and compassionate, stands, like the B minor Mass, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s Tristan, as one of the epochal feats of music, a lonely and incomparable achievement of the human spirit. Bach is believed to have written a Passion according to St. Mark, but not a trace of it survives. Another, according to St Luke, is extant but most certainly spurious. It is hard to believe he could ever have surpassed the lyric glory of the St. Matthew. For generations after its re-emergence musicians paid it everything from lip-service to ecstatic tribute. A complete, full-length performance of it was, however, a rarity and not even Mendelssohn had the courage to attempt it. In our own time we have finally come to the ways of wisdom, recognizing that the St. Matthew Passion can produce its proper effect only when heard in its entirety, with never a bar or a phrase omitted. Those who have heard it thus are unlikely ever again to listen willingly to a cut version.
If anything can be said to rival the grandeur of the St. Matthew Passion it is the Mass in B minor, the triumphal hymn of the church militant. This utterance of subduing and inscrutable majesty, which transcends the world to bestride the universe, was completed in 1733 and offered to Augustus the Strong as “an insignificant example of my skill in Musique”! Augustus the Strong, being occupied at the moment with problems of state, did not deign to notice Bach’s “insignificant” gesture. The composer never heard a performance of this gigantic creation, which soars to heights beyond human gaze and, in its proportions and technical details, is too vast to serve ordinary liturgical purposes. Yet here, as so often elsewhere, Bach followed the example of his age and employed several numbers from this Mass—with greater or lesser alteration—elsewhere. Even the triumphant Osanna, which expert criticism has pronounced a polonaise (apparently a subtle compliment paid to Augustus as King of Poland), and the ineffably touching Agnus Dei may be encountered again in several of Bach’s cantatas.