Bach’s setting of the Passion According to St. John was first heard on Good Friday, 1724, in Leipzig, Germany. The performance was not a concert; it was a liturgical expansion of the Lutheran Vespers service. The text was in German, the language of its performers and listeners. Some passages were Biblical, in the translation by Martin Luther; some were contemporary devotional poetry. Much of it was the texts of hymns with which the listeners were intimately familiar. With the exception of the hymn tunes, all of the music was “modern”—newly composed, much of it specifically for this event. Bach tinkered with this Passion setting throughout the rest of his life and career —tried different choruses and arias, different poetry, different chorales. He never settled on a definitive version; that which is usually presented today is a thoughtful combination of at least two versions, and was never actually heard during his lifetime.
Bach’s musical setting of the Passion According to St. John, in its day, was immediate and purposeful. Bach focused his art, invention, and craft, not on creating a timeless work of art, but on enhancing the worship life of his community. And it seems clear, from the casual, offhand way he treated most of his manuscripts, that Bach never anticipated the interest shown in this liturgical work after his death. We, who experience this work nearly three hundred years after its first performance, are not Bach’s target listeners and performers. We treat his works with far more reverence, than he did.
I envy those who heard Bach’s works as new compositions. I imagine their anticipation, their pleasure and satisfaction, week by week, as new cantatas appeared, and as Bach performed new works, or improvised on old ones, at the organ or harpsichord. Our experience is so different-- we hear his works completely out of context, largely divorced from the religious and social worlds for which they were composed. We hear them as concert works, as “classical music,” something separate from the music that surrounds us in our daily lives, something that exists in a bell jar, to be appreciated and enjoyed as objects, much as we view paintings and sculptures in museum galleries. We focus on their history, on informed performance practice, on musical gesture and rhetorical language. We try, through exhaustive study and practice, to perform them as Bach imagined them, and to understand Bach’s genius and still-vital appeal, across centuries of change.
But we can never experience Bach as his original listeners did. No matter how hard we work to duplicate the physical conditions of his original performances, we can never be his original audience. We are, at best, successfully costumed and equipped re-enactors. So why put such emphasis and care into our performances of this music? I frequently ask myself this, and related questions, when studying and performing music of earlier times. Were Bach alive now, or Josquin, or Palestrina, or Brahms, or Mozart, what would they compose? and why would they compose it?
It is not healthy to despise the present while worshiping the past—one is left culturally homeless and disconnected, if one cannot embrace ones own world. Chicago Chorale devotes a sizable portion of its energy to the performance of contemporary choral music, by living composers, in an attempt to balance past and present. By focusing on the best and most communicative choral music we encounter, from any historic period, we discover deeper connections, contexts, and meanings, than the particulars of era or circumstance would suggest.