A Passion for All Seasons: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion Beyond Good Friday

Bach

Wiegner, Nötige Freitagsarbeit, Leipzig 1724.

A performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in early November? That somehow feels wrong, at least at first. Bach created his Passion for a performance during the annual Good Friday Vespers in Leipzig in 1727; and most performances of the piece usually take place during Lent.

When Schola (under the direction of our colleague Grete Pedersen) performs St. Matthew Passion on November 1 in New Haven, we will hear this magnificent composition outside of its natural habitat. And yet, there’s something theologically intriguing—and historically fitting—about the liturgical displacement of the Passion.

Johann Sebastian Bach was a devout Lutheran, and his music is deeply influenced by Lutheran theology. And especially by Luther’s Theology of the Cross. For Luther, the passion story was not only a historical narrative; already in his Meditation on Christ’s Passion from 1519, Luther demanded that a true contemplation of Christ’s Passion should infuse all parts of daily life. 

It is no surprise that reflections on the Passion permeate Lutheran devotional literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A particularly interesting example is a weighty tome by theologian Abraham Wiegner entitled Nöthige Freytagsarbeit (Necessary Work for a Friday). The book includes 52 meditations on the passion story, divided into short sections for each of the 52 Fridays of the year. Wiegner invites his readers to a multisensory meditation on the suffering of Christ: verses from the passion story are framed by engraved images, poetry, didactic reflections, and hymns. For Wiegner, the Passion was something to be contemplated, viewed, and sung on every day of the year. 

Bach 2

Bach, “Ich will dir mein Herze schenken” (I will give you my heart) in Bach’s own hand.

This kind of year-round Passion devotion helps explain why hearing Bach in November isn’t as strange as it sounds. Wiegner’s fascinating book was published in Leipzig in 1724. Bach was the music director there, and in the same year he composed his St. John Passion, followed a few years later by its bigger sister, the St. Matthew Passion. Like Wiegner’s book, Bach’s settings of the Passion story invite the listener to contemplate the passion in a multisensory experience: music, poetry, and hymnody.

Bach performed his Passion on Good Friday, but his contemporary Wiegner would probably have been delighted to hear performances of the Passions on other days of the year as well. And Bach’s Passion even invites us to expand our scope beyond Good Friday. In a deeply emotional aria, the soprano exults in a love song: “I will give my heart as a gift to you;/sink inside it, my salvation. I will immerse myself in you.”

And at the burial of Jesus, close to the end of the Passion, the bass invites Jesus into his heart. The poetic images refer to the historical burial of the body of Jesus, but the goal is the continuing presence of Christ in the believer’s heart: “Make yourself pure, my heart;/I myself want to bury Jesus./For in me is he now,/Ever and ever,/To have his sweet rest./World, get out; let Jesus in!” 

You can hear Bach’s St. Matthew Passion as a monumental love song: images of bride and bridegroom from the Song of Songs appear regularly; Jesus’ suffering is interpreted as a manifestation of his love (“Out of Love, my Savior wants to die”), and the text repeatedly invites Jesus to dwell in the believer’s heart.

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was written for Good Friday. However, the devotional practices of his time and the interpretation of the passion narrative as a love story between Christ and the individual invite us to hear the Passion at other times of the year as well. When we hear the Passion on November 1, it will be heard in close proximity to the end of the church year, which traditionally explores the end times and the final judgment. If we hear the St. Matthew Passion in that context, it acquires an additional layer of meaning. The images of bride and bridegroom from the opening movement suddenly resonate with the same images in the Book of Revelation, where the New Jerusalem descends “as a bride adorned for her husband,” and the Spirit and the bride together cry out, “Come.” In Revelation’s vision, the story of salvation reaches its completion not in death and burial, but in an eternal union — the ultimate fulfillment of the very love story that Bach’s Passion traces from Gethsemane to the tomb.

Heard at the end of the church year, with that horizon in view, the Passion’s grief does not have the final word. The soprano’s intimate love song, the bass’s invitation to Jesus to find rest in the heart, the mourning choruses — all of these take on a new resonance: they are not merely expressions of grief over a historical death, but anticipations of a union that, in the logic of both Lutheran theology and the Book of Revelation, is still to come. Bach wrote his Passion for a single Friday in spring. But its music reaches across the entire calendar, and even across the entire arc of sacred time.

—Markus Rathey, Ph.D., Robert S. Tangeman Professor of Music History 

Professor Rathey will be giving a talk ahead of the Nov. 1 concert. All are welcome to join Breaking the Silence: Bach, Leipzig, and the Birth of the St. Matthew Passion at 5 p.m. in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, 1 Prospect Street New Haven, CT.