JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion – the so-called ‘Great Passion’ – is one of the most difficult works in the baroque repertoire to pull off. Not only is it long, it calls for an extraordinary number of performers – two full orchestras, each with its own choir and soloists. And more than that, it is HARD. JS Bach was uncompromising in his compositional approach, but even by his standards the St Matthew makes significant technical demands of players and singers alike, and these are only exacerbated by the stamina required to sustain a performance over the course of more than three hours.
Modern-instrument performances have emphasised this ‘Great’-ness, swelling string strengths to near symphonic proportions and fielding singers in the tens (if not hundreds) to fill the work’s two choirs. Audiences have come to expect to be overwhelmed by performances, from the sublimely tutta forza opening chorus – complete with ripieno treble choir sailing across the top – to the bloodthirsty melee of the crowd scenes in Part II. These large-scale effects can be powerful and deeply profound. But it is interesting to reflect on how different they must be to what Bach’s congregation would have experienced on Good Friday 1727 at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.
There, space constraints alone would have dictated rather more modest forces, perhaps only 4 or 6 violins in each orchestra, and as few as eight singers across both choirs, all ‘stepping out’ to take the solo roles. What must this have meant for the listener? Of course, there would have been greater transparency of line, throwing Bach’s unmatched gift for counterpoint into stark relief. The impact of the more ‘dramatic’ elements of Picander’s text would have been rendered rather differently as well, with less of a sense of verisimilitude than we’ve come to expect from more ‘operatic’ modern performances. But perhaps the most striking difference seems to me to be in how listeners would have engaged with the work itself in the moment of listening.
Where modern performances overwhelm, washing over audiences in wave after wave of proto-Wagnerian reverberation, Bach’s performances of the St Matthew must have drawn the listener in, not just to the performance itself but to a place of quiet contemplation. His congregation would have sat facing away from his musicians, and below the galleries where they would have performed. As such, the music must have been more internal monologue than spectacle, an opportunity for reflection more than transport.
I have become obsessed with this disconnect – between modern expectation and what I imagine must have been the true historical experience of the St Matthew – and so I was delighted when Laurence Cummings agreed to present the work this season with what might be called ‘authentic’ forces for the first time in AAM’s 50-year history. I should emphasise that this decision had little to do with what Bach’s forces actually were – we can argue endlessly over whether there were 8 or 12 or 16 singers in Bach’s choir, the merits and demerits of historical string strengths in modern concert halls etc. But we were interested in what we wanted the experience of our performance to be. After all, being ‘authentic’ or ‘correct’ is meaningless if it doesn’t lead to creative opportunity, to engaging with old music in fundamentally new ways.
For me, and for many in the Barbican Hall on Good Friday, AAM’s ‘authentic’ St Matthew Passion was a revelation, a communal meditation of sorts, in no way resembling the work I thought I knew. Was it to everyone’s taste? Certainly not. And even I grant the value of the ‘traditional’ approach in terms of sheer directness and impact. But I am confident that all present nevertheless valued the opportunity to engage with the work in a different way, to question their underlying assumptions of it, and to lean in and not back. That, for me, is what ‘Great’ historical performance is all about.
