7.00pm Thursday 3 April Royal Festival Hall
ST
MATTHEW PASSION T
hey say that timing is everything, and while it can’t explain the almost miraculous beauty of JS Bach’s Passions, it did at least help them into existence. Passion stories follow the Gospel accounts of Christ’s arrest and execution. Musical Passion plays evolved in the 15th and 16th centuries; in the Lutheran tradition, Martin Luther’s friend Johannes Walter helped develop the evangelical Passion style, of which Heinrich Schütz wrote three fine examples. The ‘oratorio Passion’ emerged in 17th-century north Germany, the Passion narrative decorated with arias, chorales and instrumental accompaniment. And, just
in time, this practice was accepted in conservative Leipzig by around 1721. Bach reported for duty in Leipzig in 1723, by which time the practice of musical Good Friday services was just established enough to be accepted, and just new enough to be malleable.
Bach modelled his Passions on earlier precedents, but created in the process something new and extraordinary – even paradoxical, fearlessly plunging us into the darkness of human suffering, yet in so doing lighting the way towards the divine. BY JOANNA WYLD