The Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is a joyous occasion for all music lovers in Israel and for those who identify with the ideas of historically-informed performance all the more.
On the one hand, the intricacy of the scoring; the variety of timbre; the prominence of rhetorical eloquence – all these make the historically-informed approach to the piece much more than a luxury. More than in any of Bach’s keyboard solos or even his church cantata, it is so easy to twist this particular score and to render it incomprehensible. This always reminds me of Otto Klemperer’s slow tempo ([dotted quarter note = 30) in the opening chorus ‘Kommt, ihr Tochter, helft mir klagen.’ Klemperer’s music is inspired, no doubt, but it sounds like Wagner. It is devoid of rhetoric, it is nothing like the elaborate Holy-Week sermon it was supposed to be...
On the other hand, those who are sensitive to historically-informed considerations cannot overlook the colossal challenges posed by the work even for the historically informed, the challenges posed by the act of pulling the work out of its original, liturgical, context and framing it in a new, 21st-century, context: in the concert hall, as a canonized piece of early music. Perhaps I was unfair to Klemperer a few seconds ago: can any piece of music, played to a ticket-buying audience, work as an elaborate Holy-Week sermon?
Some of the problems become even more difficult when we transpose the piece from the chill of North-West Saxony to the Mediterranean spring-like weather of Jerusalem or, even worse, Tel-Aviv; from Easter season to Passover; from an eighteenth-century audience for whom Gethsemane is something distant and mysterious, to a twenty-first-century audience for whom Gethsemane is but a bus ride away; and above all – from an audience who identifies immediately with those passages in the Passion text cast in first person plural to an audience descendent of the most hated characters in the story. Even if one acknowledges the universal message of the passion of Christ, some may identify more strongly than others with sentences like
To the dead he granted life and thereby laid aside all affliction until the time prescribed that he would be sacrificed for us, carrying our sins’ heavy burden even unto the cross.
And even if very few would identify with the sentence ‘Laß ihn kreuzigen!’ (‘Have him crucified’), these lines are put in the mouths of the Jews and it is sometimes hard for Jews in the audience, or within the ranks of the performers, to ignore that simple fact. Indeed, a choir made up mainly of Jews singing ‘Laß ihn kreuzigen!’ is, strictly speaking, more “authentic” than Bach’s original choir could ever be.
Asked in that way, these questions are perhaps amusing, but they indicate the many trap doors and loopholes in the interpretation of this complicated masterpiece. We thought it necessary, then, to invite a panel of five leading experts and ask each of them to highlight an aspect of the correlation between the Passion and its possible performance contexts.
Since, for my part, I am no Bach expert, I wish to open this symposium with a few remarks on the first time in which Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was pulled out of its context. The historical event I refer to is celebrated in an exhibition hosted by the orchestra and the festival – an exhibition of the original parts of the St. Matthew Passion used by Mendelssohn and the Singakademie in 1829. With Bach as sole exception, Mendelssohn is the historical figure most identified with the Passion, thanks to that revival of the piece in 1829. Mendelssohn’s performance is considered by many to be the cornerstone of the Early Music Revival, but it was also a moment of crisis – never before had a Bach piece so ruthlessly pulled out of its liturgical context, never before had a Bach piece been subject to such extensive modification and revision, however talented and able a composer Mendelssohn was ...
Mendelssohn left behind him hundreds of letters but, unfortunately, very few of them refer directly to the performance of the St. Matthew Passion, or to the set of artistic beliefs behind its revival. What I attempt in an article, to be published next month in the periodical Zmanim (in Hebrew), is to analyse the letters written by Mendelssohn’s about a year and a half after the performance, during his Italian trip of winter 1830 to 31. By doing so, I seek to learn about that great composer’s proto-historically-informed mindset. The issue of contextual shift plays a significant role in that study, and in the five remaining minutes I will just give a short summary of the subject in order to begin the discussion.
Mendelssohn’s continuous correspondence with his family and his teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, during that trip, gives a vivid picture of his intellectual life in a significant period of discovery. According to these letters, Mendelssohn found that Italy had little to offer him as an active composer but, as an intellectual (in the broader sense), the art and history he encountered became an essential source of inspiration for him. The most significant musical event for him, judging by the breadth of his description of it, was the celebration of Holy Week in Rome. Already at this stage, it is important to note that that significant event was not a concert, nor a rehearsal, nor a recital, nor an occasional improvisation – it was an ecclesiastical service, and it therefore evoked feelings on a spectrum far wider than that of purely-musical enthusiasm.
Mendelssohn’s criticism of contemporary Italian culture embraces all fields: the singing of the gondolieri, the uninspired painting, bad taste in architecture, gardening and, of course, the quality of local orchestras as well as local musicians’ ignorance of Mozart and Beethoven. In his first letter from Rome, Mendelssohn tells of his meeting with Fortunato Santini, an avid collector of early music. During November and December 1830, the social events attended by Mendelssohn in Rome gradually became centred around music. On one occasion, he played to a group, consisting mostly of Germans, some Bach and was happy to tell his audience of his performance of the Passion. Meeting the members of the Papal choir in the house of the scholar and diplomat Bunsen, he heard the choir singing some Palestrina outside the liturgical context. When challenged to demonstrate his abilities, Mendelssohn – although he surely could have done so – decided not to overwhelm his audience with a brilliant virtuoso piano piece, but rather to receive a subject from the choir director Astolfi and improvise a stile antico fugue. Members of the Papal choir soon began to call him l'insuperabile professorone, much to his pride ... However, during the month of December, the Papal choir had little time to attend social meetings at Bunsen’s. The pope died and they had to sing for days until the installation of a successor. Mendelssohn wrote to Zelter that he intends not to miss even a single Requiem. He was captivated by Palestrina’s music, by the choir’s unique style of singing, and in his apartment on the Piazza di Spagna, he had portraits of Palestrina and Allegri.
Not every composer visiting Rome at the time shared Mendelssohn’s enthusiasm. Berlioz, who arrived at the city two months later, in order to dedicate himself to composition after winning the 1829 Prix de Rome, was all about modern art. The relationship between Mendelssohn and Berlioz was multifaceted. They spent considerable time together, agreed that the Italians know too little Mozart and Beethoven but otherwise disagreed on all matters professional. Berlioz attests that for a foreign musician, quote, ‘nothing can be sadder than to have to live [in Rome]’ unquote. Mendelssohn, on the other hand, ignores modern music entirely but remains enchanted from the rich tradition of centuries past, as reflected in the work of the papal choir. Mendelssohn gives an objective report on the size of the papal choir (thirty-two when in full capacity); Berlioz reports the same but he also looks down on the modest size of the choir, making the comparison with the ninety-singers choir in the Paris conservatoire.
And now we get to the issue of context: let us examine the two composers’ response to Palestrina’s Improperia, the responsorial reproaches sung on Good Friday. Mendelssohn claims that it is the one item that was closest to perfection in the entire ceremony. Berlioz, on the contrary, quotes an excerpt from the improperia as some sort of proof that Palestrina does not deserve the title “genius”. This disagreement is far more than a matter of taste. Berlioz tried to measure everything according to a fixed benchmark of genius. Mendelssohn acknowledged the fact that context changes the entire experience of the piece. A few months before, when visiting the Trinita de' Monti, he heard the singing of the French nuns and wrote:
I declare to heaven that I am become quite tolerant, and listen to bad music with edification; but what can I do? The composition is positively ridiculous; the organ playing even more absurd. But it is twilight, and the whole of the small bright church is filled with persons kneeling, lit up by the sinking sun each time that the door is opened.
A very similar sentiment is expressed in relation to the Requiem masses for the late pope, when, according to Mendelssohn, the choir did not sing so well, the works were poor, the audience – not devout enough, and yet, he claims, the general effect was heavenly!
Mendelssohn’s sensitivity to context may actually originate in his teacher, Zelter. Two years before the trip, when Eduard Devrient and Mendelssohn first came to Zelter in order to request his permission to perform the Passion, Zelter’s arguments against the venture sounded like the most hard-headed orthodox authenticity argumentation. The exact wording of Devrient’s description is telling:
Then Zelter started listing the challenges and problems posed by the piece; that for these choruses [(or choirs?)] one needs a Thomasschule – and one so constituted as it was when Sebastian Bach was its cantor. [I thank Joshua Rifkin for his kind help in the translation and the interpretation of this paragraph.]
What did Zelter, quoted by Devrient, mean when he said that ‘one needs a Thomasschule’? ‘Man brauche für diese Chöre eine Thomasschule, und eine, wie sie damals beschaffen gewesen, als Sebastian Bach ihr Cantor war.' He could have referred to differences between, on the one hand, a boys-and-men choir and, on the other hand, a mixed choir; he could have referred to the unique and thorough musical background of the singers of the Thomasschule; he could have simply tried to say, albeit poetically, that the piece cannot be performed in any context other than the original one—rationally, his condition, of having a choir of a kind that no longer exists, cannot be fulfilled. The next sentence is probably even more surprising: Zelter is quoted saying ‘das die Violinspieler von heutzutage diese musik gar nicht mehr zu tractiren verstaenden.’ ‘that the violinists nowadays do not understand how to perform this music anymore’. Zelter, born in 1758, whose lifetime overlapped for three whole decades with Carl Philip Emanuel, identifies an irrecoverable break in the instrumental tradition. Zelter knew full well that string playing technique had improved (and I do not use the verb ‘improve’ that often when talking about music history but in this case I allow myself) – violin technique did improve during the hundred years that followed Bach’s original performance of the passion. Violinists’ understanding of style, however, did not improve.
As these are just the opening remarks, I shall have to leave it here and not elaborate on other issues that arise from Mendelssohn’s remarks regarding the vocal forces of the papal choir, their voice production, their improvised ornamentation, their improvised counterpoint and, perhaps most fascinating, the way he tacitly accepts the non-Romantic mixture of old music and new-music-deliberately-composed-in-older-style.