J.S. Bach: St John Passion

Summary

(Numbers in brackets refer to corresponding numbers in the discography)

The history of the St John Passion is more complex than that of Bach's other surviving setting of the Passion story, the St Matthew Passion (qv). First performed in 1724, three years before the first version of the Matthew, this direct and deceptively ‘simple’ oratorio was subjected to a revision the following year that resulted in the substitution of new choruses for the opening and concluding ones, and the insertion of three alternate arias in the body of the work. All of the music for this first revision survives.

In the early 1730s, Bach returned, in essence, to the 1724 sequence, but with a few modifications. In the intervening years, the ‘new’ opening chorus, ‘O Mensch, bewein’ dein Sünde gross', became the concluding chorus of Part One of the St Matthew Passion, and thus was no longer available for use in the St John. Furthermore, ecclesiastical authorities in Leipzig had evidently objected to Bach's insertion of two intensely dramatic sequences from the Gospel according to St Matthew into the St John Passion (hereinafter SJP), and he removed them. Bach provided no replacement for the first of these excised interpolations, the passage describing Peter's remorse at his denial of Christ; but for the second, the earthquake episode after the Crucifixion, he substituted an instrumental sinfonia that has not come down to us. The aria that he wrote to replace ‘Ach mein Sinn’ in this third form of the SJP has also not been preserved. Finally, this third version did not have the chorale that follows the concluding chorus in the first version.