![]() Bringing them together can help us to define Bach’s own highly original expressive structure.Ĥ In the 1989 booklet, the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff sets out the constructional scheme of the libretto of Christian Friedrich Henrici (named Picander) for Bach’s St Matthew Passion. For instance, the booklet (1989) that accompanies the 1988 Archiv recording, offers two competing dispositional schemes. Relevant observations and interpretations have found their way into accompanying material for recordings of the Passion. The profound effect of the Passion is rightly attributed to the powerful alternation between chorales, recitatives and arias, on the one hand, and the biblical narrative, declaimed in the Evangelist’s recitatives and brought to life in real time by the crowd in the turba choruses, on the other.ģ Bach’s overall structuring of the St Matthew Passion has frequently been the subject of scholarly scrutiny. The chorales and recitatives with arias bear aloft the entire architecture of the work. To this dual-perspective biblical narrative Bach adds his own ‘two-choir Passion’ counterpart, implementing once again the structural principle of doubling: he constructs a sequence of chorales and recitatives with arias, giving expression to the collective and individual dismay of the believers. Following the traditional practice as observed in his St John Passion, in the St Matthew Passion Bach has the Gospel text alternately declaimed by the tenor Evangelist and enacted by the choir. Finally, as music to be integrated into the Good Friday church service the Passion as a whole is constructed in two parts, to precede and to follow the one-hour sermon.Ģ There is a long tradition of dual perspective in musical representations of the Bible narratives of the Passion, reaching back ultimately to the presentation of biblical scenes with allotted roles in medieval liturgy. In the version of the Passion as performed in 17, the two orchestras were supported by a single continuo group yet for utmost consistency in structural doubling, the version documented in the fair-copy score furnished two continuo groups as well. The instrumental group leader in each of the two orchestras is responsible for the obbligato accompaniment to arias sung by soloists of the respective choirs. Assigned to the two choirs are two string and woodwind orchestras. Opposite the Christ singer, the tenor soloist in the second choir, as Evangelist, declaims the Gospel narrative, and the Passion’s tenor arias are in consequence sung by the tenor soloist in the first choir. ![]() ![]() Bass arias are therefore sung from the second choir. The bass soloist of the first choir is charged with singing the part of Christ. The fair copy of the score, dating from 1736, allots the soprano and alto arias alternately to Choir I and Choir II. We know that each of the two choirs he deployed had its own soloists, following the practice of Leipzig church music. From this, Bach derived a comprehensive principle of doubling in musical composition. The two choirs of the St Matthew Passion have their roots in the traditions of antiphonal psalmody, handed down over centuries. 1 In his obituary of Johann Sebastian Bach written in the year 1754, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach ascribes to his father five Passions, ‘including one with two choirs’.
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