It's not often that a critic arrives at a gig to be informed he's meant to be singing in it, but recently I found myself expected to do exactly that. The occasion was a performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion, given by the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Ivan Fischer.
Fischer's aim was to replicate, as closely as possible, the experience of listeners at the work's first performance, which took place at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig on Good Friday, probably in 1727. Most of us are accustomed to hearing Bach's Passions in the concert hall - we quickly forget that they were written to form part of a living tradition of worship. The first listeners of the St Matthew Passion would have been a congregation attending a Good Friday service at their local church; they would have been expected to join the choir in the chorales that form the score's devotional backbone.
Fischer had accordingly decided that for his performance of "The People's Passion", as it was called, we would be the congregation. Some members of the public had already purchased choral tickets, which placed them in the front stalls and allowed them to attend a rehearsal earlier in the evening. By the time the rest of us arrived, however, Fischer had decided that we should all join in. Song sheets were accordingly shared out as people arrived.
Fischer took us through the opening chorale then left us to our own devices. I croaked away at the bass line with my cigarette-damaged baritone; others sang with professional clarity and ease. None of that mattered. This was meant to be an occasion when the boundaries between professional and amateur, between performers and audience, were obliterated.
However, I was left comparatively unaffected by a work that has often moved me to tears. I found myself wondering just why this should be so, particularly as the aim was to replicate many of Bach's original performance procedures. Musically, the evening could perhaps be described as inconsistent. As in Bach's day, the arias were sung by members of the choir, rather than the more usual starry lineup of soloists - and the results were extremely variable.
One principal drawback, I think, is that we were in a concert hall, rather than a church, and a pretty antiseptic concert hall at that. The architectural dullness of the Queen Elizabeth Hall is paradoxically one of its benefits as a venue, since it allows the music to flow unimpeded by visual distraction. However, its very neutrality, its vistas of concrete and wood, are inimical to the creation of the sense of a sacred space, in which we could experience the St Matthew Passion as a communal ritual.
The work's first listeners would have sat on wooden pews and stood for the chorales, the words and melodies of which they would probably have already known. They would have been surrounded by the familiar trappings of worship, with a crucifix before them - an ever-present visual reminder of the narrative they were hearing. In contrast, we remained seated on reasonably comfy, raked seats, and sang buried in our hymn sheets; none of the visual aids of Christianity accompanied us on our emotional and musical journey. The imaginary "congregation" remained an audience, after all.
In some respects, of course, "authentic Bach" is impossible. We can ceaselessly attempt to replicate the sound of the first performance of the St Matthew Passion, but what we can never do, ultimately, is turn back time. We are inevitably and irrevocably separated from that experience. For most of us, our ideas of the sacred and the secular have grown so far apart that we find it difficult to understand a world in which those very concepts were effectively conspicuous by their absence.
I'm not a practising Christian, and I don't believe that you need to be in any sense religious to appreciate the St Matthew Passion. Far from it. Few other works in the western musical canon quite so unflinchingly hold up a mirror to our own mortality or console us so profoundly for the fact that life is finite by its very nature. I question whether we should be searching for the "authentic Bach", since in many respects he must always elude us.
.jpg?w=600)
