St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244

• Bach composed this work in 1727, for the April 11 Good Friday service at Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church.¹
• Churches had been observing Good Friday by singing the Passion narrative (the account of Jesus’s suffering and death from one of the Gospels) since the 4th century. By Bach’s time, Passion settings had become very elaborate, and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is one of the most elaborate, even operatic in scope. It is scored for two choruses and orchestras (with a third choir added in the first movement only), plus a cast of soloists to represent all the characters in the Passion story.
• Bach’s collaborator on this project was the librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici, whose nom de plume was Picander. In addition to this work and a number of church cantatas, Picander and Bach also collaborated on Bach’s comic Coffee Cantata, so clearly the collaboration had a wide expressive range.
• This work was so much more monumental than Bach’s other passion settings that Anna Magdalena Bach and the rest of his family generally referred to it “The Great Passion.”²
• There is a famous (infamous?) quote from a scandalized church lady who experienced one of Bach’s Passion settings. Apparently she found the whole thing too theatrical for church. This quote is often applied to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but scholars now think the good lady’s quote actually refers to one of Bach’s other Passions. Regardless, the quote reflects how unexpectedly operatic and dramatic all of Bach’s Passion settings.

“In the pew of a noble family in church, many ministers and noble ladies were present, who sang the first Passion chorale out of their books with great devotion. But when this theatrical music began, all these people were thrown into the greatest bewilderment, looked at each other, and said, ‘What will come of this?’ An old widow of the nobility said, ‘God save us, my children! It’s just as if one were at an opera comedy.’”

From a c.1730 Leipzig account³

1.  Christoph Wolff and Walter Emery, “Bach, Johann Sebastian,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed January 12, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278195.
2.  Christoph Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician (UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 288.
3. Quoted in Hans T. David, Arthur Mendel, and Christoph Wolff, eds., The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents (New York: Norton, 1999), 327.