Holy Wednesday 2024 will bring a performance of one of the most famous works in the history of music – St Matthew’s Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is one of Bach’s two Passions that have been preserved in their entirety. Among the musicians performing the oratorio with Wrocław Baroque Orchestra, there will be Ian Bostridge – a fantastic British tenor famous since the 1990s for his interpretation of the German Lieder repertoire.
Bach composed his great work to be presented during the Good Friday service at St Thomas church in Leipzig, where he was employed as Cantor. It was intended to be divided into two parts by a sermon. Finally, the faithful heard the Passion for the first time there on Good Friday in 1727 or 1729. Soon afterwards, it was forgotten for almost a hundred years. It gained popularity only in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy presented it together with the Berliner Singakademie in Berlin. It was the first performance of the Passion outside of Leipzig.
The composition consists of twenty-four scenes. In it, Bach presents images of the Last Supper, the prayer in Gethsemane, the captururing, trial, crucifixion and burial of Jesus. The whole thing begins two days before the death of Jesus (on Wednesday), who announces his imminent passion to the disciples. The texts of the Gospels are supplemented with fragments of Protestant hymns and a poetic commentary by Picander. In terms of music, the German composer included here the entire repertoire of Baroque forms, both religious and secular. A master of musical rhetoric, Bach made perfect choices of compositional means for the content of the text he was working on. We find here both pious contemplation and excruciating emotionality, and his genius continues to fascinate. Listening to St Matthew’s Passion, without any doubt we listen to a masterpiece.