It’s hard to imagine the Easter season without Bach’s Passions. Ton Koopman, one of our era’s leading Bach interpreters, conducts the “St. John Passion” on 14 April. Why is this masterwork still overshadowed by the more monumental “St. Matthew Passion”?

Part of the answer can be found if we go back to March 1829 in Berlin, where the young Felix Mendelssohn led a performance of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” at the Singakademie. Memorable in itself, this event had a powerful relevance for music history. For a long time Bach’s great vocal works had been known only to a small circle of admirers and were performed only as excerpts, mostly in private contexts. That picture changed with a stroke thanks to Mendelssohn’s fresh discovery of the “St. Matthew Passion,” which inaugurated a renaissance of enthusiasm for Bach’s church music. It became part of public musical life and was introduced into the concert hall, gaining status as an independent work of art. If nothing else, the spectacular Berlin performance – today we would call it a grand “event” – can largely be credited with ensuring the “St. Matthew Passion” special prominence in the public mind as musical education became more widespread.  But this very prominence is precisely what allowed the unique qualities of its older companion work, the “St. John Passion,” to be overlooked. 

First performed on Good Friday in 1724 at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, the “St. John Passion” is clearly linked to the historical prototype of Passion narratives. The “St. Matthew Passion” incorporates countless arias and chorales alongside biblical texts to promote reflection and a sense of sympathy with the sacred events that are unfolding. In contrast, the “St. John Passion” focuses on Jesus’ Passion story as reported by the Evangelist: the musical progress is structured around a series of agitated choruses (the so-called “turba” choruses). These represent scenes with the angry crowd and intensify the theatrical effect into something that almost seems to be happening onstage – for example in the gripping court scenes with Pontius Pilate.

Referring to the work’s compelling drama, Robert Schumann remarked that the “St. John Passion” seemed to him “much bolder, much more powerful and poetic than the ‘St. Matthew Passion,’” which “is not free of diffuseness but rather seems exceedingly long. In contrast, the [‘St. John Passion’]: how compact, how thoroughly a work of genius, especially in the choruses, and what art!” By no means do you have to share Schumann’s reservations about the “St. Matthew Passion” in order to agree with his enthusiasm for the highly distinctive dramatic style of the earlier work. It’s hard, indeed, to imagine Easter without the “St. John Passion.”