Bach's Great Passion

My latest Hamburg trip centered on Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew's Passion. Red Baron often listened to The Great Passion and wrote about it in 2012 and 2016. The present performance was exceptional as

- at the Elbphilharmonie, the audience surrounds the orchestra, choir, and soloists and

©FBO

- we Freiburgers listened to the Freiburger Barock Orchester, i.e., Baden meets Hamburg.

©VL

The Baroque instrumentalists were completed by the Belgian vocal ensemble Vox Luminis.

From the program booklet of the Hamburg performance, we learned that the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion on April 11, 1727, remained uncommented. There were only four other performances in Bach's time.

The main reason for this may have been what an audience member put in 1729 in the following words, "God forbid! It sounds as if one were in an opéra-comédie!" Had the Thomaskantor not made a contractual commitment not to write music that was too operatic for church purposes? And now this.

Bach's St. Matthew's Passion was "lost" for over 100 years. It was the 20-year-old Felix Mendelsohn-Bartholdi who "resurrected" Bach's masterpiece, although in a slimmed-down adaptation in 1829 with the Berlin Singakademie. In the romantic Biedermeier era, the audience's tastes had changed considerably.

And so Felix's older sister Fanny wrote to a friend about the spectacular performance, "What we all dreamed of as a possibility in the background of time is now true and real, the Passion has entered public life and become the property of the mind. The crowded hall looked like a church; the deepest silence, the most solemn devotion prevailed in the assembly; one heard only individual, involuntary expressions of deeply excited feeling, what one so often says with the injustice of undertakings of this kind, one can claim here with the true right that a special spirit, a generally higher interest directed this performance, and that everyone did his duty to the best of his ability, but some did more." What a long sentence!

Mendelsohn's groundbreaking performance of the St. Matthew Passion launched a Bach renaissance that continues to this day. The master rightly leads the three Bs: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, as the conductor Hans von Bülow exaggerated in the 1880s, "I believe in Bach, the Father, Beethoven, the Son, and Brahms, the Holy Ghost of music."

The Hamburg performance made it evident that Bach wrote his Great Passion for two orchestras (Chorus I and II), two choirs, and soloists (Coro Primo and Second). 

 In previous stagings, the performers were primarily crowded together and faced the audience. This time, the two orchestras and choirs were separated, requiring precise cooperation between conductors. Lionel Meunier stood as bass in the right ensemble, and concertmaster Petra Müllejans sat elevated and played the first violin in the left orchestra.

This double constellation created excellent transparency and dynamics, especially when all the singers joined in on some choruses.

With this star cast, the performance was bound to be a success, and the sustained final applause put a smile on the musicians' faces.

Criticism? More intensive acoustic preparation would have been needed in the Elbphilharmonie. For example, the Evangelist sounded strangely softly in the unusual positioning of the musicians, and in my favorite aria, Erbarme dich o Herr, sung by an excellent countertenor, the accompanying violins covered up the sobbing solo violin.

The two and a half hours flew by, especially since this time, Red Baron was listening to the music not in a wooden pew but in a comfortable armchair in the 3rd row of the parterre.

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