In the midst of the inevitable disputes over the most important achievement in Johann Sebastian Bach’s oeuvre, the St Matthew Passion keeps cropping up. As English musician and scholar John Butt has noted, it is curious that a masterpiece whose emotional charge reaches the limit of human endurance was written in a secondary German centre as Leipzig was in the eighteenth century. Not all those attending the Good Friday Lutheran services during which the Passions were performed in the Saxon city necessarily appreciated the massive scale of Bach’s work, together with its subtle drama. Today’s reception of the Passion would probably infuriate both the Leipzig townspeople and the composer himself. It is difficult to count all its contemporary performances and recordings, let alone the attempts at scientific interpretations of the symbols hidden on various levels of the score. Numerous statements from present-day listeners echo the conviction of the timelessness of the arias, recitatives and choruses from the St Matthew Passion, which, as it turns out, appeal not only to believers, since Bach employed almost every available means of sound painting to tell a profoundly human story about the fragility of life, love, betrayal, violence and loss.
