On May 29, 1723, four wagons bearing nearly all the earthly belongings of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) lumbered into the city of Leipzig. Less than one year later, after a whirlwind inaugural period as the new music director for the city’s largest churches, Bach would find himself preparing his most ambitious musical work to date – the St John Passion. The Good Friday service for which the Passion was being written was perhaps the most important musical event in the yearly life of the church. Bach, so new to his post, must have felt a keen burden to provide something superlative.  At last, with the completed St John Passion in hand, musicians began preparing for the event in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche(St. Thomas’ Church).

Things progressed according to plan until, just three days before the service, Bach was notified by the city council that he had gotten the location wrong: the Good Friday service, and Bach’s new music to accompany it, were in fact slated for the smaller Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas’ Church). Bach’s complaints (where would he put all the musicians? what about the terrible condition of the church’s harpsichord?) were to no avail, and the remaining rehearsals – this time in the correct location – must have been brutally stressful. Ultimately, the setback did little to dampen the work’s success, and Bach would reprise this same music (revising it each time) for Good Friday services in the city’s churches at least four additional times during his career.

Despite this success, the St John Passion has too often in our own time been overshadowed by the same composer’s St Matthew Passion, written three years later for Good Friday 1727. The blame may rest partly with members of Bach’s own family, who were known to refer to the later work as “die grosse Passion” – leading generations of listeners to regard the earlier St John Passion as little more than an impressive warm-up for “the great passion.” In reality, though, the Bach family’s moniker likely referred to nothing more than the St Matthew Passion’s length (a third longer than Saint John) and the large number of performers it requires - thus, not “the great passion,” but simply “the big passion.”

Nevertheless, comparisons between the two monumental works are inevitable. While it would be folly to deny the Matthew Passion’s calculated perfection or its structural brilliance, there is little that compares with the Saint John Passion when it comes to drama. The composer is utterly fearless in his musical portrayals of the texts he employs. Is there anything in the era’s music to compare, for example, with the Saint JohnEvangelist’s tortured melody as he recounts Peter’s guilt-ridden weeping? Or consider the work’s central movement, the tenor aria “Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbter Rücken”: “Ponder well,” the translation reads, “how his bloodstained back is like the sky, where the deluge of sins has abated there appears the most beautiful rainbow as a sign of God’s mercy!” To capture musically the dual image of Jesus’s scourge wounds as rainbows, Bach writes for the high string instruments (either violins or violas d’amore, at the ensemble’s discretion) short melodic figures of six notes – three ascending, then three descending: musical rainbows. The composer then sees to it that we hear these rainbows most clearly whenever the tenor sings and holds the word “erwäge” (“ponder”). In doing so, he asks us to ponder these sounds, these images, and the paradox that makes them simultaneously hideous and beautiful.

The profound undercurrent of opposites in Bach’s “rainbow aria” is not an isolated case; it flows through the fabric of the entire St John Passion from the very first moments of the work’s opening movement. The composer sets the stage with sinewy pairs of flutes and oboes sounding sustained dissonances, struggling to stay afloat upon a turbulent sea of wavering violins. The vocalists enter, and while their melodies mirror the agitation that engulfs them, the text they sing – a paraphrase of the eighth Psalm – is oddly affirming: “Lord, our ruler, whose glory is magnificent everywhere!” The explanation for the apparent mismatch appears in the words that follow: “Show us through your Passion that you, the true son of God, at all times, even in the most lowly state, are glorified.” Bach’s message is clear: the world is made of fear, sin, toil, and heartache, and the only thing that saves humanity from its own wretchedness is the story he is preparing to tell.

That story is, of course, Jesus’ crucifixion, and it unfolds in Bach’s passions in the form of a semi-operatic oratorio cast in two parts, each one arranged into brief “scenes” comprising three distinct types of text. First and foremost are biblical texts, taken in this case from Martin Luther’s German translation of chapters 18-19 of the Gospel according to John, and sung mostly by the tenor Evangelist. Appended to the biblical texts are poems chosen by Bach to complement the relevant scriptural message, and usually cast musically in the form of arias and recitatives. The remaining texts are well-known hymn tunes called chorales – some dating from the earliest years of the Lutheran church – through which the choir speaks on behalf of the congregation, reflecting a communal response to what has transpired.

What that “choir” actually looked like in passion and cantata performances during Bach’s time is an often-debated matter.  Were Bach’s passions and cantatas performed with several singers per part, or was it normal to use only one singer per part? Amidst the sometimes acrimonious debates between committed camps of performers and scholars, something crucial is often lost in the argument. The fact that such debates exist at all means that we can hear one performance this afternoon and perhaps a very different performance on a different day in a different place; or we can purchase ten recordings, no two of which will sound remotely similar. Can one say this, to the same degree, of Beethoven’s symphonies or of Haydn’s string quartets? Whatever else the evidence suggests, furthermore, it shows that Bach was a pragmatist. Rather than taking principled stands on issues such as how many singers to employ in a given work, he tended to adapt to the means he had at his disposal. In a sense, then, the most “authentic” performance is one that does the same thing, and how very fortunate we are that we live at a time when we can experience this work again and again – on recordings, and when we are very fortunate indeed, in person – and hear it differently every time.

Jonathan Gibson, © 2025