Bach's St. John Passion

A second listening recommendation for Holy Week

If Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is one of the most well known and well loved and impressively crafted pieces of all time, nevertheless, his St. John Passion holds the place of favorite in my heart. Today, I would like to share more about this more often overlooked piece, and encourage you to give it a listen this week as well.

Bach’s St. John Passion is the elder brother of the two remaining passions and was written in 1724, preceding his St. Matthew’s Passion by three years. Like the St. Matthew Passion, it is based on the account of Christ’s Passion and the biblical text is interspersed with hymns and arias. The tenor soloist who sings the Evangelist part sings John 18-19 exactly. You may recognize many hymns sung throughout, including Jesus I Will Ponder Now, Oh Dearest Jesus, and Lord Thee I Love With All My Heart. It is shorter than its sibling, and also written for a much smaller group, but it is just as good. Just as all four Gospels have their own personality, these two Passions have a distinct flavor to them. I try to listen to the St. Matthew Passion every year on Palm Sunday, and listen to this St. John Passion every year on Good Friday (although to be honest, I listen to these year round as well).

One thing to note throughout this piece is Bach’s use of leitmotif, something that was not used by other composers until much later. A leitmotif is a musical theme that is attached to some person or concept and that then comes up throughout a piece of music to help signal to the listener what they should be feeling and what things are linked together. This is used today constantly in film music, but Bach himself does it here. One example is the turbulent woodwinds and strings that accompany some of the biblical text in the recitative. Notice, in the second piece, that when Judas brings his band of soldiers to take Jesus, the woodwinds and strings react with rapid alarm. You will hear this same theme again and again, signaling the evil at work. 

The St. John Passion opens with a sea of turmoil. Listen to the strings in their circling arpeggios that sound like a seething sea, and the two piercing oboes. While it opens in turmoil, the words sung by the choir remind us that “Even in the greatest humiliation” Jesus “Has become transfigured” The full text translates to:

Lord, our ruler, Whose fame 
In every land is glorious!
  Show us, through Your passion,
  That You, the true Son of God,
  Through all time,
  Even in the greatest humiliation,
  Have become transfigured!

You can see in the text for this opening chorus, that Bach uses the paradoxes of the Christian faith and also the Theology of the Cross throughout this work. You can read the whole text in English here, and once again I can’t recommend following along with the words while listening highly enough. The vividness and intenseness that the music grants to the text is unparalleled. Listen to how the crowd gets carried away in their anger and accusations, while Jesus’ responses are calm and controlled. 

There are fewer arias and hymns in this piece than in the St. Matthew Passion. You get longer stretches of biblical text at a time. While these recitatives are not as musically elaborate as the arias or chorales, they are not simply chanting or getting the text done so we can hurry to the good parts. Look at the recitative “Da Sprach Pilatus zu ihm” (18). Notice the same theme from when the soldiers came to the garden playing in the background when the crowd shouts for Barabbas. And listen how, on the word geißelte (scourged), the tenor suddenly jumps all around, audibly recreating the scourging.  One of the longest and most central arias follows this scourging: “Erwäge,” (Pt. 20) the text of which, translated, is:

Consider, how His blood-stained back
in every aspect
is like Heaven,
in which, after the watery deluge
of the flood of our sins was released,
the most beautiful rainbow
as God’s sign of grace was placed!’

This aria comes after Jesus is flogged, as if the singer is looking at him, and amazingly he compares His bloody back to heaven and to a rainbow, beautifully painting this picture with imagery from the flood. You can even hear bits and pieces of this aria quoted again later on. 

The other aria we will look at now is the alto aria Es Its Vollbracht, a devastating piece coming immediately after Jesus utters those words (“It is finished”). Bach writes it in an old style called tombeau, which was meant as a musical tomb or epitaph. Listen to the gorgeous and melancholic sound of the viola da gamba, an instrument that has previously sounded in this piece. It is haunting and beautiful, and yet in the midst of the sadness it erupts in triumph, reminding us “The hero out of Judah conquers with might and concludes the battle.” And then it stunningly returns back to it’s beginning to finish on the words “it is finished” The full text translates to:

 It is finished!
O comfort for the ailing soul!
The night of sorrow
now measures out its last hour.
The hero out of Judah conquers with might
and concludes the battle.
It is finished!

The St. Matthew Passion ended with our tears (“We sit down with tears and call to You in the grave.” The St. John Passion, however, ends without tears: 

Rest well, you blessed limbs,
now I will no longer mourn you,
rest well and bring me also to peace!
  The grave that is allotted to you
  and encloses no further suffering,
  opens heaven for me and closes off Hell.

And instead of ending on a chorus, Bach brilliantly ends on the last verse of the hymn Lord Thee I Love With All My Heart. Here is what one conductor has to say about this: “Theres’ a final chorale after that and the masterly touch is that the story of the passion is embedded in a much greater structure. God and man become one in the way husband and wife become one. We see the words of King Solomon in the final chorale; ‘my small bedroom’ the smallest space where two lovers can meet. This is the image Bach wants to end with, which he does magnificently in that chorale. It begins intimately, but gets broader and broader all the time as if the world is covered entirely by that final chorale. Then he ends where he began, ‘I will ever praise you'” (find more from him and his choir/orchestra here).

What a beautiful ending to a beautiful piece of music. Give it a listen this week!