St Matthew Passion

Introduction

In 2013, the Hungarian State Opera presented Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental Good Friday oratorio, Matthäus Passion (St Matthew Passion) for the first time, in Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s transcription, in a special production by Géza M. Tóth. Since the early period of Christianity, approximately the 4^th century, the performance of the passion of Jesus has formed an independent unit in the history of church music. Since the 12^th century, there has been a tendency to dramatize this story, and from that time on, the text was not sung by a single priest, but by different people who voiced the Evangelist, Christ, and further characters. The genre of the passion appeared in many forms over the centuries, before reaching its form created by Bach, in the Protestant German environment of the 18th century. Apart from the text of the Evangelist, the passion oratorio hardly relies on the Gospel text anymore: the texts of the choruses, arias, recitatives, and folk songs, i.e. chorales, are written by poets.

About the work

Bach’s St Matthew Passion is based on Martin Luther’s translation of the 26^th and 27^th chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. The story told by the gospel is complemented by church folk songs (passion chorales) and poems by a contemporary poet of Bach, Christian Friedrich Henrici, writing under the pen name Picander, set to music. The work was performed for the first time on Good Friday, 11 April 1727, at the St Thomas Church in Leipzig, conducted by the composer. It features two choirs, both consisting of 12 singers including the soloists; the chorale melody of the introductory chorus was sung by another 3 boy singers. The parts of the divided orchestra were played by only 34 instruments. In total, about 60 performers made up the ensemble of the premier, and this was the largest one that had ever been available to Bach to perform a sacred work. In later times, it was not uncommon to have the work performed by 150 to 200 participants.

One of the most essential features of the concept of St Matthew Passion is the division of the ensemble into two. From a musical point of view, this procedure offered Bach plenty of opportunities to make the counterpoint arrangement more versatile. However, the spiritual concept is perhaps even more significant: the divided choir corresponds to each other not only musically, but also ideologically. In the double choirs, one half-choir usually represents contemporary observers of the passion, while the other half-choir interprets the interjections and comments of today’s congregation. An important component of St Matthew Passion is the use of chorales. Among them, the chorale melody of “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (“O Head, full of blood and wounds”) occupies a central place, which occurs five times during the passion, almost always with changing harmonization. However, Bach uses a chorale melody not only in the explicit chorale passages, but also in the opening chorus and even in the choral material corresponding to one of the tenor arias.

St Matthew Passion was performed several times during Bach’s lifetime, but after his death, the work was forgotten until 1829 when Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who was only twenty at the time, performed the piece again in a version shortened by almost half. The first performance in Berlin after Bach’s death was followed by the second one a few weeks later, in Frankfurt am Main, also revised and conducted by Mendelssohn. This marked the beginning of the renaissance of Bach’s works – in fact, a change in the attitude that turned the attention of people who were almost exclusively interested in contemporary music to the music of earlier eras. Mendelssohn made another transcription of St Matthew Passion which was presented in Leipzig, in 1841.

Staged by Géza M. Tóth, St Matthew Passion was first performed at the Hungarian State Opera in 2013, which was also the Hungarian premiere of Mendelssohn’s version. The production is based on the later, 1841 Leipzig version of the Mendelssohn arrangements. Compared to Bach’s original work, this version is about an hour shorter and uses different instrumentation in several places than the original. Mendelssohn mainly left out arias and chorales, but one of the characters, Pilate’s wife, was also “sacrificed”. The proportion of the more dramatic and monumental parts in the piece increased, making it easier for a concert audience to receive. In addition to dramaturgical and sometimes theological considerations, Mendelssohn was also guided by practical considerations. He left out or re-arranged the parts which required such instruments from the 18th century that were not available such as the viola da gamba or the oboe da caccia. Instead of the original organ bass, the continuo group accompanying the secco recitatives was rearranged by Mendelssohn into an ensemble comprising of two cellos and a double bass.

About the production

The subject of St Matthew’ Passion, namely, the passion of Jesus, has been presented perhaps the most often and in the most varied form among the biblical stories in the past two thousand years. Géza M. Tóth staged his version of Bach’s adaptation of the Gospel story in such a way that although the story could be recalled through the pictorial representation of some well-known motifs like the breaking of bread, the kiss of Judas, the carrying of the cross, or Pilate washing his hands, the plot itself is not represented on stage, not even in a stylized form, and it does not use any kind of pictorial illustration following Christian iconographic traditions.

The reason behind it is that the stage interpretation of the oratorio does not primarily focus on the action, but on the text and its written form in addition to the music that is being played. Therefore, in addition to the performers, an important part of the production is the projected, text-based moving image as a visual element, which appears in continuous synchronization with the audible text. Visualizing the text as a projected image or animated typography offers the opportunity to not only recall the plot, but also to point out the deeper musical and textual connections of the work. The director justifies the main reason for this concept with the circumstances of the creation of the work: the original role of the wok and the way it was first performed were determined by Bach’s Protestantism, and even more so by the exceptional role of St Matthew Passion in Protestant church music. Thus, a performance was created in which the concert audience sitting in the richly decorated spaces of the Opera House becomes a congregation listening to, reading, and interpreting texts from the Gospel.

Diána Eszter Mátrai
(Based on Péter Várnai, Book of Oratorios, Editio Musica Budapest, 1983;
Géza M. Tóth, Opera Performance and Worship: Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the Opera House, Religion and Art, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, L’Harmattan.)