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.