The orchestra and its Passion tradition
Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion is not only one of the greatest masterpieces ever composed, but it is also much beloved by its audiences — and particularly in the Netherlands, where thousands of music lovers have been attending performances of the Passion according to St Matthew in the week before Easter for nearly 130 years.
The basis for this particular tradition dates back to 1899, when Willem Mengelberg, then chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, decided that a performance of Bach's masterpiece should take place every year on Palm Sunday. The Concertgebouw's Great Hall is still packed every Palm Sunday, although the St Matthew Passion is now performed in alternation with Bach's St John Passion. We’ll explain how this came about later in this article, but we have to go back a little in time first, as the Concertgebouw Orchestra's Passion tradition didn’t just come out of nowhere: many factors and events preceded that first Palm Sunday performance in 1899.
The rediscovery of Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach had been largely forgotten by the time of his death in 1750. Several of his sons had become much more popular and influential, and ‘old Bach’s’ polyphonic works had come to be regarded as old-fashioned and far too complicated: they were studied only by a few connoisseurs, although these did include Mozart and Beethoven.
Felix Mendelssohn then came along, who was only 20 years old when he fished the St Matthew Passion out of its obscurity and brushed the dust off it. He conducted the work in Berlin on 11 March 1829, more than a century after its first performance in Leipzig, although he had adapted the score to the taste of 19th-century audiences: his alterations included a choir of 158 singers and a great number of cuts.
The performance was a great success and the precedent Mendelssohn had set gradually came to be accepted elsewhere. Bach's music began a well-deserved revival in Germany and Austria, where Schumann, Brahms and Bruckner paid high honour to the great baroque master.
The St Matthew Passion in the Netherlands
It took quite some time for this revival to reach the Netherlands. The first performance of the St Matthew Passion took place in Rotterdam in 1870, and the German-Dutch composer and conductor Julius Röntgen mounted a performance with the barely three-year-old Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1891. Performances in various places followed and led to Mengelberg’s establishment of a yearly performance of the Passion in 1899.
Mengelberg's Bach performances became legendary, although we should note that he too followed Mendelssohn’s example and adapted his performances to the tastes of the time. An orchestra in Bach’s time was made up of about ten to thirty musicians, whose instruments both sounded and were played very differently. Mengelberg used a full symphony orchestra that played in the usual expansive manner of the time and also made use of large choral forces. He shortened the work considerably as well, although a performance still seemed to take forever because of his slow tempos. Whilst his interpretation came in for some criticism from the press, he also received at least just as much praise; he continued with his late-Romantic vision of Bach until his last performance of the work in 1944.
The annual ‘Mengelberg-Matthäus' hit the mark and became a tradition. Mengelberg missed only one performance of the St Matthew Passion due to illness before his position with the Concertgebouw Orchestra became untenable in 1945. A two-year hiatus (1945-1946) followed, after which his successor Eduard van Beinum took over. Bernard Haitink became the orchestra’s new chief conductor after van Beinum’s death in 1959 but preferred to delegate the somewhat specialised task of leading the St Matthew to Eugen Jochum, the orchestra’s second permanent conductor at that time.
Performances in a more authentic style
People had meanwhile begun to realise that baroque performances might not necessarily benefit from a modern symphony orchestra and a choir of hundreds of singers — and that perhaps it might pay to take the period and the circumstances in which the music was written into account. Increasing numbers of musicians appeared during the 1960s and 1970s who based their performances on historical written sources; although any idea of the exact sound of Bach’s music must remain a matter of conjecture, musicians could at least use instruments from the period or copies made of them and take historical descriptions of performance practice into account. Great Britain and the Netherlands led this trend, which eventually brought about an alternative tradition of performances of the Passion in a more authentic style by the Bachvereniging in Naarden as well as much else. This situation created an ideological gulf between ‘authentic’ Naarden and ‘Romantic’ Amsterdam.
St Matthew and St John
The gulf was bridged in 1975, when the Concertgebouw Orchestra invited the Austrian conductor and harpsichordist Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929-2016), one of the figureheads of historical performance practice, as a guest conductor. His proposal to perform Bach's St John Passion instead of the St Matthew was nothing short of revolutionary: the St John Passion had been composed before the St Matthew, was on a smaller scale, and was much less popular at that time. He also reduced the orchestra to just 29 musicians and employed the equally modest-sized Nederlands Kamerkoor (Netherlands Chamber Choir).
The orchestra musicians were converted. Harnoncourt led the St Matthew the following year and the St John again in 1977, since when the Concertgebouw Orchestra has performed the two great Passions in alternation. Even more importantly, he taught the orchestra a great deal about historical performance practice for music from the 18th and early 19th centuries, for which he was granted extra rehearsal time. The strings learned to play more transparently, with less vibrato and a more pointed attack, whilst the orchestra as a whole realised that the era of overly Romantic interpretations of such repertoire was over. The orchestra subsequently appointed Harnoncourt as honorary guest conductor, a title that was passed to Iván Fischer a few years after Harnoncourt’s death. Not only is historically informed performance practice now ingrained in the musicians, but specialists in the repertoire have also been invited a number of times a season for several years now. And — the orchestra still performs the St John Passion and St Matthew Passion in alternate years during Holy Week.
This year we present the St Matthew Passion conducted by baroque expert Riccardo Minasi on Friday 11 April and Sunday 13 April. Tickets are still available.