Solomon's Knot Artistic Director Jonathan Sells gives his personal take on why JS Bach's St Matthew Passion continues to attract audiences every year, for whom it is 'for', and how we should best approach listening to or experiencing it.
Far removed from the era and context of the first performances of the Matthew Passion, our ritualised annual concert performances of the piece have become an object of worship in their own right.
As well as the beguiling music and compelling story, the Passion speaks to all of our failings as human beings and, through the devastating example of Christ's torture and death, inspires us to do better.
Thanks for listening to the SKaffeehaus. To support Solomon's Knot and all of our work, please visit https://www.solomonsknot.co.uk/support/
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© Solomon's Knot Productions Ltd
Solomon's Knot Artistic Director Jonathan Sells gives his personal take on why JS Bach's St Matthew Passion continues to attract audiences every year, for whom it is 'for', and how we should best approach listening to or experiencing it.
Far removed from the era and context of the first performances of the Matthew Passion, our ritualised annual concert performances of the piece have become an object of worship in their own right.
As well as the beguiling music and compelling story, the Passion speaks to all of our failings as human beings and, through the devastating example of Christ's torture and death, inspires us to do better.
Thanks for listening to the SKaffeehaus. To support Solomon's Knot and all of our work, please visit https://www.solomonsknot.co.uk/support/
Twitter/Insta/Facebook/YouTube @solomonsknot
© Solomon's Knot Productions Ltd
Countless people flock to concert halls and churches around the world, mainly in the period leading up to Easter every year, in order to experience a live performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, or Passion of Jesus Christ according to St Matthew, the St Matthew Passion. I’m fascinated by the reason people do this – people from all walks of life, all ages, all faiths or none. I’d like to explore what it is about Bach’s great and longest Passion that attracts us, that keeps us coming back for more, year in, year out. My theory is that it is the combination of two powerful elements: firstly, the felicitous marriage of Christian Friedrich Henrici’s words and Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, and secondly a story which not only retells the tragic and dramatic events of the torture and murder of Jesus Christ, but which also, and most importantly in my opinion, holds a mirror to all of us and our conscience as human beings. The combination of these ingredients plunges us into an aural, visual, communal and psychological experience which forces us to look directly at our most unpleasant weaknesses as human beings, face up to them, and endeavour to improve ourselves. To those who are open to it, the Matthew Passion offers a process of catharsis and redemption unmatched by any other artwork I know. And that, for me, is the key: to open ourselves fully to its penetrative power.
On the face of it, the ritual of annual concert performances of the Matthew Passion is odd. Easter recurs every year of course, and so therefore does Good Friday, the anniversary of the first performance of the piece, sometime in the late 1720s. The context for Bach’s own performances was very different from ours today. He designed the Matthew Passion as liturgical music, straddling the sermon in what must have been an absolutely epic Good Friday Vespers service, surrounded by other pieces of music and liturgy: hymns, motets, prayers, organ voluntaries and so on. And this means that the music and message of the piece were targeted at a very specific group of people: the believers, doubters, the pious, sinners - all the people who came to the two main churches in Leipzig on Good Friday at that time. The poetry which they heard, the fresh contemporary writing by Henrici which is a key element of the Passion’s make-up, was written in a modern idiom, designed to speak to them directly as early-18th-century Saxon citizens.
Today, when we experience the Matthew Passion we are far removed from that world where religion had a much greater importance in daily life, social life and cultural life. A world where attendance at a 3-hour+ Sunday service was expected, where all one’s efforts and achievements were dedicated to God, where the thread of life was much more frayed and exposed to the sharp blade of death, and therefore the dependence on a benevolent deity was ever-present. Today we are happy to pay a fee, often much in excess of thirty pieces of silver, to listen to this sacred work in either church or concert hall, generally without much further reference to Christian, not to mention Lutheran, religion; sitting politely and reverentially in silence alongside hundreds or thousands of our fellows, framing the ritual with applause (though this is frowned upon in some places), or at the very least with the procession in and out of the performing forces. In this way, and like some other pieces of its kind, it has attained a ritual status of its own, an aura which transcends even its most sacred subject matter: the Matthew Passion itself becomes an object of worship, a holy of holies in the musical canon. It is a freestanding musical cathedral in its own right.
We are far from that original context; we are not the intended targets of the Passion. The modernity of Henrici’s poetry can seem foreign to us now, grotesque even (though thankfully he does not go as far into 4K hyperrealism as some of his contemporaries). And yet we continue to return to the Matthew Passion, almost 300 years after it was written; we continue to resurrect it year after year. Why do we keep coming back to it? What generates that magnetic pull which we are unable to resist?
One immediately obvious answer, together with the compelling story, is the surface beauty and musical power of the work. Bach’s music, working hand in hand with the words of the bible story, the choral texts and Henrici’s poetry works wonders on us in its own right. You don’t have to know anything about what an aria like ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben’ is about in order to recognise its otherworldly, painful sublimity. The cracks of the whip and the welts they leave behind become almost physically visible in the hands of Bach’s scouring strings, and the miniature jewel of the two bars of recognition, ‘Wahrlich dieser ist Gottes Sohn gewesen’, ‘this truly was the son of God’, open and close like the most dazzling of fleeting flowers, come too late and gone too soon.
But there is so much more at work below that surface, currents which pull us gladly down into blissful depths. To paraphrase a famous ogre, ‘Passions are like onions. They have layers.’ Let’s have a quick look at how those layers work; how the Passion is put together. The strands which make up the voluptuous tapestry of the St Matthew Passion span the 1700 years between the events it describes and the time it was first performed. Those lucky first listeners would have experienced interweaving layers of temporal distance, held together by music which, apart from the soprano tunes of the chorales, was all brand new. The bedrock of the textual geology is the Greek and then Latin of Matthew’s gospel, translated into German by Martin Luther in 1545. This text, recited by the Evangelist, other solo singers, and the entire chorus when groups of people speak, is mostly delivered in very simple terms. Jesus carries with him a faithful band of strings (though even they desert him at the last), and occasionally Bach gets carried away with the fervour of the crowd scenes for such statements as ‘Sein Blut komme über uns und unsere Kinder/may his blood be upon us and our children’. But otherwise the Evangelist is accompanied by the driest of chords. The events are told in the 3rd person, albeit with the words of key characters spoken, or in this case sung, by different people, ‘dramatised’ only in as far as the reported speech is brought to life by a change of voice. We are not expected to believe that the person singing Jesus becomes Christ at that moment, not least because the part assigned to that singer also contains arias and choruses, and the same is the case for the Evangelist. Every singer is a chameleon, switching in an instant between Christian believer, character in a story, compassionate or horrified observer, and so on. Bach deliberately avoids turning the retelling into a staged play.
The chorales represent a closer seam of language, but still at a distance of 100-200 years, a Lutheran tradition passed down over generations, and tied of course to melodies, hymn tunes so familiar to the listening congregation. The voice here is mostly in the 1st person plural, ‘we’: instruments and voices unite and speak their message in almost perfect syllabic synchrony, delivered from one collective to another.
And finally we have Henrici’s contribution, very much in the 1st person singular, the arias and recitatives that provide a contemporary and individual reaction to key events in the story, pausing the action, sometimes at its most fast moving and dramatic moments, to jump outside the frame and give a personal and new take on what is happening. “Give me my Jesus back!”. “Hell, open your fiery abyss!” “My heart is swimming in tears.” Further to these arias, Henrici, who’s nom de plume was Picander, also penned large-scale numbers which form pillars at either end of the two parts of the Passion, most memorably the opening chorus, framed as a dialogue between the allegorical Daughter of Zion and the Believers, crowned by the German Agnus Dei chorale, which once again spans the centuries.
Encountering the Matthew Passion three centuries later, another layer of temporal distance has opened up between us and what was intended to be heard as a piece of contemporary art. We do not hear Picander’s words as those of someone of our own age, our own generation. We see them very much as ‘of their own time’, we can allow ourselves not to take their more graphic elements at face value, we could shy away from the heart-on-sleeve emotional response. As I shall explain later, I believe this is would be a mistake.
Since the layers of the texts in the Passion span the centuries, there is a recurring echo which is continued when we recreate this music, centuries on from its birth. We add a layer of resonance, we share its message again with the listeners of today, and we contribute to its timelessness, performing it in a way which speaks more clearly to us. Paradoxically, in recent times this has meant striving to perform it in a way which we believe corresponds most closely to the way Bach himself performed it. Somehow, by making it old, we make it new again.
Our modern retelling of the story is not a re-enactment, it is not dramatic. But, and this is the key for me, the Matthew Passion is an invitation to immerse ourselves in the story, again, year after year. Not just to listen to it. Sound has the astonishing capacity to physically move us, to pass through our bodies and out the other side, to set not only our ear drums into motion, but every fibre of our bodies, from the bass in our pelvis or femur to the treble at the top of our neck or at our fingertips. Bach’s irresistible music & Henrici’s words penetrate us, pierce us, striking a chord in us, resonating & turning us into resonating bodies that vibrate in tune with the events. Bach’s setting of the words ‘Er hat uns allen Wohl getan/He has done good things to us all’, for soprano and oboes da caccia, washes through us like a soothing balm. Every angular, dissonant interval in the recitatives at the mention of the cross twists in our gut, inevitably paired as it is with the musical ‘sharp sign’, which in German is called ‘Kreuz’, or Cross – so the performers themselves or students of the score cannot ignore the imagery. When the massed forces of two choruses and two orchestras with strings, organs, flutes and oboes are used to propel a message of great import, we cannot help but feel the monumental power of those ideas and emotions vibrating through us; we as an audience become one great resonating body, in sync and united through the same sound of word and music which touches us each in different places but whose fleeting and unique power we all share in the moment.
And then there’s the story itself. On the face of it, the story of the Passion is most relevant to a Christian audience, although some may sympathise with György Kurtág thoughts on the matter, when he said, “Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed.” For many, the Matthew Passion may form part of an Easter ritual that has more to do with chocolate eggs than a religious origin. And, as I have mentioned, we may rather pay money to enter a cathedral of music, both physical and aural, than sit in a church.
But there is more to our reception of the story than sympathy with a martyr of a certain religion. For me, the narrative of the passion is about something much bigger than that, with all respect to Christians would argue there can be nothing bigger than the salvation of humankind! I feel that the crux of the Passion story is human failure, betrayal, and that ultimate test: would you save your own skin over that of your neighbour, or your friend? Peter fails, repents, is saved. Judas fails, regrets, and is doomed to take his own life, his sin being far greater than Peter’s. The personalising power of the Passion puts us all on this spot, puts us in each character’s shoes. How many of us would succeed where Peter & Judas failed? How many of us would fail to be caught up in the mob whipped up by the high priests?
These choices are everywhere around us. Do we share what we have? Do we speak up for our colleagues, for example, the BBC Singers, risking that we might not get that next BBC broadcast as a result? Would we, in Nazi Germany, have protected the Jew next door, knowing full well the risk to our own lives? Do we step in when we witness violence? Do we allow the tyrants in our society, big and small, to act with impunity, because we’ll be individually better off by keeping our heads down? Our very humanity is being put to the test.
The ultimate message of the Passion is to learn from Christ’s example. The opening chorus demands: LOOK. LOOK AT HIM. Like a lamb, to the slaughter. He was patient, silent in the face of lies and false accusation. He made the ultimate sacrifice. Under interrogation, he did not crack, he did not lie; he submitted himself to the most egregious torture. He gave his own life, in the belief that life would be better for those that came after him.
We are forced to look, deeply and sustainedly, into the wounds, into the pain, and they transform themselves into beautiful things. The alto sings: “Look at Jesus’s arms, on the Cross! They are stretched out to embrace you!” The story must enter our own bodies, as it does via the music, the sound. Our tears wash him, we bury him in our own bodies, in our hearts, as the music buries itself in us. By physically internalising this story, by storing it in the muscle memory of our own bodies through the invisible transfusion of musical and verbal sound, we literally bury it and the self-sacrifice of Jesus in our own selves, and we leave the experience better for it, better equipped to deal with the moral challenges we shall come to face on a small or large scale in our lives to come.
So for me, the Passion is not about Jesus Christ, it is about us, every one of us, of any faith or none; it holds a mirror to us, shows us that in our frail humanity, we would most likely fail. But the example of Christ gives us strength and hope that the next time we are confronted with such challenges, we would make the braver choice, the selfless choice. Bach and Henrici created this masterpiece like an arrow, designed to be plunged into the heart of everyone who encountered it, overwhelming and quivering their entire beings with ancient and modern ideas of compassion and humanity, in such a way which has become timeless and continues to resound in us today.
‘Wie soll ich dich empfangen?‘ asks the opening line of the first chorale of the Christmas oratorio – ‘how should I receive you?’ My advice to anyone experiencing the St Matthew Passion in any context is to Be Open. In our day-to-day lives we subconsciously block out sound in order to survive – to pick out the voice of the person we’re speaking to in a crowded room, to ‘cancel’ the noise of the vehicle we’re travelling in, to focus on the book we’re reading on the train. It takes conscious practice to lower those aural barriers and open our ears and bodies fully to music, and especially music with the depth and range of tone and colour that classical music has. This is excellent practice for any classical music listening experience, but the Matthew Passion seems most specifically targeted at open and receptive bodies, ears and minds. The imperatives of the opening chorus, Come! Look! are invitations to receive, to participate. “So hilfst du mir es selber tragen” sings the bass – “you help my to carry [the Cross] myself”. “I drink from the cup gladly, because my saviour did it before me.” “I gift you my heart, sink yourself into it, my salvation.” We are invited time and again to embody the story, to physically participate in it. The words of Picander, St Matthew and the poets of the chorales, flying on the wings of Bach’s penetrative music, bore into us like worms through flesh, like nails through bone. Only when we are fully open, unguarded and vulnerable to potential pain can we partake in a wholly emotional experience, one which will put us through the mangle, only for us to emerge humbler, braver, and better human beings.