Sebastian Bach

hich are the truest reflexion of the master's genius in his ripest years. The other three were long supposed to have been lost, unless a S. Luke Passi

ve;55 and Professor Spitta has made it probable that Bach also wrote the music to a Passion following the text of no single evangelist, which was produced at the Thomaskirche in 1725.5

. The Passion according to S. Matthew follows in 1729; and last of all, in 1731, that according to S. Mark. The printed text of this, which we still possess, was

give life to the Latin words. The necessity of it was removed when the Gospel came to be recited in the vernacular tongue, but the habit had struck too deep roots in the heart of the people to be interfered with. The Catholic wont survived, with so much else in the Lutheran churches of Middle Germany; and the musical Passion remained, at Leipzig at least, a part of the regular service until the second half of the eighteenth century. German Passions at once sprang up, and won an ever-increasing popularity, since it was now attempted to exalt their religious impression by an artistic treatment of the subject as a whole. At first the music hardly departed from the strict medieval recitation; then it was varied by the introduction of hymns; th

ture of an oratorio, immediately established itself as a model, and was set to music, within six years of its publication, by musicians of the eminence of Keiser, Telemann, Handel, and Mattheson. It forms also the basis of Bach's S. John Passion; but here the biblical narrative is followed with entire fidelity,59 and the master has proceeded with such independent judgment that his work stands quite remote from the strange medley of sacred and secular, old and new, with which his immediate predecessors had to be contented. The music they wrote to it was indeed of great individual beauty, but in their hands it never gained the symmetry of an organic whole. It is Bach's peculiar glory to have succeeded in this endeavour where everyone else had failed. He adopted not the forms of the Italian oratorio, but he absorbed its spirit. He blended it in a manner of whi

e Jewish crowd, or the soldiers, is wrought into a regular chorus, or at least several times repeated. This arrangement certainly impairs the proportion of the different parts, since it appears to lay a greater emphasis upon the voice of the many than upon the single utterance of Christ or another. There is, however, always a musical fitness in these elaborations, and nothing can be more artistic than the way in which, for example, the sentence, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, is rehearsed as the subject of a fugue, the most formal and (so to say) legal phrase that music admits, and also the most expressive of the dispersed yet unanimous speech of a multitude. It is part of the idea of Passion music to break the continuity of the narrativ

resent form as well is a matter for which we cannot be too grateful, whether we regard most the exquisite pathos of its melody or the perfect flow of the several instruments, which, in their separate progressions, give a personal, almost an individual, sentiment to the composition. This sentiment lies at the root of the Pas

e, the actors. The never-ending wail of the violins preludes to a tragedy which sums up all human suffering. The cry has slowly risen to its height when the daughters of Zion are shown to us, assembled to mourn, in the same piercing measures, the Bridegroom as he passes on bearing his cross. A chorus of believers, with wondering question, first interrupts their lament, fina

ul distribution of the speeches between two complete choirs, each with its own organ and orchestra. Above all he separates the words of Jesus from the rest of the recited narrative by a different accompaniment, that of a string quartet, within which setting he places them, with the purity of a crystal, as within an aureole.62 At certain moments of supreme dignity, the simple recitative rises into the measured melody of the arioso, the words, however, r

ly applied, as that of the modern Leitmotiv. Beside these chorales stand Picander's verses which are set in the form, not only of arias or ariosos, but also of recitative; and these, to throw the biblical recitative into greater relief, have, for the most part, an accompaniment of wind instruments: sometimes the single voice is blended, as in converse, with the voices of the choir. Usually in the Passion music the company of the faithfu

re unfamiliar with the usage of Lutheran worship. The conservatism of Leipzig, in particular, retained many Catholic customs which the Protestant churches as a rule had discarded, for instance, the surplices of minister and choir, and the r

was broken up by a string of Christmas songs, which, we may rather say, served as a curiously wrought setting to enhance the beauty of the gem it enclosed. At every pause the thanksgiving of the virgin-mother was interrupted by verses of a well-loved German hymn, Vom Himmel hoch, by the Gloria in Excelsis, and by little songs, part in Latin, part Ge

s and feast-days; the Sanctus distinguished the three high festivals of the Lutheran kalendar: the only element of the Mass which is not known to have been sun

s not the mere opening of a stately pageant. From four bars of majestic chorus, the orchestra go on at once to announce a theme unsurpassed in the entire range of Bach's music; each of the five voices of the choir take it up in turn and weave together their passionate, yet restrained cry for mercy. The human passion of the Kyrie eleison has its counterpart in the tender, almost personal feeling of the Christe eleison, which is set as a duet to an exquisitely melodious accompaniment of the violin, and in the closing Kyrie chorus, which, instead of being conceived in the usual way as a petition to the Holy Spirit, resumes the tone of the first and sums up the total supplication in a spirit now suggestive of the broad treatment of the Catholic writers but soon betraying the hand of Bach in its conciseness, its more nervous motion and acuter harmonies. The same abandoning of traditional currents in order that he might go back straight to the springs lying deep in the nature and experience of the world, to which the office of the holy communion owes its life, is equally manifest throughout the Mass. The Gloria becomes again the angel-song of the nativity. Bach throws himself at once into the spirit in which he wrote the Christmas Oratorio; and of this great work the

the restful consummation of the whole. Nor can I describe the infinite fertility of the design, the happy frequency with which in the arie a single instrument, violin, flute, hautboy, or horn, is made to enhance the delicacy of the human voice, or the splendour of the gro