Loading...The Choral Arts Society, James Rightmyer, conductor, will present J.S. Bach's monumental setting of the Passion Story from the Gospel of Matthew on Palm/Passion Sunday, April 5, at St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church, 1950 Bardstown Road, Louisville.
Because of the length of the work (three hours), Part I will be presented at 4:30 p.m. and Part II at 7:30 p.m., following a dinner break. The work calls for two choirs, two orchestras and numerous soloists. The performance will feature period instruments, including Louisville’s Bourbon Baroque Orchestra. Admission is $20 (seniors $15; students $10). Tickets are available in the church offices at both St. Francis in the Fields and St. Francis of Assisi.
The tradition of singing the story of Jesus’s passion during Holy Week goes back many hundreds of years to a time when a priest would sing the story instead of speaking it. Later a tradition developed of having it sung by a choir. During the Baroque period the Passion oratorio developed. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, written in 1727, is the most famous work in this tradition. It was probably first performed on Good Friday, April 11, 1727, in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was Kapellmeister. He made some changes to it by 1736 and performed it again on March 30, 1736. After that it was almost completely forgotten until long after Bach’s death. Even Bach’s music in general was forgotten by most people. In 1829 the composer Felix Mendelssohn discovered the music of the St. Matthew Passion and decided to perform a short version of it in Berlin. It immediately became extremely popular with the public and from then on Bach has always remained recognized as one of the greatest of all composers.
The St. Matthew Passion is sometimes compared to an opera, and sometimes to a sermon. Neither comparison does justice to the work’s complexity and depth. As John Butt writes, “with its unfolding levels of symbolism, theological interpretation, and—most striking of all—psychological insight, the Matthew Passion is perhaps the most challenging and ambitious Christian artwork.”
