It is the fate of only the most exceptional of masterpieces that many hundreds of years after they were written, they make the same impact on audiences as they did in their own time. This select group include the statues of Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare and Bach's Passions. Ever changing fashions and styles have not dimmed our perception of Bach's artistry, although it is true that the Passions did lapse into obscurity – at least, as far as the wider musical public was concerned – but since their rediscovery (in the historic revival by Mendelssohn of the St Mathew Passion in 1829), any performance in the world of Bach's Pasions has been a major event.
Although one of Bach's sons co-operated in assembling a catalogue of his father's life and work (the “necrology”), in which five passions are mentioned, only two have survived complete: the St John and St Mathew. The origin of the St Matthew Passion is simpler, Bach regarded it as his principal work, planning a unified work and taking particular care in the preparation of the score. The St John Passion however, has a much more involved and complicated background, which to this day has not been entirely clarified.
The precise date of the St John Passion is unclear, although since it was premiered in 1724, and it tends to be assumed that this was when it was completed. More recent researchers now date some of the arias to Bach's period in Weimar, some ten years before, which have survived in some of his cantatas, and it is possible that they were parts of an earlier, now lost passion. In those days, it was by no means uncommon for a composer to pillage his own earlier work while writing a new one. And Bach was no stranger to the practise.
It is known that the first performance of the St John Passion took placed in Leipzig on April 7th 1724, on Good Friday (the St Matthew Passion was premiered some three years later), but in the following year, it was performed again, after Bach had exchanged some numbers and made smaller alterations.
The St John Passion was performed on several occasions in Bach's lifetime, and for each one, he made many alterations. In the fourth (possibly the fifth) version, which derives from Bach's final years (between 1746 and 1749), he essentially restored the original order of movements but expanded the forces required to perform them. These days – always with occasional omissions that very from one performance to the next – it is this version which is used, since it is the one that Bach endorsed last of all.
Where the text is concerned, the St John Passion is not unified. Its guiding principal is that the Biblical text chosen by the author is used in its entirety (St James Gospel, chapters 18-19 as well as some brief extracts from St Mathew) but is broken up by freely invented verses and commentaries, as well as the occasional chorale. Tthe Biblical text is largely performed in recitative by the soloists: the evangelist (tenor) who fills the function of narrator, as well as the other participants in the story (e.g Christ) and the so-called turba choruses. The arias, ariosi and soloists depict how the narrated events affect them. The chorales formulate the common reflexes of the entire congregation. The freely invented sections are largely based on B. H. Brockes's famous passion poems (Bach was familiar with Handel's 1716 Brockes Passion), but many other authors (S. Heyden, Luther, J. Hermann, P. Gerhardt, C. H. Postel) can be identified behind the St John Passion's texts.
Text and music stand in very close relationship to each other in this work. In many places, we can observe the precise use of word painting, which is to say that Bach highlights and illustrates the texts with musical techniques. If we consider that the audience at the St Michael's Church in Leipzig not only understood, but basically knew the text by heart, we can sense how the work must have struck the listeners with elemental power.
Bach's dramatic sensitivity shows that rather than turning to fashionable and superficial operatic theatricality, he sought and found musical solutions which were profound yet simple, effective but also pictorial .
An interesting feature of the musical material is that besides its exceptional variety and flexibility, we can sense a structural skeleton to the entire work. The crowd, in the form of the chorus, uses the same material with small variations on five occasions, and thus help shape the immense construction with a kind of “leitmotif.”
The St John Passion is thus more concentrated and dramatic that the St Mathew Passion. In this score, the arias are among the most deeply moving of all the pieces. The warm, human tone of the largely fo