{"id":13982,"date":"2022-04-06T17:14:28","date_gmt":"2022-04-06T15:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/?p=164520"},"modified":"2022-04-06T17:35:13","modified_gmt":"2022-04-06T15:35:13","slug":"how-mendelssohn-helped-bring-bachs-st-matthew-passion-back-to-life","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/how-mendelssohn-helped-bring-bachs-st-matthew-passion-back-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"How Mendelssohn helped bring Bach\u2019s St Matthew Passion back to life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Terry Blain\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Wednesday, 06 April 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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H<\/span>ard as it is to imagine, there was a time when JS Bach<\/a>\u2019s St Matthew Passion<\/i><\/a> was virtually unknown outside\u00a0Leipzig, where it was first performed in\u00a01727. Sporadic performances continued at the city\u2019s Thomaskirche, where Bach had been music director, after his death in 1750. But the broader world knew nothing of what we nowadays view as one of the supreme choral pieces.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Until, that is, a precocious youth named Felix Mendelssohn<\/a><\/strong> was given a copy of the St Matthew Passion <\/i>by his grandmother nearly 100 years later. Mendelssohn was 15 at the time (1824), and already the composer of 12 dashing String Symphonies. But his encounter with the Matthew Passion<\/i>, one biographer wrote, was \u2018revelatory\u2019, and became \u2018a cornerstone of his musical faith\u2019. Could he get a performance of this long-unheard masterwork organised?<\/span><\/p>\n

Mendelssohn\u2019s initial thought was that he couldn\u2019t. Bach\u2019s Passion<\/i> was too long \u2013 three hours \u2013 and unfamiliar to most audience members and musicians. These were formidable barriers to putting a concert performance together, and Mendelssohn \u2018utterly disbelieved it could be done\u2019. Instead, he jestingly offered to \u2018give a public performance on a rattle and penny-trumpet\u2019, which fortunately never happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mendelssohn did, though, participate in sing-throughs of the Passion<\/i> at home with friends, and this stoked his enthusiasm further. \u2018No living man but you can conduct its performance,\u2019 the baritone Eduard Devrient told him, and Mendelssohn was gradually won over. With Devrient, he approached his teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter, conductor of a Berlin choir both Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny sang in.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zelter had wanted to mount the Matthew Passion<\/i> himself, but never managed it. Would he support a project hatched by a teenager with limited conducting experience and a singer in his twenties? To begin with, he was unimpressed with their plans for a performance. \u2018Do you think that a couple of young donkeys like you will be able to accomplish it?\u2019, he fulminated. But he eventually relented, agreeing to lend them his Singakademie choir and its concert hall. <\/span><\/p>\n

The version of the St Matthew Passion<\/i> heard by a capacity audience on 11 March 1829 was, however, very different to the one we know today. No doubt worried about over-taxing the audience\u2019s attention span, Mendelssohn cut ten arias and six chorales, halving the work\u2019s duration. The 158-strong choir was far bigger than Bach would have used, and Mendelssohn conducted from a piano, not the harpsichord of Bach\u2019s era.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of this mattered to an enthralled capacity audience, which included luminaries such as the Prussian King, the poet Heine and the philosopher Hegel. The choir, Fanny Mendelssohn<\/a><\/strong> recorded, sang \u2018with a fire, a striking power and also with a touching delicacy and softness the like of which I have never heard\u2019. Her brother Felix, now aged 20, had achieved \u2018a perfect success\u2019, she added.<\/span><\/p>\n

His success resounded. The 1,000-plus applicants who missed out on tickets for the 11 March concert clamoured for a repeat performance. This happened ten days later, on Bach\u2019s birthday (21 March), and on Good Friday (17 April) Zelter\u2019s long-time ambition to conduct the St Matthew Passion<\/i> was finally realised, when he led a third performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mendelssohn\u2019s devotion to Bach continued for the remaining 18 years of his life, and he conducted the St\u00a0Matthew Passion<\/i> again in 1841 at Bach\u2019s Thomaskirche in Leipzig, restoring some of the cuts he\u2019d made 12 years previously. By then, though, the die was well and truly cast: the revival of interest in Bach\u2019s major choral works, catalysed by the 1829 revival of the St\u00a0Matthew Passion<\/i>, had become irreversible.<\/span><\/p>\n

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