When his St Matthew Passion was performed for the first time, influential members of the congregation became steadily more bewildered by the way that the music branched out from the chorales that they knew, and one elderly widow cried, ‘God help us! ‘tis surely an opera-comedy!’47 In one sense, she was right: Bach had poured his choral creativity into his cantatas and, mysteriously, was the only major composer of his time never to write an opera.
