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Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion from 1725:
A Liturgical Interpretation
MARKUS RATHEY
When we listen to Johann Sebastian Bach’s vocal works today, we do this most of the time in a concert. Bach’s passions and his B minor Mass, his cantatas and songs are an integral part of our canon of concert music. Nothing can be said against this practice. The passions and the Mass have been a part of the Western concert repertoire since the 1830s, and there may not have been a “Bach Revival” in the nineteenth century (and no editions of Bach’s works for that matter) without Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s concert performance of the St. Matthew Passion in the Berlin Singakademie in 1829.1 However, the original sitz im leben of both large-scaled works like his passions, and his smaller cantatas, is the liturgy. Most of his vocal works were composed for use during services in the churches of Leipzig.
The pieces unfold their meaning in the context of the liturgy. They engage in a complex intertextual relationship with the liturgical texts that frame them, and with the musical (and theological) practices of the liturgical year of which they are a part. The following essay will outline the liturgical context of the second version of the St. John Passion (BWV 245a) Bach performed on Good Friday 1725 in Leipzig. The piece is a revision of the familiar version of the passion Bach had composed the previous year. The 1725 version of the passion was performed by the Yale Schola Cantorum in 2006, and was accompanied by several lectures I gave in New Haven and New York City.
The Liturgical Year as Soundscape
We come to a performance of the St. John Passion from a sonic experience significantly different from the one Bach’s listeners had when they attended the performance in 1725.2 Maybe we just listened to the news on our car radio, or to a pop song. Maybe we took the elevator and endured elevator-music. Maybe we just came from home where we enjoyed a CD recording of Beethoven’s Third Symphony or a Brahms string quartet. Our listening to the passion has to compete with other sonic experiences. Bach’s St. John Passion might interrupt our everyday musical life, but it is nevertheless a part of it.
A listener in 1725 had a different experience. Not only did he not know the pop song, the Beethoven symphony, or the string quartet; his perception of the Passion was shaped by the musical context of the liturgical year. A listener who heard the initial measures of the St. John Passion in 1725, the flowing motion of the orchestral prelude in the flutes, then in the oboes, supported by the fundament of the strings, had been on a long musical “diet.” The last regular performance of vocal-instrumental music in the liturgy had been more than one and a half months earlier, on February 11, when Bach performed his chorale cantata Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott (BWV 127), the first movement of which featured a similar instrumentation.3 In the following weeks, during Lent, the instruments had to remain silent. The only music performed in the liturgy were hymns by the congregation and liturgical chants. No figural music (with or without instruments), or soloistic organ music, was allowed during the services.4 This regulation was not unique to Leipzig, but rooted in an old liturgical tradition shared by Catholics and Protestants alike.5
Not only was liturgical music reduced during Lent, but public and private festivities were also limited during that time, and thus the musical diet affected not only the worship services but the entire soundscape of Leipzig. The weeks before Good Friday must have been much quieter in the city than during the remainder of the year.
The most significant interruption of this liturgical silence took place five days before Good Friday. The Sunday Palmarum fell on 25 March, which was also the feast of the Annunciation. By tradition the feast day trumped the liturgical silence of Lent, and it was celebrated in a festive fashion. Bach performed his cantata Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (BWV 1), a festive chorale cantata with an elaborate instrumental part. This was, however, the only time that the silence was interrupted.
The performance of the St. John Passion in the Good Friday Vespers of 1725 thus ended a long period of musical frugality during the liturgy. It is hard for us to imagine the impact of the first sounds of the piece. This was not music among other musical pieces, but sounds that floated into a sonic space that had been empty for weeks. Only on Easter would cantatas be again performed in the Sunday morning service, would the organ play its long preludes, and would secular music and celebrations be “back to normal.”
Bach had come to Leipzig in 1723. When he performed his first passion (the first version of the St. John Passion, BWV 245) in 1724, the tradition of large-scale passion compositions had been quite young in the central German city. Only during the last years of Bach’s predecessor, Johann Kuhnau (1660–1722), had it become customary to perform a figural setting of the passion in the style of a large-scale oratorio during the vespers of Good Friday.6 (In this Leipzig followed other German cities, where a similar tradition had been introduced in the late seventeenth century.) The novelty might even have intensified the impact of Bach’s early passion performances in Leipzig, for not only did they break the silence of Lent, but this breaking of the sound of silence was something quite new—even in 1725, when Bach conducted the second version of his St. John Passion.
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