St. Matthew Passion

Bach, who lost 10 of his 20 children during their infancy, knew the pain of grief. The composer’s personal experience of death and faith in the Christian promise of eternal salvation flowed into his St Matthew Passion, a profound meditation on the drama and meaning of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. As so often, he took an existing genre and graced it with an unprecedented level of musical invention and emotional insight. Bach’s “Great Passion”, as it came to be known during his lifetime, followed in the Lutheran Holy Week tradition of singing passages from the Gospels of St Matthew and St John that recount the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion. Having raised the bar high with his St John Passion in 1724, he created the far richer, more complex St Matthew Passion, performed in all probability for the first time at St Thomas’ Church in Leipzig on Good Friday 1727. An oratorio in all but name, the St Matthew Passion owes its coherence to an ideally balanced combination of biblical narrative, spiritual reflections and chorale verses assembled by the Leipzig poet Christian Friedrich Henrici, better known by the pen name of Picander. His libretto’s variety of monumental choruses, arias, hymns and recitatives for an Evangelist (from the Greek for “good message”), Jesus, Pontius Pilate, Peter and other protagonists fired Bach’s boundless imagination to produce a setting that captures events from a moment in time and explores their timeless implications. Bach pits his tenor Evangelist against a baying choral mob and explores the shame of Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial of Christ in music of the utmost compassion, crowned by the sublime alto aria “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” (“Have mercy, my God”).