 The transfer of the St. Matthew Passion out of the Good Friday liturgy into the concert hall (first in 1829 in Berlin under Felix Mendelssohn) was just the start of its adaptation to the modern world. One familiar element today was not part of the work’s original presentation in 1727: Many English-speaking listeners today choose to follow a recording or performance from a printed translation. The result in some ways resembles the experience of a listener in the eighteenth century but in some respects has the potential to change the focus of our listening. The relatively well-to-do segment of Leipzig society that attended services in the St. Thomas and St. Nicholas Churches could purchase printed librettos of the vocal-instrumental works performed there. A few printed texts of weekly cantatas survive, and passion librettos were also presumably available, as they were in other German cities. Until just a few years ago nobody had ever seen such a document from Bach’s Leipzig. We did have reprinted librettos for the St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 and the St. Mark Passion BWV 247 that appeared in retrospective anthologies of poetry by the works’ librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici (“Picander”). These are literary presentations, not liturgical documents, but there is a good chance that they looked very much like the original librettos. The anthologized text of the St. Mark Passion offers the complete gospel narrative along with the chorale stanzas and new poems the librettist interpolated. Though Bach’s musical setting of this libretto unfortunately does not survive, the text shows that compared to the St. Matthew and St. John Passions this work contained fewer arias based on new poetry (only six, plus the opening and closing choral arias, with no orchestrally-accompanied recitatives), and proportionally more chorale stanzas. The emphasis in this libretto was on the placement and significance of a smaller number of interpolations, most of them chorales, rather than on poetic elaboration. The discovery a few years ago of an original libretto for the St. Mark Passion from 1744, which looks exactly like the reprint, confirmed that Leipzig listeners saw the text in this layout, with the complete gospel narrative along with the interpolated commentaries. The libretto of the St. Matthew Passion is constructed somewhat differently. Of course it, too, is built around a gospel narrative, but also contains numerous short lyric poems meant to be set as solo arias. Many of those are paired with longer poems in blank verse intended to be set as orchestrally-accompanied solo recitatives, for example the accompagnato “Er hat uns allen wohl getan” that precedes the aria “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben.” Some of the new poems are cast as dialogues between two allegorical figures, Daughter Zion and a Believing Soul, whereas others are in anonymous voices. Overall the new poetic movements are more numerous, weightier and more complex, and play a much larger role in the libretto than in the St. Mark Passion, where chorales dominate. (Bach’s St. John Passion BWV 245 falls somewhere in between, with a closer balance of chorales and new poetry.) We do not have an original printed libretto of the St. Matthew Passion but do have that anthologized reprint, and the presentation there reflects a different emphasis in the text and its musical setting compared to the St. Mark Passion. The print omits the gospel narrative, giving only the newly-written poems that Bach set as solo arias, duets, and framing ensemble arias for chorus. In this presentation of the text, brief cues introduce each piece of new poetry and point the reader to the moments in the passion narrative upon which it comments. For example, the aria “Erbarme dich” is labeled “When Peter cries.” Nor are the chorales mentioned, not even by the first lines of the chosen stanzas, a common shorthand in eighteenth-century librettos. The only exception is the verse of “O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig” that is part of the design of the opening movement. This partial presentation of the text, omitting the gospel and the chorales, focuses the attention of the reader and listener decisively on the new poetry and on two responses to it almost certainly intended by poet and composer: contemplation and emotional engagement. The contemplative element lies in the poet’s aim of encouraging reflection on the meaning of the passion story for the contemporary believer; many of the new texts are in the first person (I, me, mine, we, us, our) and can be read as drawing the listener into the narrative. In fact reflection on the passion narrative was at the head of Luther’s guidance for the believer’s encounter with the story. This is why so some poetic texts interpolated into passion settings begin with commands like “betrachte,” “erwäge,” or “besinne dich,” words that all mean “consider” and urge reflection; or (like the opening movement of the St. Matthew Passion) instructions to “come” and “see.” The emotional element starts with the expressive poetic language of the new texts but lies particularly in Bach’s musical settings of them as accompanied recitatives and arias. These types were borrowings from 18th-century opera; they appeared there at moments when the plot was interrupted for expressions of characters’ emotional states, and sought to move the affections (that is, change the emotional state) of the listener. Some types were conventional and find exact parallels in the passion, like the rage aria “Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder” or the lament “Erbarme dich,” designed to provoke specific responses. On the other hand, most of Bach’s musical setting of the gospel words, however vivid, is more concerned with the delivery of the story than with its interpretation and expression. (Some of the choral numbers that set the words of groups do go further; this has been a particular point of contention in modern debates about potentially problematic sentiments in passion settings, some of which are expressed in vehement and affective ways in choruses.) Like the narrative, the chorale stanzas were familiar, and most of Bach’s settings are musically relatively neutral, aiming to present the established tunes and their words in a straightforward way. Overall, the settings of most of the gospel narrative and of the chorales probably did not strike contemporary listeners as particularly moving by their musical design, and these pieces were relatively generic from passion setting to passion setting. The new poetic texts set as arias and recitatives, in contrast, were distinguishing features of individual passion settings. They encouraged the contemplation of the significance of the story to the modern believer, and used conventional musical tools to produce personal and emotional responses. We cannot be certain how Bach and Picander’s listeners approached the St. Matthew Passion, but the construction of the text and music strongly suggest that the recitative and aria settings of poetry were the focus of the listening experience. The narrative was infinitely familiar, as were most of the hymn stanzas; the poetry and its affective musical settings were new. It is thus possible that the anthologized text of the St. Matthew Passion—the one that offers just the new poetry of recitatives and arias—represented not only a space-saving way to reprint the libretto but also an early eighteenth-century mode of listening, one that focused on the theological and affective import of the moments at which the narrative broke off for commentary. That is, it points to a particular reflective way of experiencing the passion. What about listeners today, translation in lap? Given the international spread of today’s listeners, many are unlikely to understand the sung German text, so a translated version certainly helps bridge a gap. It should be said, though, that we do not know how well Bach’s listeners would have made out the sung words of new poetry; the acoustics of Bach’s churches combined with the complexity of the musical settings probably made a printed text helpful even to native speakers. In this regard, having a text in a present-day pe
|
Catalogue 
