Taken as a whole, the works of J.S. Bach reveal his astonishingly fertile and proficient musical mind. Some, such as The Art of the Fugue, A Musical Offering, and The Goldberg Variations, show off his mind-boggling capabilities as a contrapuntist. His instrumental works reconcile staggering complexity with powerful simplicity, a meticulous counterpoint with ornate melodies that nonetheless sound improvised. The surface of Bach’s music, whether a shapely melodic gesture or an intricate web of interlocking, elaborately embroidered contrapuntal lines, guides and delights the ear. But the way that surface adorns an assertive harmonic design gives Bach’s music its commanding logic and power. Its craft ranks among the world’s greatest artistic treasures. While we’re fortunate that these scores survive for us to study and analyze, they provide only blueprints. Performers and listeners don’t just appreciate Bach on paper—his music demands the utmost from those who present and interpret it. We revel in the heightened sense of execution the music demands, and the challenge and complexity enrich the aesthetic experience. To see a Bach score on paper is to be dizzied by black ink; to hear a Bach score in the hands of experts is to be dazzled by the capabilities of the human mind and body. Two-hundred-seventy years’ worth of musical and technological invention haven’t rendered the splendor of Bach’s creations any less brilliant. Heard as sheer sound, Bach’s music is deeply satisfying. But part of the richness of these musical treasures is the way they transcend technique and pull us beneath the ink-speckled surfaces to engage with multiple layers of meaning. Even in his purely instrumental music, Bach’s natural feel for musical rhetoric begets clear, incisive musical sentences and paragraphs worthy of the greatest orators. It’s as if he is trying to work through something with us, in conversation.
Bach’s church music, which takes as its starting point a biblical or poetic text, expands into an additional dimension. His grandest texted church music—the B Minor Mass, Christmas Oratorio, Easter Oratorio, and his two extant Passion settings—are something different altogether. For centuries the Passion—the annual recitation of the account of Christ’s abduction, trial, and crucifixion—was delivered within liturgy as plainchant. In the Lutheran tradition prior to Bach, additional vocal and instrumental parts were gradually added. Though in 1721 Bach’s congregation in Leipzig would have heard a St. Mark Passion by his predecessor, Kuhnau, Bach’s St. John Passion, heard for the first time on Good Friday 1724, was a far more musically elaborate version of the story. The preparation required to perform one of Bach’s Passions surpasses that of many other works in the repertoire because they feature such variety and complexity, presenting manifold layers of music and meaning, demanding that the performers succeed in transmitting the extremes of human depravity, love, and uplift encoded on their pages.
So what is the St. John Passion? Bach’s core mandate was to deliver the text of John 18-19 via musical tones. While eschewing an operatic style (i.e., music that reveled in vocalism and virtuosity for their own sakes) he was still able to interpolate movements set to poetic, non-biblical texts. The St. John Passion opens with one of two heavy bookends: an extended movement for the full chorus and orchestra whose agitated, churning instrumental opening establishes an anguished, unsettled mood. He places another extended movement, a haunting lullaby, just before the finale chorale. In between, the musical material is presented in several layers, each with its own text type, purpose, and style. The foundation is the biblical narrative—the actual words from John, chapters 18 and 19, outlining the actions and conversations surrounding Jesus’s abduction, trial, crucifixion, and burial. An “evangelist” (a tenor soloist) and other figures from the bible (Jesus, Pilate, Peter, and a few attendants, voiced by other singers) recite this prose as music, in a form of heightened speech called recitative—mostly syllabic melodies tracing and amplifying the contours of the words, supported by bass notes and chords from a continuo group—organ and cello, sometimes with lute. Where the biblical narrative depicts something spoken by a group of people (a crowd, or a panel of high priests, for instance), Bach deploys the chorus (usually joined by the full orchestra). The movements of this layer move quickly, as do the actions they portray.
Bach intermittently pauses the biblical narrative and takes us outside the dramatic action via a second layer: solo arias. Here, the text is not biblical prose but highly emotive devotional poetry that reflects on some aspect of the action. Musically, these atmospheric movements are highly varied. In each, the instrumentation, tempo, and sense of gesture transmit the emotion evoked in the poetry. Here, Bach reaches into a curio cabinet of instruments, some of which were already considered out-of-date in the 1720s. Pairs of flutes, oboes, violas d’amore (violas with seven regular strings and seven sympathetic resonator strings that emit a halo of shimmering sound), and the plangent timbres of the tenor-range oboe da caccia (a predecessor to the modern English horn) and the viola da gamba, in various combinations, fashion sublime, singular sound worlds. Bach hoped that these subjective movements, delivered mostly in the first person, would help clarify the narrative and kindle devotion.
The remaining layer: chorales. These movements, sung by the chorus, accompanied by the full orchestra, present hymn tunes harmonized in four parts, with poetic texts. We don’t know whether Bach’s congregation sang along, but the tunes of these movements would have been familiar to all those gathered and would have evoked the feeling of congregate hymn-singing.
This three-layer scheme—recitative, aria, chorale—mirrored the way Lutherans in Bach’s time were instructed to first read scripture, then reflect on its meanings, and, finally, pray. The St. John Passion was the capstone project of what was surely a frenzied first year on the job as Kantor for the churches of Leipzig, during which Bach produced the first of several annual cycles of cantatas—choral-orchestral works combining biblical and poetic texts in combinations of recitative, aria, and chorale—at the breakneck pace of one per week. Bach’s congregation in that first year heard in real time his finessing the design of such multi-faceted works to increasingly amplify and underscore the texts of a given liturgy and their theological implications. Bach’s congregation would not only have been familiar with the Passion story itself but also would have arrived at Good Friday attuned to the imagery and devotional fervor of the sorts of poems Bach would set in his new composition. The composer hoped that hearing the familiar narrative nestled among poetic reflections and prayers, brought to life and heightened by richly varied music, would engender a multi-dimensional spiritual experience—not just a piece of music but an engrossing act of guided worship.
Neither theologian nor Christian, I won’t wade too deeply into the spiritual significance of the Passion either for eighteenth-century Lutherans or modern-day believers. But on the level of the music—its melodic-harmonic relationships, instrumentation, and structure—I would assert that nearly every note of the score seems to have been crafted to heighten the experience of the listener and underscore the theological concepts at the heart of Bach’s eighteenth-century Lutheran understanding of the Gospel of John. Thousands of pages have been filled exploring the relationships between the composer’s musical gestures and the theological concepts he was trying to convey, but for those approaching this listening experience as a Christian or spiritual one, it’s helpful to understand some of the theological concepts outlined in the various biblical commentaries and literature with which Bach was familiar. The opening chorus outlines one such concept: the paradox that “even in the greatest abasement,” Christ “has been glorified.” God reveals his salvation to humans in the cross. The bass arioso Betrachte, meine Seel (“Consider, my soul”), also leans into the paradox. The singer, amidst the looping plucks of lutestrings and anguished harmonic suspensions repeated by a pair of violas d’amore, asks us to “gaze without pause” on the thorns of the crown about to be placed on Jesus’s head and imagine that from them, key-of-heaven flowers blossom. Paradoxical metaphors such as “anxious pleasure” and “bitter joy” abound. The tenor aria that follows bids us consider the bloodied, flayed back of Christ and see in it the rainbow symbolizing God’s covenant with Noah. The violas d’amore and viola da gamba spin out broad arcs of sound and long floods of chromatic motion. The alto aria Es ist Vollbracht (“It is finished”) and other movements convey another theological concept: Atonement has been won for humankind by Jesus in the cosmic battle between good and evil (“the hero out of Judah conquers with might and has concluded the battle. It is finished!”). Here, at the moment of Jesus’s death, believers are assured they needn’t wait until the resurrection; atonement is achieved at the cross. Elsewhere, Bach’s handling of text and music highlights the sense that Jesus’s self-sacrifice frees humans from the bondage of sin, so that they might love one another. Consider the text of two carefully placed chorales: One asks, “How can I repay your deeds of love, with my actions?” while another states, “Through your prison, Son of God, must freedom come to us.” Other elements underscore the symbolism of Jesus as the Passover Lamb, the sacrifice of a sinless man. Bach’s music in the St. John Passion is at its most harmonically anguished, and most intimate, when asking us to confront the pain and suffering of Jesus and consider the role of our sins in them. The straightforward melodic and harmonic thrust of the chorales underlines the questions of broader significance posed in their texts. Being immersed in this music for the first time as a member of Bach’s congregation in 1724, one imagines, was to hear and feel the Passion story more deeply than ever before. So compelling were Bach’s formulations that they resonate even now, three hundred years later.
While some of us may be Lutherans, or Christians of another stripe, none of us are those eighteenth-century Lutherans who heard the premiere in the Nikolaikirche. We’re gathered at a concert hall in New Jersey in 2023. How does this piece resonate in this time and place? There is, of course, the music itself. Story and meaning aside, this exceedingly rich score contains some of Bach’s most expressive, colorful, and exquisite music. Those with a lens focused on the religious significance of the story will find moments designed to engender deep spiritual reflection. Though it’s nice to use music as an escape, my own engagement with this work over the last several months, in this particular moment in our world, has found me drawn into the story at the heart of the work. The bulk of the Passion—the reflective arias and chorales—rests on the scaffolding of that innermost layer, the prose of John, chapters 18 and 19. Bearing in mind that the unknown author of the Gospel of John is recounting this narrative decades after it transpired, during or after the First Jewish-Roman War of 66–73 CE, and that we are hearing it some two thousand years later, the scenes depicted in the text benefit from two contextual framings: consideration of the historical-political milieu in which it unfolded, and a review of the events described in the Gospel of John prior to these chapters.
The Jewish people of the Mediterranean basin had lived for centuries under the rule of various empires and occupying forces which imposed their own cultures—and permitted Jews to observe and practice their faith—to varying degrees. During Jesus’s life, Jerusalem was part of the Roman province of Judea, created in 6 CE, and had been a hotbed of intermittent rebellions. Pontius Pilate was its fifth Roman magistrate. At several points before the period recounted in John’s Gospel, Pilate took actions that knowingly transgressed Jewish law, inflaming Gentile-Jewish relations. First-century historians characterize the ruler as vindictive and inept, and several years after Jesus’s crucifixion, he would be recalled to Rome for his mismanagement of an uprising among the Samaritans.
Among first-century Jews in Judea were several sects disagreeing about matters of Torah interpretation; purity laws and practices; the balance between assimilation to Roman and Hellenic customs and adherence to their own; and the degree to which they should cooperate with Roman rule. The Jewish tribunal in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin, included representatives of various sects vying for influence, including the Pharisees and the Sadducees; the high priest Caiaphas; his father-in-law, Annas; other priests; and some aristocratic leaders. Several generations before, in the Greek period, the priesthood was shaken by upheavals and malfeasance to which these elites were wary of returning, including the deposing of priests and the buying and selling of the priesthood. The relatively long eighteen-year tenure of Caiaphas (one of two high priests named in the Passion narrative) suggests a productive working relationship with Roman officials wherein the Temple elites would deploy their clout to keep peace among Jews in Jerusalem in return for minimal interference from Rome in their religious operations. The strain on Jewish-Gentile relations arising in normal times from the strict boundary-keeping and purity laws was especially taut during Passover, the celebration of which drew many additional Jews into the city from the countryside. (The Passion narrative unfolds on the day before Passover). Moreover, by the time our story begins, Jewish authorities had had to deal with numerous claimants to the messianic title, some of whom assembled small armies and ended up being killed along with their followers.
Enter Jesus, a preacher from rural Nazareth, and his followers, from the towns on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and the countryside north of Judea. The second chapter of John recounts Jesus’s going to Jerusalem just before Passover and storming the Temple to drive out the animals and overturn the tables of the money lenders. (All four of the synoptic Gospels recount this action, but John puts it up front.) Such a demonstration surely didn’t endear him to the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. The ensuing chapters of John describe a budding antipathy between Jesus (and his works) and the high priests and religious authorities in Jerusalem (the Pharisees, in particular, are named repeatedly). Jesus performed a series of seven “signs”—miraculous deeds, healings, and in the case of Lazarus, the resurrection of a dead man. While these acts garnered Jesus additional followers, rumors of them reached the authorities in Jerusalem, feeding their sense that he posed a threat. He ran further afoul of the authorities by performing some of these works on the sabbath (forbidden) and interacting with Samaritans, lepers, and other groups with whom pious Jews were forbidden contact. The text foreshadows the trials to come: The seventh chapter, for instance, notes Jesus “did not want to go about in Judea” because the Jewish leaders there were looking for a way to kill him. Several verses later, at the festival in Jerusalem, Jesus asks the “Jewish leaders,” “Why are you trying to kill me?” After Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, John’s Gospel recounts:
The chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will take away both our temple and our nation.” Caiaphas, the chief priest that year, spoke up: “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life.
Jesus fled to the countryside. “But the chief priests and Pharisees had given orders that anyone who found out where Jesus was should report it so that they might arrest him.” When he reenters Jerusalem, as Passover approaches, the twelfth chapter reports: “Many even among the leaders believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they would not openly acknowledge their faith for fear they would be put out of the synagogue; for they loved human praise more than praise from God.”
In other words, the trial in Part I of the St. John Passion is neither the first interaction between Jesus and the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem, nor the first time his death is considered. The St. John Passion opens with Judas betraying the location of Jesus to the Jewish authorities. He is interrogated and tried by the high priests, who then deliver him, bound, to the Roman judgment hall, where Pilate, the Roman governor, presides. The second, Roman trial in Part II unfolds as two parallel interrogations, one inside the hall between Pilate and Jesus and the other outside between Pilate and the gathered Jewish religious authorities. (The Jewish priests and officials, owing to their laws, would not enter the gentile Roman judgment hall, especially so close to Passover, so Pilate has to shuttle back and forth between Jesus, inside, and the crowd, outside). Both interrogations are confounded by evasion and oblique responses: The Jewish authorities lean on the grey areas of jurisprudence between Roman and Jewish law; Jesus tends to answer Pilate’s questions with further questions and pivot to a super-judicial, metaphysical plane. Pilate, portrayed more sympathetically in John than in the other Gospels, is left in the middle, deeply concerned about the increasingly restless Jewish authorities, but unconvinced that Jesus has done anything wrong, at least in the eyes of the Roman law. Eventually Pilate acquiesces and has Jesus whipped, beginning the process that will culminate in crucifixion. Roman soldiers dress Jesus mockingly in a purple robe and a crown of thorns. When the Jewish authorities start to question Pilate’s allegiance to Rome (“if you let this man go, you are not a friend of Caesar”) and ironically assert their own (“We have no friend but Caesar”), Pilate delivers Jesus to be crucified, placing a sign on his cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” so others might see it.
At the level of the drama itself, St. John Passion depicts the trial, conviction, and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and the tender care attended to his burial thereafter. The singer and writer Pamela Delal crafted this summation:
The St. John Passion is a potent allegory of institutional corruption. A religious power structure that has lost touch with its founding principles becomes a collaborator with an occupying force, and marginalizes, then destroys, the reformer from within who speaks the truth and tries to bring the faith back to its roots.
Bach’s choices—the texts used in the chorales; his placement of those collective moments of reflection in the narrative; and his use of the same music to depict both the Jewish religious officials and the Roman soldiers, among other details—reinforce the notion of Jesus’s crucifixion being preordained, and not the outcome of one or another group in the biblical narrative. Bach’s design implicates all the listeners in Peter’s denial and in the outcries of the crowd leading to Jesus’s suffering and crucifixion. One of the earlier chorales, for instance, has each member of the chorus singing, “I, I and my sins, that can be found like the grains of sand by the sea, these have brought you this misery that assails you, and this tormenting martyrdom.”
Nevertheless, it has been difficult for me in rehearsal to demand clear, intense diction in the Kreuzige (“Crucify”) choruses. Hearing them performed with conviction sends chills down the spine. In my summary above, I referred to “Jewish authorities,” as the original Greek word of the Gospel of John, Iudaioi, translated by Luther simply as “the Jews,” could also be understood to mean “Judeans.” (Indeed the New International Version of the Bible footnotes the first instance of this term thusly: “the term traditionally translated the Jews refers here and elsewhere in John’s Gospel to those Jewish leaders who opposed Jesus.”) Whether or not the original Greek term of is a geographic signifier or a specific reference to the authorities in Jerusalem, the fact remains that the anti-Judaism of John’s account has been wielded and perverted, from early Christianity onward, into anti-Semitic persecution. At certain times and in certain places in history, Good Friday was a day of grave danger, when Jews became targets of violence and even massacres at the hands of Christian mobs. How many other groups and individuals at the margins of their milieux fell prey to (actual) witch hunts over the centuries?
Sadly, we don’t have to look far, in time or space, to observe the persistence of homo sapiens’ basest tribal instincts. Genocide, war, gun violence, and other atrocities are ravaging communities this very day. In just the last few years, gut-wrenching images of torch-wielding demonstrators spitting anti-Semitic slogans and violent crowds desecrating the inner sanctums of our institutions have seared themselves into our eyes not from history books, but from our televisions. Of course, such instincts manifest in softer, more insidious ways, too. What were once “dog whistles” and oblique nods now leave the lips of elected representatives without chagrin or subtlety. In just the last several months some political leaders have dispatched, with astonishing speed and ease, hundreds of pieces of new legislation that enshrine the scapegoating and targeting of groups othered and outcast.
Is this just the nature of the beast? Bach, at least, seems to hope not. The arias of his St. John Passion, delivering lurid texts via his most colorful, heart-rending music, and the chorales that respond to them, force our close confrontation with a peaceful prophet’s gory debasement and careful consideration of the implications of our misdeeds. To perform and listen to this work as a community—to experience its commingling of discomfort and pleasure and hear the many voices of the chorus deliver not just the savage cries of “Crucify!” but also the corporate contrition and devotion of the chorales—is to consider what we’re capable of, good and bad, when we get swept up in each other’s passions. In a musically heightened way, St. John Passion puts side by side humanity’s most repugnant and most generous inclinations. One hopes that Bach’s design leaves us meditating more on the latter. By the time the penultimate movement bids Jesus’s “holy bones” “rest well and bring me peace as well” Bach’s Passion has traversed the ambit of human attributes but underscored the one that, while rarely headline news, is as radical and necessary now as it was when Jesus preached it, as central to the survival of the species, and as admirable as the better part of our nature: profound, selfless love.
