Not Only Bach: Passion Music

In pictures Johann Sebastian Bach often looks surly: half angry, half suffering. It is easy to believe that this man wrote Passion music of great urgency, works that no other composer matched before or since. Bach was feared and honoured within his lifetime, then forgotten and rediscovered by Mendelssohn. Today you would be hard pressed to find a concert hall that does not present his Christmas Oratorio at Christmas or one of his two great Passions during Eastertide.

Bach regularly borrowed motifs from himself and other composers and incorporated them in his works, as was accepted and customary at the time. Some of his chorale melodies can also be found in his organ works – melodies which were later also revisited by other composers, such as Max Reger.

At first glance, the famous Chaconne from Bach’s violin sonata has little to do with Passion settings in the true sense of the word. However, musicology has shown that within this piece various chorales dealing with the subject of death and resurrection are featured. No one has described the depth and dimension of this piece more powerfully than Johannes Brahms, who himself adapted the work for piano: "The Chaconne is for me one of the most wonderful, incomprehensible pieces of music," he said. "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings."

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Bach was of course only one of many composers that wrote Passions. Others included Carl Heinrich Graun, with his cantata 'Der Tod Jesu' ('The Death of Jesus'), as well as Graupner, Homilius, Sammartini, Myslivecek and even Salieri, to name but a few. With his 'Brockes-Passion', Georg Philipp Telemann wrote a work almost the equal of Bach's. In fact, his five movement cantata 'Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebt' ('I Know that my Redeemer Liveth') was for a long time attributed to Bach. The text refers to a phrase in the Book of Job and relates to the resurrection of Christ: "I know that my redeemer lives, what joy the blest assurance gives!"

George Frederic Handel, Bach’s contemporary, composed 'La resurrezione' or 'Oratorio Per La Resurrezione Di Nostro Signor Gesù Cristo' to use the full title, in Rome in 1708. The first act, in which Lucifer and the Angel try to prove to each other that they have the greater influence on the people, is performed between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. The textual source is not the Bible but rather one of the Apocrypha texts. It becomes apparent in the second scene that Lucifer gloated a little too soon.

The bitterness of death has been a recurring theme since before the New Testament and therefore is not necessarily linked to the Resurrection of Christ. Brahms, for example, chose passages from the Old Testament for his 'Four Serious Songs', including "O Tod, wie bitter bist du" ("O Death, how bitter you are”) from the Book of Ecclesiasticus. It is a little shocking to see how bluntly Brahms has brought together central bible passages. "For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts; even one thing befalls them: as the one dies, so dies the other" – passages such as these are no chance find, but the result of long-term intensive biblical study.

Joseph Haydn’s Passion settings of an entirely different breed. At the end of the 1780s Haydn was a celebrity throughout Europe. He received commissions from Paris and even Spain and wrote the famous, intimate, urgent "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross".

Mahler is also not generally considered a composer of Passion settings. However, at the end of his Second Symphony, the "Resurrection", Mahler creates an atmosphere of joyful jubilation. It was at the funeral or "Totenfeier" (also the alternate title for the first movement) for Hans von Bülow in March 1894 that Mahler came up with the idea of setting Klopstock’s poem "The Resurrection" for the final movement of his symphony. Mahler used his own revised version of the text for this grand finale – and what a grand finale it is: "That for which you suffered, To God shall it carry you!"