Johann Sebastian Bach

In Bach’s official obituary, published in 1754, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel stated that his father had composed five Passion settings during his lifetime. Unfortunately, Emanuel did not specify them, other than to say that one (obviously the St. Matthew) was for double choir. Only three Passions by J.S. Bach can be authenticated today, and one of those (St. Mark, written around 1731) has been lost. Some scholars have speculated that one of the other “lost” Passions was an early work that Bach probably cannibalized in crafting St. John. In any event, St. John is Bach’s earliest surviving Passion as well as his earliest known large-scale sacred work. Written on the eve of his appointment as Leipzig’s music director, it was premiered in that city’s St. Nicholas Church as part of the Vespers service on Good Friday, 1724. But unlike the more famous St. Matthew Passion, which he wrote about 1727 and had put into its final form by 1736, Bach continued revising St. John throughout the rest of his career. Even his last performance of it, scarcely a year before his death, incorporated new changes.

The Passion as a musical/dramatic form developed largely in Germany. It dates from at least the 15th century, later than medieval liturgical drama but probably arising out of a similar desire to expand upon the liturgy for an important feast day. In its original form, a cantor ("The Evangelist") chanted the Gospel narrative, joined by a few other singers taking on the roles of various dramatic personages. By the mid-17th century, that practice had evolved to include a mixture of Italian-style recitative, which replaced the original Gregorian chant, and polyphonic music. An important innovation from this period was the addition of turba choruses, in which a choir took on the roles of large crowds (e.g., disciples, priests or soldiers). Later in the century, the influence of “pietism” (a fundamentalist movement aimed at deepening religious sentiment, an attitude of humble submission to God, and feelings of personal identification with Biblical incident) led composers to add contemplative pieces to the Passion narrative. These interpolations were for the most part solo arias, settings of newly-composed pietistic poetry. Around this time composers also began to include chorales, the vernacular hymns, often set to popular tunes, which formed the core of Lutheran sacred music. Scholars today debate whether these hymns were added in the expectation that members of the congregation would join in singing them during liturgical performance. The important point is that their words, music, and spiritual meaning were intimately familiar to everyone in the congregation and would have induced much the same reaction among listeners whether they sang them inwardly or outwardly. By Bach’s day, then, the Passion had evolved into an idiom whose purpose was to stimulate reflection on the meaning of the Gospel. Bach no doubt understood the function of his music as largely to amplify that contemplation. Like his regular church cantatas, his musical Passions were written in two sections, in order to surround a sermon whose purpose was to interpret the Gospel even further.

At the time Bach wrote St. John, this much-expanded format for the Passion (sometimes called a "Passion oratorio") was still relatively new. Bach’s was, in fact, only the third such setting Leipzig audiences had heard, the first having been a work by his immediate predecessor Johann Kuhnau performed only three years earlier. The problems of struggling to define a new form may account in part for Bach’s continuing revision of his first effort. A deeper problem, however, may have lain with the nature of the textual sources from which he had to work, and ultimately with the nature of John’s narrative itself. When he turned to the composition of the St. Matthew Passion a few years later, Bach commissioned a pietistic libretto from the respected local poet Picander to supplement the Gospel verse and chorales. In the case of St. John, however, he was working from poetry by at least three separate authors and apparently rewrote some of that verse himself with the help of a fourth, anonymous collaborator. As a result, there was little aesthetic unity to the libretto, certainly nothing comparable to the great dialogue between The Faithful and The Daughter of Zion that binds St. Matthew together. Moreover, John’s narrative of the Passion is spare, lacking the richness of incident and human detail that Bach used so well in St. Matthew. Whether for aesthetic or didactic purposes, Bach chose to buttress the material in John’s Gospel with additional detail (concerning Peter’s denial and the rending of the temple veil) borrowed from Matthew.

John’s account has a much different style and agenda than Matthew’s, and whatever aesthetic or theological problems those differences create, the spirit of the Fourth Gospel is faithfully reflected in Bach’s music. John’s primary concern was establishing the kingship of Christ and the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, an orientation which Bach embraces from the outset with the choice of Psalm 8, “Herr unser Herrscher,” as a textual foundation of his opening chorus. Throughout the Passion, John’s account portrays Jesus as fully aware of his divinity, completely serene and in control of his fate, from the time of his capture through his execution. This of course deprives the narrative of the emotional tension between the human and divine sides of its central protagonist that is so poignantly developed by Matthew—and followed by Bach—showing for instance Jesus praying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me” just before his capture, or asking, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” or crying out in pain as he is dying. Also largely absent from John are incidents of Jesus’ human compassion toward his disciples or the larger world. It is noteworthy in this regard that the episodes Bach chose to borrow from Matthew are not ones which in any way mitigate this rather austere and aloof portrait, but ones which, on the contrary, reinforce it. Peter’s remorse after his denial of Jesus, for instance, is only an admission of his inadequacy in failing to stand by his Lord, while the rending of the temple veil provides a final demonstration of Christ’s divinity and power even after death.

Biblical scholars now believe that John’s Gospel was written during a period of growing conflict between the early Christian community and mainstream (pre-Rabbinic) Judaism, also a time of increasing persecution by Roman authorities; thus, his harsh portrayal of both Jews and Romans is not surprising. In the crowd scenes, John characterizes both groups as far more monolithic in their hostility toward Jesus than does Matthew. No member of the crowd comes forward to help carry his cross, nor do any Roman soldiers declare, “Truly, this was the Son of God.” Bach uses several structural and stylistic devices to express John’s severe perspective. He keeps the narrative relatively tight. The words of most secondary characters—other than Pilate and, very briefly, Peter and a maid—are not assigned to individual singers but simply recounted by the Evangelist. There is also less interruption of the narrative flow for pietistic contemplation than in St. Matthew. Solo-arias are fewer and on the whole shorter, and, except for the chorales and two large outer choruses, there are no such interruptions by the choir. This structure both intensifies the narrative by compressing it and establishes an overarching dramatic dichotomy between the noble Christ and the world that rejects him. Theserene and divine Christus, revealed largely through his interrogation by Pilate at the center of the Passion, is surrounded, literally and figuratively, by the wrath and condemnation of the mob, which Bach’s turba choruses portray in its many varieties, from the rising anger and tension expressed in the ascending chromatic line of “Wäre dieser nicht ein Übeltäter” to the soldiers’ dripping sarcasm in "Sei gegrüßet, lieber Jüdenkönig!"

It is tempting to consider St. John something of a transitional work on the road to St. Matthew. Certainly its overall structure is less operatic and Bach’s use of his resources—particularly the chorus—less elaborated than in the later Passion. But we also must bear in mind that those limitations are essentially in accord with the nature of John’s Gospel. It is perhaps equally fair to say that what Bach was aiming for and achieved in St. John was a tighter, more dramatic narrative than St. Matthew and ultimately a more mythic portrait of a king betrayed, rejected, and sacrificed by his world, yet triumphing through that sacrifice.