Bach’s St Matthew Passion at 300: Creation, Rediscovery, and the Birth of Musical Historicism

In 1727, in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach premiered what would become one of the central monuments of Western sacred music: the Passion According to St. Matthew (BWV 244). Three centuries later, this course examines the work both in its original theological and liturgical context and in the afterlife that transformed it into a canonical masterpiece. We begin in Bach's Leipzig: examining the Passion as a work of Lutheran devotion, a carefully structured meditation on scripture and poetry, and an artifact of Baroque musical thought. Through guided score study, listening, and discussion, students explore the work's large-scale architecture, its intricate relationships among recitative, aria, chorale, and chorus, and Bach's distinctive approach to text setting, musical rhetoric, and expressive symbolism. At the heart of the course stands a second historical turning point: the 1829 Berlin revival of the St. Matthew Passion led by the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. That event—one hundred years after the original premiere—has often been described as the beginning of the Bach revival. More broadly, it offers a remarkable window into the cultural transformations of the nineteenth century: growing interest in the musical past, new approaches to historical scholarship and source study, changing ideas about artistic authority and creativity, and the emergence of concert repertories that looked backward as well as forward. Using Mendelssohn's 1829 Berlin performance and his 1841 Leipzig revival as case studies, we explore nineteenth-century attitudes toward history and memory, the early development of musical scholarship, evolving notions of authenticity and performance, the rise of public concert culture, and the reshaping of Bach's reputation from respected eighteenth-century craftsman to one of the central figures of the Western musical canon. The course culminates in optional attendance at and reflection on the Harvard Choruses' performance of the St. Matthew Passion on April 30, 2027, offering students an opportunity to connect scholarship, listening, and live performance.