(2) Arias preceded by accompanied recitatives, using newly written texts that contain commentaries on the narrative from an 18th-century Lutheran standpoint. (3) Choruses on Biblical texts (“turbas”), containing the responses of the crowd. (4) Chorales, or Lutheran church hymns inserted as moments of communal reflection on the action. The first and third of these categories had been part of the Passion from the beginning; the second and fourth were added in the German “oratorio Passions” of the 17th and 18th centuries. The words to the arias were written by contemporaries of Bach; while in the case of St. Matthew we know who the poet was (Christian Friedrich Henrici, aka Picander), the situation is more complicated in St. John: here the identity of the librettist is unknown, although the text leans heavily on a famous Passion poem by Barthold Heinrich Brockes, set to music by both Handel and Telemann. The St. John Passion narrates the events of the last days of Jesus’s life, from his betrayal by Judas through the Crucifixion, as found in chapters 18 and 19 of John’s Gospel. In two instances, elements from Matthew were also woven into the narrative: one of these insertions occurs during the episode of Peter’s denial of Jesus, the other describes the earthquake following Jesus’s death. Bach wrote the St. John Passion in 1724, the year after he took up his duties at St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. Subsequently, he revised the work no fewer than three times. Only one year after the first version, Bach made substantial changes in the score, adding several new movements; later he cut those movements again and the last version, from 1749, the year before Bach’s death, is actually very close to the first one. Most performances today follow the modern edition prepared by Arthur Mendel and first published in 1951; this is a composite of the different versions (not all of which survive in full).
Recitatives Of the four musical categories listed above, the first is the biblical narrative presented in the recitatives. Bach’s recitative differs from Passion recitatives of earlier composers in the highly expressive nature of its melodic line. Far from being the mere imitation of speech that recitative is supposed to be according to most dictionaries, Bach’s recitatives (while scrupulously following the prosody of his text) are quite demanding musically. They have a wide vocal range, may be quite complex harmonically, and sometimes contain aria-like elements such as long melismas (groups of notes sung to the same syllable) to mark words of particular importance. The Evangelist, whose part is by far the most extensive, is much more than a mere narrator: he actively participates in the action, and the melodic inflections in his part offer a personal commentary on the events. His voice often rises to the highest register of the 19