JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: A LIFE IN MUSIC

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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was born into one of Europe’s most remarkable musical families. Generations of Bachs had worked as organists, town musicians and church musicians across central Germany, and music surrounded him from childhood. He was orphaned by the age of ten and went to live with his elder brother Johann Christoph, an organist who helped continue his musical education. As a teenager Bach sang in school choirs, studied organ and absorbed the rich traditions of German church music. He was also intensely curious about the music of others, travelling, copying scores and learning from composers whose styles he admired.

His early career took him through Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar and Köthen. He became known as a formidable organist, a brilliant improviser and an exacting musician with very high standards. At Weimar he developed as a composer of organ and church music; at Köthen, where his duties were largely secular, he produced some of his best-known instrumental works. His personal life was marked by both devotion and loss. His first wife, Maria Barbara, died suddenly in 1720. The following year he married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a professional singer. Between his two marriages Bach fathered twenty children, though only ten survived to adulthood. Several became important musicians in their own right.

In 1723 Bach moved to Leipzig to become Thomaskantor, responsible for music at the city’s principal churches and for the musical education of the boys at St Thomas School. The position was prestigious but demanding. He had to train singers and instrumentalists, teach, rehearse, organise music for several churches and provide new works for the liturgical calendar. In his first years in Leipzig he composed sacred music at an astonishing pace, including weekly cantatas and the great Passions. The ST MATTHEW PASSION belongs to this extraordinary period of creative intensity.

THE WORLD OF THE ST MATTHEW PASSION

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The work was first performed in Leipzig on Good Friday, 11 April 1727. In Bach’s Lutheran world, the Passion story was not presented as concert entertainment. It formed part of the Good Friday Vespers service, with the two parts of the Passion placed around the sermon. The congregation already knew the Gospel story intimately. Bach’s task was therefore not simply to tell them what happened, but to make them encounter it afresh: to hear the words, feel their weight, recognise themselves in the story and reflect on its meaning.

The biblical narrative comes principally from chapters 26 and 27 of St Matthew’s Gospel. Around it, Bach and his librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici, known as Picander, placed poetry for arias and reflective movements, while familiar Lutheran chorales gave the congregation a musical and spiritual point of connection. Bach’s surviving fair copy shows how highly he valued the work: he prepared it with exceptional care, even using red ink to distinguish biblical words and chorale melodies. The result is monumental in scale, yet profoundly intimate. It moves continually between public drama and private reflection, between the historical events of the Passion and the listener’s own emotional response.

Bach spent the final twenty-seven years of his life in Leipzig. Although later generations temporarily regarded some of his music as old-fashioned, his reputation as a master never disappeared among musicians. Since the nineteenth-century revival of the ST MATTHEW PASSION, his music has become central to the classical repertoire. Its extraordinary combination of architecture, emotion, theology and human insight is one reason Bach remains, for many, one of the most profound musical minds who ever lived.

HOW BACH TELLS THE PASSION STORY

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The ST MATTHEW PASSION works on several levels at once. The Evangelist, sung by a tenor, is the narrator: he carries the Gospel story forward with remarkable urgency and flexibility. Jesus is given to a bass voice, often surrounded by sustained string sonorities that create a distinctive musical halo. Other characters step briefly out of the narrative, while the choir becomes disciples, priests, soldiers and crowds. At other moments the choir sings chorales, representing a reflective community looking back on the events. The solo arias suspend the action altogether, allowing time for grief, compassion, fear, devotion and self-examination.

Bach divides his forces into two choirs and two orchestras. They can answer one another, overlap, question, accuse, comfort or combine into a single overwhelming body of sound. The continuo players provide the harmonic foundation beneath much of the work, while individual instruments become expressive partners to the singers. Oboes can ache, flutes can seem to hover, strings can tremble or console, and a solo violin can turn a single aria into something almost unbearably personal. Bach does not merely accompany words. He makes the orchestra interpret them.

PART ONE: FROM PROPHECY TO ARREST

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Part One begins before the Gospel narrative itself. In the great opening chorus, one choir calls the listener to witness Christ’s suffering while the other questions and responds. Above them, a chorale melody invokes the Lamb of God. From the outset Bach places several perspectives in the room at once: narrator, believer, observer and mourner. The Passion then unfolds through the plotting of the authorities, the anointing at Bethany, Judas’s betrayal, the preparation of the Passover and the Last Supper.

The pattern is crucial. The Evangelist tells us what happens; characters speak within the story; the choir suddenly becomes the crowd; then time seems to stop for an aria or chorale. These reflective movements allow us to step inside the emotional meaning of the action. An alto grieves over sin, a soprano responds to betrayal and loss, and the chorales repeatedly turn the ancient story toward the present listener. At the Mount of Olives, Peter promises loyalty, Jesus enters Gethsemane and the music becomes increasingly inward. In the tenor aria “I would beside my Lord be watching”, the singer’s desire to remain faithful is answered by the choir, binding private devotion to communal response.

The arrest brings Bach’s dramatic imagination to full intensity. The soprano and alto lament that Jesus has been taken while the chorus erupts around them. Tenderness and violence occupy the same musical space. Part One closes not with action but with contemplation: the great chorale “O man, thy grievous sin bemoan” draws the first half into a broad meditation on the meaning of what has begun.

PART TWO: TRIAL, CRUCIFIXION AND BURIAL

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Part Two begins in the court of Caiaphas and moves steadily toward the Cross. The atmosphere becomes harsher. False witnesses accuse Jesus, crowds condemn him and Peter denies him. Yet Bach repeatedly interrupts the public brutality with music of extraordinary intimacy. After Peter’s denial, the alto aria “Have Mercy, Lord” is accompanied by a solo violin whose long, pleading line seems to speak beyond words. It is one of Bach’s most remarkable examples of an instrument becoming a second emotional voice.

The story proceeds through Judas’s despair, the hearing before Pilate, the choice of Barabbas, the call for crucifixion, the scourging, the crowning with thorns and the journey to Golgotha. The two choirs can become a terrifying crowd, yet Bach never allows the work to become simple spectacle. Chorales repeatedly draw us away from blame and toward reflection. The listener is asked not merely to watch the drama but to recognise human weakness, fear, betrayal and compassion within it.

At the Crucifixion, the musical world gradually empties. Jesus’s final words are followed by a chorale of extraordinary stillness. After his death, the narrative turns toward burial and farewell. The bass aria “Make thee clean, my heart” transforms grief into an inward act of preparation. In the final movements, solo voices and choir gather around the body of Christ, each offering a last farewell. The closing chorus does not end in triumph. It settles into sorrowful rest, with the repeated invitation to “sleep in peace”. Bach leaves the listener at the tomb, not with a theatrical conclusion, but with space for silence, grief and reflection.

That is part of the work’s genius. Bach makes theology dramatic without making it superficial, and makes drama devotional without losing its humanity. The Gospel text tells the story; the Evangelist propels it; the characters inhabit it; the choirs surround it; the chorales reflect upon it; the arias open its emotional interior; and the orchestras give colour, movement and meaning to almost every word. Across nearly three centuries, the ST MATTHEW PASSION continues to feel immediate because Bach asks us not simply to hear what happened, but to enter the story.

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