Hearing Bach's Passions

by Daniel R. Melamed

Johann Sebastian Bach's two surviving passions-- St. John and St. Matthew --are an essential part of the modern repertory, performed regularly both by professional ensembles and amateur groups. These large, complex pieces are well loved, but due to our distance from the original context in which they were performed, questions and problems emerge. Bach scholar Daniel Melamed examines the issues we encounter when we hear the passions performed today, and offers unique insight into Bach's passion settings.
Rather than providing a movement-by-movement analysis, Melamed uses the Bach repertory to introduce readers to some of the intriguing issues in the study and performance of older music, and explores what it means to listen to this music today. For instance, Bach wrote the passions for a particular liturgical event at a specific time and place; we hear them hundreds of years later, often a world away and usually in concert performances. They were performed with vocal and instrumental forces deployed according to early 18th-century conceptions; we usually hear them now as the pinnacle of the choral/orchestral repertory, adapted to modern forces and conventions. In Bach's time, passion settings were revised, altered, and tampered with both by their composers and by other musicians who used them; today we tend to regard them as having fixed texts to be treated mith respect. Their music was sometimes recycled from other compositions or reused itself for other purposes; we have trouble imagining the familiar material of Bach's passion settings in any other guise.
Melamed takes on these issues, exploring everything from the sources that transmit Bach's passion settings today to the issues surrounding performance practice (including the question of the size of Bach's ensemble). He delves into the passions as dramatic music, examines the problem of multiple versions of a work and the reconstruction of lost pieces, explores the other passions in Bach's performing repertory, and sifts through the puzzle of authorship.
Highly accessible to the non-specialist, the book assumes no technical musical knowledge and does not rely on printed musical examples. Based on the most recent scholarship and using lucid prose, the book opens up the debates surrounding this repertory to music lovers, choral singers, church musicians, and students of Bach's music.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a careful and highly detailed examination of the surviving manuscript sources for Bach's passions. These sources are parts copied by Bach himself for performances he led of St. John and St. Matthew passions. The author also discusses the arguments for and against attribution (in whole or in part) of the St. Luke and St. Mark Passions, rejecting Bach's authorship for both.

Since Felix Mendelsohn's performances of the St. Matthew Passion in the early 19th century, the principle model for performance of the Passions has been with full orchestra, large divided choruses, and separate soloists. This view was first challenged in the 1980s by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded the Bach B-Minor Mass with one voice to a part. His essay, "Bach's Chorus", appears in Andrew Parrot's 2002 book, "The Essential Bach Choir", which was a landmark in scholarship around authentic performance of Bach vocal works. Melamed is the latest to document what is known about Bach's actual realizations of his Passions.

Using the manuscript sources, Melamed describes the basic model: a baroque concerto, or better, concerto grosso structure, that puts the soloist or soloists (concertists) in relation to the ripienists who support the work and answer the musical statements of the soloists. In the Passions, the concertists form Chorus 1 and perform all the solos in addition to all the choral parts, and the ripienists perform only the choral parts. This approach is perfectly realized in a recent recording of the St. Matthew Passion performed by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort, and in a new recording of the St. John Passion with John Butt and the Dunedin Consort.

There is much detailed discussion of the sources, and also of the tradition of musical settings of the passion, but the greatest value in this book will be for readers familiar with the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, who wish to learn more about how these works were originally performed.

[Taylor Swift Scholar · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a title like "Hearing Bach's Passions" I was expecting more analysis of the music and the text itself. The focus is really on performance practice. I learned so much, but it was a bit repetitive.