Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy will be forever remembered and revered, not only for his own musical creations, but for his rediscovery and advocacy of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was mourned throughout Europe not as a composer per se but as an organist when he died in Leipzig in 1750. His music was known by connoisseurs and professionals, but performances of it were rare and effectively it lay dormant for almost eight decades. It may be hard to believe, but after Bachs death many of his manuscripts were sold for their own weight in paper (relatively costly in his day). Scholars have estimated roughly thirty percent of his total output was thus lost to posterity, robbing us of treasures we can now only try to imagine. The responsibility for the musical resurrection of Bach, a devout Lutheran, falls mainly to the Jewish Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn performed Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829 and 1841: on 11 March 1829, the Passion was heard again for the first time in 100 years. This performance marked the rediscovery of Bach as a composer, and a revival of his works began. As part of the “Historische Konzerte”, a performance of the Passion was given on 4 April 1841, Palm Sunday, in St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, the place of its first performance. Rehearsals began on 2 February 1829 in the Singakademie. Orchestral rehearsals began on 6 March. The chorus comprised 158 singers. Mendelssohn conducted the performance from the grand piano with a baton. The performance was attended by the King with his court, the leading intellectuals of the day including Schleiermacher, Heine, Hegel, Spontini, Zelter and the best of Berlin society. On 21 March 1829, Bach’s birthday, a second performance took place. The work was heard a third time on Good Friday, 17 April 1829, conducted by Zelter. Felix Mendelssohn shortened the St Matthew Passion for the Berlin performance by ten arias, four accompagnato recitatives and six chorales. For the 1841 performance he then reinstated five movements. His basic idea with the arrangement was, on the one hand to produce a dramatic concentration of the content on the biblical text and, on the other hand, to stress the emotions in the sense of the romantic period, and to achieve this by omitting those parts which owed something to the baroque doctrine of affects and could barely be reconstructed a hundred years later. The secco recitatives which Mendelssohn himself had accompanied at the piano in 1829, were allocated to two cellos (using double-stopping) and a double bass in the 1841 performance. It was precisely those recitatives which drive the content of the plot forward that Mendelssohn particularly arranged. As the copy of the score available to him contained no figuring, he entered the harmonisation of the recitatives which he desired in his own hand, his harmonisation differing fundamentally from Bach’s in many places. The occasional fermatas over individual notes, tempo indications, instructions regarding dynamics, articulation and accents, most notably in the part of Christus, also enhance the concentration of content. Mendelssohn’s arrangement is, in other words, designed with a view to bringing out the crucial moments, to give expression to human emotions in a heightened form. Mendelssohn’s tempo instructions for the turba choruses should also be understood in this context. His aim was to portray the dramatic plot pointedly with people of “flesh and blood”. The opening and final choruses of the first part, “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß”, contain most careful markings in the romantic style. Bach’s orchestral scoring has been altered in a few movements. The use of clarinets, replacing the low oboes (oboe d’amore and oboe da caccia), is striking. Mendelssohn no longer gave the organ a prominent function, as the secco recitatives were either accompanied by him at the piano, or by the cellos and double bass. The organ was used in the chorales and at selected points in a few arias and choruses as an additional tone colour. With Mendelssohn’s arrangement, a version is now available lasting just over two hours, which provides an interesting alternative for present day audiences.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 21:35:31 +0000
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