Johann Sebastian Bach (54 page)

The Passion performance of 1724 provided Bach with the first opportunity to put his own stamp on the Good Friday Vespers service, which had only recently become the musical highpoint of the year (the sermon, for all its length, could be thought of as a mere interruption of an essentially musical service). He was able to define the event and to shape both its perception by the worshippers and their expectations for subsequent years. Never before had Bach been in a position to engage in such a showcase performance, one that needed to be exceptionally well prepared and that greatly advanced his experience with large-scale compositions. In its textual components and organization, he adhered to Kuhnau's model—presumably a requirement of the Leipzig clergy—but he chose dimensions that exceeded any of his two-part cantatas, the Magnificat, or the lost Weimar Passion of 1717. Lacking a homogenous libretto, he designed the work along the lines of the seventeenth-century Passion
historia
, with the biblical text, punctuated by hymn stanzas, functioning as the structural backbone. This approach also allowed for substantial changes that Bach later made to the work, replacing some of the poetical movements in order to modify its external gestalt, musical content, and theological character.

T
ABLE
8.15. Libretto Design of the
St. John Passion, BWV
245 (first version, 1724)

Such changes are particularly evident in the second version of the
St. John Passion
, performed a year later, on Good Friday 1725. Bach replaced the opening and concluding movements with two chorale elaborations, “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß” and “Christe, du Lamm Gottes.” Also, one of three aria substitutions featured a chorale, “Jesu deine Passion,” which along with “O Mensch, bewein” was especially well chosen.
⁹⁰
Bach clearly intended these true classics from the rhymed Passion repertoire to help adapt the
St. John Passion
to the ongoing cycle of that year's chorale cantatas. By using these two complex chorale settings to frame the entire work, he demonstrated the impact and significance of a musical architecture—not merely to present a novel formal accent but to forge a genuine new identity for the piece. A third revision of the St. John Passionmay have been prompted by Bach's having composed his
St. Matthew Passion
, as he now dropped the only two passages that were drawn from the Gospel of St. Matthew (Peter's lament and the earthquake scene). There is also a fourth version—dating to 1749, the year before Bach's death—that undoes most of the structural changes made since the first but requires larger forces than before. Judging by the surviving set of original performing parts, the orchestra consisted of an expanded body of strings (with additional stands for violins, violas, and violoncellos) and a continuo group bolstered by a contrabassoon, to provide an especially weighty foundation.

In addition to these four discernible versions of the St.
John Passion
that emerged in its twenty-five-year history, Bach began, around 1739, a thorough revision of the work, which by then had already undergone two massive transmutations. This revision, intended to preserve the work in an autograph fair copy and to restore the basic structure of the original version, also entailed a careful stylistic overhaul of the entire score. For whatever reason, Bach broke off after twenty pages, in the middle of the tenth movement. Because that revision remained unfinished, an aura of incompleteness surrounds the
St. John Passion
.
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Conceivably, Bach stopped his work because of an unpleasant affair that took place in the spring of 1739, recorded by the town scribe on March 17, ten days before Good Friday:

 

Upon a Noble and Most Wise Council's order I have gone to Mr. Bach here and have pointed out to the same that the music he intends to perform on the coming Good Friday is to be omitted until regular permission for the same is received. Whereupon he answered: it had always been done so; he did not care, for he got nothing out of it anyway, and it was only a burden; he would notify the Superintendent that it had been forbidden him; if an objection were made on account of the text, [he remarked that] it had already been performed several times.
⁹²

 

The incident, emanating from the civic rather than church authorities, clearly involved an issue of administrative supervision. We do not know whether Bach's angry reaction resulted in the cancellation of a performance of his own composition and the last-minute substitution of another work (possibly Telemann's Brockes Passion, which Bach must have performed at around that time), as a calendar of Passion performances during Bach's Leipzig period cannot be reconstructed without omissions and conjectures (see Table 8.16).
⁹³

T
ABLE
8.16. Calendar of Passion Performances in Leipzig, 1723–50

The complex genesis and transformations of Bach's first Leipzig Passion—one is tempted to speak of
St. John “Passions”
—demonstrate a degree of continuing freshness, originality, and experimental radiance that makes the work stand out in many ways, notwithstanding that in terms of sheer compositional sophistication and artistic maturity, it serves as a forerunner of two later
works, the Passions According to St. Matthewand St. Mark
. Of the five Passions mentioned in the Obituary,
⁹⁴
only two survive,
St. John and St. Matthew
; for
St. Mark
, we possess only Picander's libretto of 1731. Nevertheless, we know some of its musical content, scoring, and instrumentation because the piece derives from earlier works by way of parody, most notably from the Funeral Ode, BWV 198, of 1727 (there is reason to believe that the libretto itself was created with the reuse of extant material in mind). The reference in the Obituary to five Passions may include the lost work presented in 1717 at Gotha (BC D1) and, erroneously, an anonymous
St. Luke Passion
that Bach copied out and performed with a few additions of his own.

Of the three Leipzig Passions, the
St. Johnin
all of its versions lacks textual unity—the madrigal lyrics were compiled from various poetic sources—and the remarkable adaptability of the work cannot entirely conceal this inherent aesthetic problem. No doubt conscious of the difficulty, Bach began looking for a different kind of text, but not quite the oratorio type created by Barthold Heinrich Brockes in which the biblical narrative was replaced with rhymed paraphrases. Bach's unsuccessful search for a suitable text may well have hindered him from composing a new work for two successive Good Fridays and made him turn instead to modifying his
St. John Passion
for 1725 and selecting the
St. Mark
Passion by Friedrich Nicolaus Brauns for 1726. He had performed Brauns's work in Weimar, and he now adjusted it to fit Leipzig liturgical practice and musical conditions (BC D 5). When in 1725 Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici) published an oratorio text of the Brockes type,
Erbauliche Gedancken auf den Grünen Donnerstag und Charfreytag über den leidenden
JESUM
in einem
ORATORIO
entworffen
(Devotional Thoughts for Holy Thursday and Good Friday about the Suffering Jesus, Fashioned into an Oratorio). Bach surely paid attention to this libretto, which was dedicated to (and perhaps commissioned by) Franz Anton Count von Sporck of Bohemia. It could easily have been this sample from Picander's adept and agile poetic pen that brought the two Leipzig artists together.
⁹⁵
Whether Bach eventually commissioned Picander or Picander approached Bach, a close collaboration is beyond doubt, both on the conceptual level and in matters of detail. The Brockes model loomed large (and Picander emulated its allegorical dialogue between the Daughters of Zion and the Faithful) and the poetic language of Salomo Franck also proved inspiring, but it became of utmost importance for the Gospel text to be preserved intact and for the lyrics to reflect the appropriate theological scope. Bach may in fact have alerted Picander to pertinent sources, such as the Passion homilies of Heinrich Müller, a seventeenth-century Lutheran theologian whose works could be found among the literature in Bach's library.
⁹⁶
Some structural features seem to have been specifically requested by the composer. For example, the allegorical dialogue is arranged so that the Daughters of Zion and the Faithful do not just appear successively but simultaneously, as in aria no. 20, where the soloist from choir I sings “Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen” (I will wake with my Jesus) while choir II responds “So schlafen unsre Sünden ein” (Thus will our sins go to sleep)—this kind of conjunction being essential for the double-choir design to work.
⁹⁷
Likewise, the combination of free lyrics with hymn strophes (most prominently featured in the opening chorus) may have been suggested by Bach, reflecting as it did his keen interest in multilayered polyphonic structures that include a cantus firmus.

What emerged was a libretto that used the same textual components as the
St. John
but avoided the pitfalls of heterogeneous lyrics. And with its more abundant and complex madrigal-style poetry, Picander's
St. Matthew Passion
libretto indeed constituted, from a literary point of view, a unified Passion oratorio. While the libretto for the later
St. Mark Passion
, again by Picander, borrowed from preexisting material, which presented certain impediments, the
St. Matthew Passion
libretto enabled Bach to conceive a wholly original work and to compose it in a single sweep. There was neither room nor need for the kind of radical alterations that the
St. John Passion
underwent, even though Bach nearly always found occasion to change and improve. In the case of the
St. Matthew Passion
, a significant revision occurred only once after its first performance at St. Thomas's on April 11, 1727, and this for the purpose of enhancing the work's monumental character by extending its musical dimensions and by expanding and refocusing its performing forces, while leaving the overall design and libretto intact. It was in 1736, when the work was performed for the third time, that Bach replaced the simple chorale “Jesum lass ich nicht von mir,” BWV 244b, which originally concluded part I, with the massive chorale setting “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß,” appropriated from the second version of the
St. John Passion
. Additionally, he created a more decisive division of the entire ensemble into two vocal-instrumental bodies by assigning separate continuo groups to choirs I and II, instead of letting one common continuo section provide the fundament for both choirs. Finally, in addition to the regular spaces for choir and instruments, Bach used the swallow's nest organ and choir loft in the performance. He assigned the cantus firmus lines of the two choruses that framed part I (nos. 1 and 29) to a third choir made up of sopranos with organ support,
⁹⁸
a decision that mobilized virtually all available musical resources at St. Thomas's and must surely have resulted in a spectacular effect. And if sexton Rost, in his list of Passion performances, specified merely “1736. St. Thomas's, with both organs,”
⁹⁹
his remark shows that this unusual feature by no means went unnoticed.