On Good Friday, we explored J. S. Bach’s oratorio St. Matthew Passion in a special online event. Our guides were concert pianist Mia Chung, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, and maestro Richard Westerfield. 

Good Friday is a day for Christians to ponder the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice, when the Son of God hung on the cross, bearing the weight of humanity’s sin. Where words fall short in expressing the depths of this act, music comes in. With a mix of music and conversation, Mia and Richard help us grasp key points in Bach’s musical narrative, illustrating how it tells of the near-incomprehensible extent of God’s love for humanity.

Thanks to our co-host, Octet Collaborative, for their support of this event.

Please note this transcript may contain inaccuracies and should not be used as an authoritative source.

Tom Walsh: On behalf of the Trinity Forum, thank you for participating in today’s Good Friday reflection on the St. Matthew Passion of J.S. Bach. By way of introduction, the Trinity Forum is a community of people engaged in a common effort to keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive, to nurture new growth in that tradition, and to make it available to everyone. We are grateful to the members of the Trinity Forum Society who make events like this one possible. With that, I’d like to introduce our guides for our time together. Mia Chung is one of our senior fellows here at the Trinity Forum. Mia teaches at Harvard and has previously been on the faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. Her recordings have won awards, and she has performed in concert halls worldwide. Mia founded and leads the Octet Collaborative, Our co-host today, which is a Christian study center promoting human flourishing at MIT. Maestro Richard Westerfield has served as associate conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and led many other orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic. We’re grateful to Mia and Richard, and also to each of you for joining us in this time of reflection.

*Music*

Mia Chung: That was “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” the famous Lutheran chorale that is quoted five times in Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental achievement, the St. Matthew Passion. It’s a particularly appropriate work to be exploring as we are now in the Lenten season, this time that can be best described as a time of spiritual spring cleaning, if you will. And I’m going to be spending the first part of this presentation talking about some of the historical details behind this work, maybe covering Bach’s Lutheran faith, sort of as Reformational commitment to the Protestant faith. And then also exploring some of the textures that you’re going to hear in this work. And then in the second portion of this presentation, I’m going to welcome my friend and colleague Richard Westerfield, who has conducted the St. Matthew Passion numerous times, to join me in a conversation about the individual numbers found in this extraordinary composition. The St. Matthew Passion is an oratorio. In other words, a really large scale musical work, that is akin to opera. And it’s based on sacred text. But unlike opera, there are no costumes, scenery, or sort of dramatic actions before your eyes. All you hear is music. Now, this great, ambitious composition is about two and a half to three hours in length, depending on which performance force you listen to? Which ensemble, if you will. And it’s performed very often during the Lenten season. What is really powerful about this work is that it is really an expression of the deeply personal, Reformational Lutheran faith that J.S. Bach possessed. And there are some key theological points that will be underscored during the course of the work. First of all, you’ll hear that humans are sinful. They’re deeply broken. Fallen, if you will. That’s point number one. And the second is that Jesus is the Son of God. Was innocent. Perfect. The third is that God’s love for humanity was so outstanding. Just limitless, if you will, that he would pursue us to the end. And the fourth is that an extraordinary price was paid by Jesus through his crucifixion, his death on the cross. It was a great cost that was paid on our behalf. And finally, and this is really what Bach hopes to achieve through the length and the specificity and power of this work is he leaves us with a question. What is your response? Even our response in this contemporary era to what the St. Matthew Passion depicts. Now, there are a couple of theological points that are missing which are left out. And that is, of course, Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and our redemption. But again, keep in mind that this was performed on Good Friday, and the duration and affective power of this work is really meant to help us understand and experience emotionally and spiritually the depths of grief and the extraordinary price paid on behalf of mankind. Now, Johann Sebastian Bach’s deep reformation of Lutheran faith is uncontested, but recent scholarship is also showing that he may have had pietistic leanings based on some books that were found in his personal library.

Mia Chung: And what this suggests is that Bach was trying to balance perhaps the more doctrinally or dogmatic aspects of his Lutheran faith with the kind of spiritual renewal or yearnings towards transformation that Pietism was associated with during his lifetime. Now, during the Lenten season, this work is performed often. As I mentioned earlier, in just Holland alone, there are literally hundreds of performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion across the country. And everyday citizens are familiar with this powerful work. Now, the work is based on chapters 26 and 27 from the Book of Matthew, as translated by Martin Luther from Latin into German. So it was in the vernacular language for the audiences of his of Bach’s day. The Latin word patior, which is the basis for passion, actually means suffering. And so you have this passion play, if you will, that is based on the final period of Jesus’s life. When I was in Europe back in 2022, the month of August, I was playing a recital in Vienna. And it so happened that at about the same time, there was a performance of a passion play in Oberammergau, Germany. And that tradition of performing a passion play, which happens pretty much every ten years in that town in Germany, has gone on since the middle of the 1600s. It’s the longest-running passion play tradition in the world. And the purpose for that performance is really a gesture of thanksgiving and gratitude to God for the lives that were spared in Oberammergau right after and during the bubonic plague, which happened during the 30 Years of War.

Mia Chung: Now back to Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Bach’s profound vocational commitment to honor God through his music is not just expressed through the literal music, but also through the physical manuscript itself. In the words of musicologist David Gordon, the work is beautifully and painstakingly bound. Bach sewed it by hand and carefully highlighted the biblical words in red ink, and the words Soli Deo Gloria are inscribed at the end, meaning to God be the glory alone. Of course, you may have heard that he ended many of his works in this fashion. Well, given its current acclaim as one of Bach’s greatest compositions, it may surprise you to know that after Bach’s death in 1750, it was largely forgotten, as were many of Bach’s compositions. Bach was not a famous composer during his own lifetime. Years later, Felix Mendelssohn, another great Lutheran composer who was of Jewish ancestry but pronounced his own Reformational Lutheran faith in his youth, discovered this work thanks to his grandmother, who gave him a manuscript copy for his birthday when he was young, and in 1829, at the age of 20, Felix Mendelssohn staged this work in the city of Berlin. So, thanks to Mendelssohn, the whole Bach legacy has been renewed and brought back to public attention.

Mia Chung: The passions enduring legacy and interest is a testament to Bach’s genius and his ability to create music that transcends time and place. The first performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion likely took place on April 11th, 1727, in Leipzig’s Saint Thomas Kirche or Saint Thomas Church, where Bach was the cantor or music director. He composed music for services he conducted. He played the organ, but he also taught in the boys’ school at the Saint Thomas Church. He taught music and Latin. On a Good Friday service, in Bach’s time, one would hear part one of the St. Matthew Passion, and then there would be scripture reading and a substantial sermon up to an hour even. And then there would be part two of the St. Matthew Passion performed. So all in all, this might take about five hours. Just imagine that every year, a five-hour service. I can’t imagine that we’d be able to do that in this day and age. Now, to visualize the performance, there were two choir lofts in the Saint Thomas Church, and so there were two separate choirs and two separate orchestras. And keep in mind, this enables these two performing forces to kind of sing back and forth, even in dialog to one another. There’s also a boys choir, and then you have six soloists who stand in front of these performing forces. And then, of course, the congregants, the audience facing these performers, the librettist who’s the person who arranged the biblical text and also wrote text for the musical numbers in the work was poet Christian Friedrich Henrici, who wrote under the pen name Picander.

Mia Chung: And Bach was fond of Picander’s poetry, and so he often used it for his musical settings. Matthew, chapters 26 and 27, which include these following major events, are outlined in the text of this work. The Anointing of Jesus in Bethany by Mary, who is the sister of Lazarus. The Last Supper Judas’s. Betrayal of Jesus. Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter’s denial of Christ. Jesus’s trial before Pontius Pilate, his crucifixion, and finally his burial. Part one of the work goes up to Jesus’s arrest, and part two takes us, of course, through his death and burial. Now, the characters in the oratorio are individual ones, but also groups. There’s Jesus, who’s sung by a bass singer. There’s the evangelist who is really the narrator, or Matthew, if you will, who’s sung by a tenor. Then there’s Judas Iscariot. There’s Peter. Pontius Pilate. And finally, the chorus, which represents the crowds. There’s also the general Christian community, as represented by the chorales that are sung intermittently throughout, as well as individual Christ followers whose thoughts are captured by the individual solo numbers. Now, regarding the textures that you’re going to hear through the course of this work, there are 68 musical numbers or units in the St. Matthew Passion according to the New Bach Edition, and they’re different in nature. These textures include the following.

Mia Chung: Recitative is musical declamation that captures the syllabic rhythm of spoken text, so it doesn’t sound very melodic. It’s very rhythmic. Jesus only sings in this declarative or wretched recitative style, as does the evangelist Matthew, who is the narrator. So let me play you Jesus’s recitative that he declares in the Garden of Gethsemane. He sings, My Father, if it may be, do thou let pass this cup from me, yet not as I will, but as thou wilt? So I’m going to play that recitative. This way. This is how it goes. My father, if it may be, do thou let pass this cup from me, yet not as I will, but as thou wilt. Okay. And so when the orchestra plays with Jesus’s recitative, it sounds like this. I’m going to play the pitches that Jesus declares. So you notice how syllabically rhythmic it is, right? Not very melodic. Now there are different kinds of recitative. We’re not going to go into the details of that, but the next large textural category that you’re going to hear is an aria. It’s an unaccompanied song for a solo singer, and it’s melodic or tuneful in nature. One thing to note is that Bach often gives the soprano more encouraging or uplifting melodic tunes about God’s grace, his redemptive love. The alto sings sorrowful arias or laments, and the tenor will sing in reaction to Jesus’s suffering and pain. And finally, the bass soloist sings about the beliefs or the foundations of the Christian faith.

Mia Chung: In number 39, arguably the most famous aria in the work, Peter sings Erbarm dich, mein Gott, Lord have mercy after he denies knowing Jesus three times. And Rick and I will talk about this particular aria further and in detail later on in this presentation. Now, the chorus, this large group of people, represents crowds, and their song textures reflect on the events that were narrated by the evangelist. And these crowds could be different groups of people, priests and elders, an angry mob, even us as people, we contemporary folk. These crowds can communicate grace and gentleness, kindness on the one hand, but also judgment, self-righteousness, and anger on the other. And finally, you’re going to hear the famous Lutheran chorales, the first of which I played, O Sacred Head, now wounded, you’re going to hear three different chorales repeated various different times. That O Sacred Head, now wounded, for example, is sung and performed five times, and each time it’s orchestrated differently. It’s set in a different key, and all for very specific musical reasons. These Lutheran chorales were existing hymns, hymn tunes that were very familiar to the German public, and so it made the message of the passion deeply personal and relevant to the listeners because they were already familiar with them, having sung them in services and even in their own personal worship. Well, this concludes my introduction, and it’s now time to introduce my colleague and friend, conductor Richard Westerfield. Welcome, Rick.

Richard Westerfield: Thanks, Mia. Good to be here.

Mia Chung: It’s great to have you. Now we’ve got this weighty introduction or prelude, if you will, to this extraordinary, monumental work. And we’re going to come back to that opening movement. But before we do that, it might be fitting for us to sort of talk through what we can expect in the numbers that follow this weighty introduction. So, would you sort of introduce us to some of the concepts and things that we’ll be hearing?

Richard Westerfield: Imagine you’re sitting in the concert hall of the church and and someone stands up to sing and he starts singing the opening words of Matthew chapter 26, which is the passion account in Matthew’s gospel. And he tees up, basically tees up Jesus’s first words, and Jesus will stand up and Jesus will say, speaking to his disciples in two days, you guys know that the Passover is coming and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified. So straight away we know that this is getting to the point very quickly, he’s going to be crucified. And we hear some things that are interesting. Number one, we hear that the whole time Jesus is speaking, but not when the evangelist, the storyteller, is speaking and singing. There are strings accompanying Jesus. There’s kind of a background of strings that just kind of shimmers when he’s speaking, like a halo. Only Jesus has this. None of the other singers has this halo effect. We also notice that he tells these things that are very factual and kind of discursive, and they say that these things are going to happen. That’s one note per word, very declamatory. But then, when we get to the word that he will be crucified, Creutzig it, we get a very jagged and prolonged setting with many notes with just that one word Creutzig, that actually runs kind of upward over a tritone and then back inside and then crosses itself. So it creates a little picture of a cross musically, which is something Bach does in all his sacred music with the word cross, but especially in the St. Matthew Passion. There’s a lot to be said for this. 

Richard Westerfield: All right. So we’ve got Jesus and we’ve got the evangelist telling the story. But now there’s a third thing that’s coming at us, which is a chorus singing a kind of hymn that Bach would have called a chorale. And these are actual real church chorales or hymns that were sung in Bach’s day. They’re not Bach’s own handwriting, they’re not his melodies, but they’re his settings of these melodies, which become very important through the St. Matthew Passion. There’s a great number of them, and they’re kind of the emotional heart of the piece. They’re not just because they’re so beautiful, but because they’re where we are involved in who these people are; they’re not there at the time, right? They’re the congregation of all believers throughout all time. This congregation that’s seeing these chorales and what they’re doing is they’re responding to what’s happened the same way that you would if you were Jesus’ best friend, someone’s best friend, and he’s going to tell you he’s going to be killed. You would say, well, what have you done? And that’s what this chorale is doing. It’s leaps to Jesus, my most dearest Jesus. Literally, what wrong have you done? Such a terrible judgment should come upon you. It’s asking the question. Surely the disciples asked, but only Matthew didn’t record. So that’s what the chorale is serving to do. Not only to take the place of the disciples and ask the question, but to help us ask the question, to help us understand what’s going on, because it’s not what we would have thought if we were there.

Mia Chung: It’s great. I was sharing in the introduction that it’s also deeply personal for the congregants. You, me, we still sing these hymns in our hymnals, right? Some of these chorale settings.

Richard Westerfield: We’ve been listening to this new music that we haven’t heard before up till now. And now there’s something we know. Sing along with. So it’s very inclusive, extremely powerful.

Mia Chung: Yes, exactly. 

*Music*

Mia Chung: Wow, that was so beautiful, Rick.

Richard Westerfield: That’s so special. Yeah. Well, from here we’ve now met the chorus, the chorus of all believers and Jesus and the evangelists. So now we’ll meet the disciples. Well, they’re the same chorus. So the chorus is switching back and forth in terms of its persona. Its identity is constantly changing. Jesus says to them when they’re sitting around at dinner at the Passover, he’s saying one of you will betray me. And the disciples are like, Is it me? Is it me, is it I? Is it I? And so Bach sets this 11 times, right? 11 and then this is followed by another chorale that’s just inserted into the actions of all the action freezes. And this choir from all time and space sings a response, and they sing I am the one. Is it me? Is it me, is it me? It’s me, I’m the one who deserves to be punished. I’m the one who has caused you to be crucified. We’re all part of this problem. We’ve all contributed in our own way to breaking up the goodness that God has created, destroying the earth, destroying relationships, all these things. We’re part of that in our own way. And that’s what this chorale that follows is acknowledging right off.

 *Music*

Richard Westerfield: And arias or songs? Airs. We sometimes call them in English. Aren’t sung by anyone who is actually in the action there. And they’re not sung by people now really. They’re really kind of you and I as Christians. If we’d been there knowing what only what they knew then. So, for example, when Jesus is arrested and or when he’s taken off to be crucified, they would be frantically saying, No, don’t do this. No. But of course, we know that that had to happen, and so the perspective is one of just of a friend, of a lover of Jesus. Who? Just this person who’s changed your life, who’s just meant everything to you, is being taken away, right? So this is the reaction that we see in these aria soloists, by and large. Well, for all of them. But this one is one of the first ones. And I thought we could talk about it because it’s such a wonderful illustration of the way Bach connects ideas across completely different kinds of categories. Here we’ll hear an excerpt where the evangelist sings the words that Jesus says at the Passover meal that he has with his disciples, where he says, Take this bread, eat this is my body, right? And then drink this wine. This is the cup of my blood, which has been shed for you for the remission of sins, which will be shed for you for the remission of sins. Right. So these become kind of the words of the Holy Communion or the Eucharist or the Lord’s Table or Supper. They are obviously very, very important and very important to Luther and to Lutheranism. So Bach takes this little motive, which we’ll hear in this little beautifully set recitative, with this beautiful string writing. And then he will use that motive in the little aria that is sung straight away afterwards.

Mia Chung: So tell me, you know, we talked a little bit about the sort of personal faith that he upholds in the work. Right? He uses the work to reflect his own faith convictions. But tell us a little bit more about his own context, too, and sort of the tensions between his deep Lutheran commitments, but also his longing for a sort of renewed or transcendent spiritual experience or relationship with God.

Richard Westerfield: It is in the middle of this very complex triad, with the enlightenment and rationalism picking up, you know, obviously, in the mid-18th century and you’ve got this orthodox Lutheranism of which Bach is a champion and which he’s to uphold and defend. But then you’ve got this movement of pietism going on, too, which is about a lot of small groups and Bible studies and more individual focus on our own walk with the Lord and our devotions and confession and repentance and lots of talk of tears and crying. And, you know, it’s more of a personal kind of engagement with Jesus, and Bach is clearly attracted to that. Also, he’s got lots of Pietist sermons in his library, and he reads them. And his librettist, Heinrich, nicknamed Picander, is a big pietist. So you hear that in this music?

*Music*

Mia Chung: Okay, Rick. So now we come to one of the most dramatic moments in St. Matthew Passion. Certainly in part one, which is Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. So, walk us through what we’re going to hear in numbers 26 and 27.

Richard Westerfield: So we’ve just kind of missed all this incredibly dramatic stuff in Jesus’s prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane, which I had time to talk about those, but now it’s the end of that. The disciples are sleeping, he sees the group coming to get him. And Jesus says, it’s time. We have to go. Everybody get up. The time has come. And Judas gives him a kiss and he is arrested and led off, after which Bach immediately sets an aria. It’s a duet for soprano and alto and chorus in response to what’s just happened.

Mia Chung: Hm, powerful. Are there certain musical details that we should be listening for in this?

Richard Westerfield: So the aria itself is really kind of a different character than the one we heard earlier in G major. This is in E minor. It’s almost like the goosesteps of soldiers. Da da da da da da da da. Very rigid and stiff and these two soloists are just bewailing, you know, my Jesus is captured. My Jesus is taken away. To which this chorus responds, let him go, free him. Don’t bind him. Just like that very strong striking interjections. So it’s a very dramatic use, and you have to picture yourself in Saint Thomas Church in 1727, where all of this is happening around you. Right? Because everybody’s spatially, you have two choirs, separated. You’ve got different soloists. It’s so they’re it’s not all happening from one place. So sonically really interesting.

Mia Chung: Interesting. Let’s have a listen.

*Music*

Mia Chung: So, Rick, the first part ends with this great chorale. Could you tell us how Bach closes off this first portion of the Passion?

Richard Westerfield: So it’s a chorale, but it’s not set in the way that we’ve heard earlier. It’s not set just simply as a straightforward chorale like a hymn. It’s set as a, in a chorale fantasia kind of movement with much more modern Italianate kind of music going on. Italian, everything that in Bach’s day that was modern was from Italy, you know, anything modern, people in the church, they were like rock music today, just anything Italian, you know. Horrible. So here you’ve got these flutes. Dear, dear dear dear dear dear dear. So it’s very da da da da da. So it’s just kind of cool stuff. At least in those days it was cool. It’s not really cool anymore, but it’s fun. But so there’s energy to it and a certain joy. But it’s about something very serious. It’s bewailing Sünde, o Mensch. Zwischen deinen Sünden groß.. Oh, man, oh, man, bewail your great sin. So, you know, this is a little hard to relate to. I think for some people who don’t see sin as a category that they particularly agree with or think I mean, most people along those lines would say that, you know, sin is actually harmful because it’s going to it enables you to judge other people so one group can judge another group and wield power over another group. And it’s just it’s not helpful. Guilt and all those things, they’re not helpful terms. And so I think that’s an obstacle for people today to this piece, because you’ve got to be able to get around that somehow and understand what Bock’s talking about. So that’s, you know, I think for Luther, sin isn’t just about behavior. It’s not just a moral category, it’s also something we experience. It’s an existential thing. Luther said something incredible in his commentary on Psalm 51, where David repents and he says, the knowledge of sin is itself the feeling of sin.

Mia Chung: So, Rick, if you were in Bach’s church in his day, you would have heard part one of The Passion and then heard some scripture and a very lengthy sermon. And then you would hear part two. And it seems to me like there would have been a lot of careful thinking around how to start part two. So can you sort of expound on the artistic thinking that Bach displays in this opening work?

Richard Westerfield: Mhm. That’s a great point. He would have thought a lot about this. So he needs to connect whatever begins part two with what just happened, which is Jesus’s arrest. And what he chooses to do is to go after the feelings of Jesus’s friends and how they would have felt. So it’s a woman who starts, who sings this aria to begin part two. It’s not one of the disciples. The women are really the stars of the gospel in so many ways. They really are. And you know, the early church was mostly women. It was predominantly women. Anyway, so she’s the one who starts the second part and she’s a friend. We don’t know who she is, but she says, now is my Jesus captured and it’s sinking in. She’s starting to accept this, and she’s looking in kind of a daze for Jesus going this way. The music kind of searches up, this oboe goes like that, and then that ends in a bar of rest, and then it goes down and she’s going this way. Bar of rest. She’s just kind of in a cloud. In response to this, a chorus of believing people, sing some encouragement to her, echoing words from Song of Songs.

Richard Westerfield: Where has your beloved gone, O most beautiful among women. This beloved whom you love. This is straight out of Song of Songs, which is a love story, a pure, unadulterated love story in the Bible, and which was important to Bach and to the Pietists, because it was important to a guy named Bernard of Clairvaux back in the 11th century. He was a mystic, and he wrote a lot of sermons about the Song of Songs, drawing an analogy between the relationship of this couple and the Song of Songs to our relationship with Jesus. The bride and the bridegroom, and saw it as a very personal and very private kind of relationship, which is, I think the way contemporary evangelicals would see it, they’d be able to resonate with that kind of a sentiment. So Bach is very modern in that way as a Christian. But here at the same time, he’s straddling all these very orthodox creeds and confessions in these hymns that date back centuries. And so he’s bridging all these worlds. And this opening movement is a good example of that.

*Music*

Mia Chung: Okay, Rick. So here is where we enter the heat of Jesus being tried, right, and questioned. Take us into the musical content of this moment. The context and the performing forces that are at play.

Richard Westerfield: Okay. So this is the quote unquote first trial of Jesus. It’s the overnight trial with the Sanhedrin, the ruling elders, the chief priests, and scribes of the law. A smaller group, not all the Pharisees and Jewish people, just a small group that is determined to get a charge against Jesus that they can then bring to Pilate in order to execute Jesus, because on their own authority, they can’t commit a capital offense. They can’t execute Jesus. Only Pilate can do that as the prefect of the Roman colony there. So, they need to do that so they think they can come up with a charge, and they try to get Jesus to blaspheme in what he says and to, you know, blaspheme against God. And that’s essentially what happens here. And so what we’ll hear is that process kind of having finished up, the chief priest says, see, we’ve got him. And then all the other people in the room say, you know, he’s guilty of death. And then they start to make fun of him and hit him, hitting him and just really abusing him, slapping him and saying, You know who’s going to hit you? Who’s hitting you? Who’s hitting you? Prophesy to us. Oh, great son of God. You know, prophesy to us. And it’s followed immediately by a chorale which uses those exact same words who hit you, but in a very tender, totally, totally different way out of compassion and empathy.

*Music*

Mia Chung: So in my introduction, I gave a description of an aria as a simple melody with an accompaniment. In contrast to, say, recitative, for example, and sort of identified number 39 as perhaps the most famous aria in this work. So can you tell us more about what’s going on in the text and in the music?

Richard Westerfield: So it is the most famous, well-known aria in the St. Matthew Passion. It is where Peter repents of having betrayed Jesus, denied Jesus, to the servant girls who detect his accent as being Galilean. You’re not one of us. You are one of his. And he denies that three times, as Jesus said he would. So he goes out and he weeps bitterly. And this is set as a violin solo against this alto solo. Interestingly, not a male voice type, but the alto. So it’s not Peter necessarily singing, it’s Peter and all of us. It’s his repentance and it’s our repentance. And the text is simply Lord have mercy. It’s really the Kyrie of the Catholic original Old Roman Catholic Church and still is, have mercy on me. And that’s really all we need to say. It’s all we can say at a moment like this.

Mia Chung: Okay, Rick. So we’ve just heard about erbarme dich, number 39, the most profound aria, likely the most profound aria in the entire work. And if you’re Bach, how do you follow? What could possibly follow that, given the emotional depth of the expression.

Richard Westerfield: Well, he’s going to follow it with some kind of agreement from all of us that it’s not just Peter, it’s all of us. And so he sets a chorale, bin ich gleich von dir gewesen und ist, which is, “although I have strayed from you, yet I turn back once again”. And it’s all of us saying, we’ve all done this. And the rest of it is very affirmative and confident, saying, your son has settled the account for us through his anguish and death agony. I don’t deny my guilt, but your grace and favor is much greater than the sin I see in myself. Just very simple. And it’s not like anything emotional. It’s just a statement of acknowledgment and kind of confession that it’s not like I’m pointing fingers at Peter, like, how could you do this? I would never be in that position because we all do things like that.

Mia Chung: I do love the fact that, you know, in chorale Texture, because they’re like hymns. It’s very vertical. We’re just singing harmonies. There’s something very stately and dignified about it and objective, if you will, you know, versus like the painful emotion of an aria, for example. Let’s listen.

*Music*

Mia Chung: So Rick, Peter’s sense of regret and remorse and repentance, is not the only expression of that emotion. There is also that of Judas in number 42. Can you take us through that as well?

Richard Westerfield: Yes. This is a fantastic aria. Virtuoso, brilliant, glittering aria, extremely Italian. It’s like it could be on an opera stage in Rome. I mean, it was absolutely horrifying to traditional Lutheran audiences on Good Friday of the most sacred day of the year, to have this kind of thing. So Bach is pressing every button he can to make his point. So, where is Peter’s Aria is deeply heartfelt and sincere and just really, really internal. This is is external and extroverted and flashy and flamboyant and virtuosic, as you can imagine. So to set the scene, Judas has thrown back his money, saying, this is blood money. You can have it back. His 30 pieces of silver that the Pharisees promised him and that they’ve just given him. And he sings this aria, saying to give me back my Jesus, what he wants. But it’s not like he’s really saying he did anything wrong. He’s just kind of frustrated with the whole situation, and he’s angry. He’s not really finding anything in himself that he did wrong. He just wants Jesus back. Please, you know, give him back.

Speaker3: I gave you the money back. Give me Jesus back. So it’s you know, Paul in second Corinthians seven distinguishes between what he calls godly regret or godly sorrow, which leads to regret and worldly sorrow, which leads to death. And Bach is making that distinction. I think here it’s the difference between, it’s between hating the sin, which is what Peter did, and hating yourself, which is what Judas did. And I think a lot of us get confused with the repentance. It’s not hating yourself, it’s hating the sin. And there’s a difference. And so Paul makes that point in that passage in the Bible, and Bach drives it home clear. And musically, it’s just so vivid that you couldn’t have a more vastly, different way to set a piece of music. Everything is pictured, you hear the money, the silver flying in the air. There are 30 pieces of silver where there are 30, 32nd notes, going up, capturing that. It’s just glittering. The sound literally is like glittering like silver. There’s no there’s no real sorrow.

Mia Chung: So it’s interesting, Rick. It’s almost as if the text reveals sort of the external content, right? Or meaning, but the music reflects the heart condition. Exactly right. That’s pretty marvelous. Let’s have a listen.

*Music*

Mia Chung: One of the major climax points, right? The most dramatic points where Jesus is before the crowds and Pontius Pilate and his future is going to be determined. So walk us through now these sections, numbers 45 and 50 of the passion.

Richard Westerfield: So this is Pilate thinks that he can get the crowd to sympathize with an alternative to Jesus, because Pilate doesn’t think Jesus is guilty because he doesn’t think there’s anything to this charge of blasphemy that the Jews have handed to him, that the scribes and chiefs, the priests of the law, have handed to him. He doesn’t really care what their religion says about blasphemy. So he’s very reluctant to issue an order of capital punishment for Jesus. So he’s trying to kind of get out of it without looking weak. So he finds out that on this day, one can exchange a prisoner for another one. One can kind of get a get out of jail free card. So there’s someone who’s been in prison named Barabbas, who’s an insurrectionist who is a real problem for the Jewish people, he had thought, and he was pretty sure the crowd would choose him to be crucified over Jesus, but he turns out to be wrong. And that’s what we find out in this section. He misunderstood that the Jews actually saw Barabbas as a kind of Robin Hood figure on their behalf against the Romans, and they were quite sympathetic to Barabbas. So that fails for Pilate and puts him in a situation. So I wanted to play that for you. Just the drama of that moment. And then how the turba chorus, we call it the big crowd chorus, responds, which is with the most so far, the most blood curdling crowd chorus saying, let him be crucified. Which is set to a very angular kind of tritone thing that crosses itself constantly and shows the sign of the cross, Zeichen des Kreuzes. 

Mia Chung: Great. Okay. Let’s listen.

*Music*

Mia Chung: So Rick, as his box sort of method, he seems to follow up a really dramatic scene or a moment of great emotional intensity, again with a chorale.

Richard Westerfield: And so he knows we need some relief. He knows we can’t take it. You know, all the crazy anger. So here again, he will go straight to a chorale. So, let him be crucified as followed straight on by this marvelous text, Wei erstaunlich diese strafe, which is “how amazing is this punishment”? How amazing, miraculous is this punishment, the good shepherd suffers for his sheep. The Lord, the one who pays the just penalty for his servants. He’s both just and a justifier of us unrighteous people. I think John Stott says, God is righteously righteous, the unrighteous. He does this action of justifying those who are unrighteous to make them for him righteous. And that’s a gift that God gives. And that’s what this little hymn is acknowledging. So it’s going back to what’s the core of their faith, which is this idea of the atonement of Jesus, his work on the cross, what’s going on here? Which is this price that he’s paying, this terrible cost that God is paying to redeem us and for him to bear our sins in our place and in order to enable us to have his righteousness before God. That’s the idea of penal substitutionary atonement, which Bach and Luther really felt was kind of the whole superstructure of their faith. 

*Music*

Richard Westerfield: And so as that chorale finishes, the evangelist stands up and says, and Pilate says, What evil has he done? And from there Bach takes us into the most personal and private, and intimate moment in the St. Matthew Passion, which is an aria called, Aus Liebe word mein Retter sterben, ‘Out of love my Savior will die’. It’s preceded by a beautiful recitativo, which I don’t have time to go through, but it’s just sets forth how everything Jesus has done, and it’s been just so wonderful, all these healings and all these things. Nothing else has Jesus done. She says nothing of this, just good. So for this, Jesus is going to die out of love for us and it’s special because the texture is just so strikingly different than anything else we’ve heard. Baroque music is all about the bassline. Baroque music came to be because of the bassline. Before that, in medieval music, Renaissance music, there was an egalitarianism among all the parts. There was no sense of harmony, like the bass note was really important. Baroque music changed all that, and it all became about the harmony. And then that enabled music to enlarge and become so much bigger and do so many more things, because we now had tonal harmony. But here the bassline is gone. We just have the beautiful oboes and a flute solo. And the oboes are deeper oboes, older oboes that have a very honeyed sound that are associated with love and with this very rich, special sonority. You’ll hear the difference. They don’t sound like it would sound more like English horns. And she just sings this very simple, very beautiful melody, echoing this lovely flute solo that sounds as innocent as you could possibly. You couldn’t write anything sounding more innocent than this music.

*music*

Mia Chung: In number 54, we revisit the Passion Chorale. Could you expound on that a bit more fully in this moment?

Richard Westerfield: Yes. The Passion Chorale occurs five times. It’s an old chorale. Bach didn’t write it, but he sets it differently each of these five times. And this is one of these five times. This is the fourth of the five times. And it’s with the text that we know best. O Sacred Head, now wounded, ‘O heiliger Kopf jetzt verwundet’. And it’s the longest one. It has a repeat, and it’s set just as the Roman soldiers have been flogging Jesus and scourging him, and he’s he’s badly beaten up, and it even says the evangelist says they hit his head. And that’s what triggers this chorale, O head full of blood and wounds. It’s a striking moment, as it is with all five of these passion Chorale’s. It’s a beautiful Chorale. We hear it first, midway through the first the first part, we hear it in E major there, and then it returns a few moments later in E flat major. So it’s four sharps now down to three flats, and then we hear it in D major. So it’s now just two sharps, and now here it’s one flat. And then the last time we’ll hear it, which is after Jesus’ death, it’s no sharps or flats. So Bach is very carefully gone from 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 to no accidentals in the key signature. As we approach Jesus’ death, he’s also very careful about the number of accidentals he’ll use in the actual chorales and accidental.

Richard Westerfield: It’s a sharp or a flat inside the work, so it’s like you want to be different than the key signature. You got to put a sharp or a flat in there. So he’s counting those up. These are the number of accidentals. And if you add these up you get the number 74. Include the repeats. You add those all up. If I don’t know who would want to do that. But someone’s obviously done that and it adds up to 74, which is the number you get if you take the word Christ and you add it up alphabetically. So C would be three, H would be eight, R would be, I don’t know, 18 something like that. You add those all up and you get 74. So the number of accidentals in the chorales, those five Passion chorales adds up to 74. The name of Christ. You also get if you add up the ending key signatures, you get 25, of the ending key signatures. 25 is the stigmata or the wounds of Jesus. There are five wounds of Jesus. If you take five squared, you get 25. I’m not kidding. This Bach thought all this through. If you want to add up the actual, the key signatures all together, you’ll get 40, which is the temptation in the wilderness. So Bach is the number of times he would have had to change things in order to make this all work.

Speaker3: If you think about this, is really kind of mind boggling that he was able to sort this out, but this is what he was so famous for. Playing things backwards. Playing things upside down, just without any notice, just right off the bat. You can just do that. He just had a marvelous mathematical ability. So his hero wasn’t any other musician. It was Sir Isaac Newton. He just loved science. And he loved the order of creation and the perfection of creation. He loved mathematics. And so he’s just, he’s really striving in everything he does, but most especially in this incredibly important chorale to to do something for God that’s special. He wants to glorify God by what he’s doing. He doesn’t care if anybody notices. He knows nobody’s counting in the audience. He’s just doing it for God. He wants to make it as perfect as he can for God, and that motivates everything he does. Everything is written at the end. Sdg. Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be the glory. Or at the beginning. Jj Yeshua. Jesus. Help! So you see it in this kind of thing. You just kind of can’t believe that he took this care with this chorale. But it’s that important to him. And it’s that important to this piece.

Mia Chung: I think that’s so marvelous because in the contemporary understanding of vocation, it’s so much about the work, your profession, how you make your living or what it is that you devote your time to. Whereas what this expression is about is really the quiet offerings before the very private and quiet offerings of the heart to God. Because who would even know that these sort of ciphers or codes or numbers or, you know, are actually embedded in the music? It’s only a person, a nerd, or, you know, someone who really loves this stuff, who would chase it down to actually identify these sorts of secret codes embedded in the music.

Richard Westerfield: We all approached our work that way. We did it for, you know, for God or for not for our employer. Not as an exchange, but did it that seriously? Yeah. For Luther, the idea of going to heaven when you die, that kind of thing was kind of, well, that’s been sorted out. Jesus is taking care of that. Well, we can do. Now is our vocation. So if you’re a wheat farmer, do it for the glory of God. Do it really well. So your vocation becomes really important, and it’s just a wonderful thing. What you’re doing really matters. It’s not just a an exchange of money for what you do. It really matters to God. And that carries on 200 years later to Bach.

Mia Chung: Great. So let’s hear this fourth version of the chorale, the passion chorale.

Richard Westerfield: Most beautiful, I think of all 5.

*Music*

Mia Chung: So we finally come to this moment where Jesus has died. He’s paid the ultimate price for all of us. And the entire work has been moving to this moment. And what does Bach do now to convey the importance of this moment?

Richard Westerfield: Well, we’ve just been through a very emotional setting of his last words on the cross. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Which is set in a very striking way in the key of, you know, you couldn’t go as far away from where you were. Bach goes into this setting of Eli lama sabachthani, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And that’s now behind us. And the evangelists then say, Jesus has died. And then we have, of course, a chorale. But unlike the other four passion chorales, this setting is a cappella. We do it without instruments, and it’s very quiet. And what I think is so special about it is that Bach isn’t trying to teach a lesson here. He’s not trying to preach anything. You know, he’s not making a point. It’s just the text is when one day I must depart, please don’t depart from me. When one day I face these fears, please help me and take away my fears. You know, it’s kind of identifying with what is just so normal to be anxious at that moment, you know, not pretending to be Mr. Religion or anything. You know, you’re just real. And Bach knows that about us.

*Music*

Mia Chung: Well. So far, Rick, we’ve heard a number of arias, and typically sort of the more positive and kind of pure and upbeat and encouraging and warm arias seem to be assigned to female singers. I typically think of the soprano, for example. But we come to 65 and it’s a bass aria, and the words, lass mein Herz so rein sein wie deins, ‘let my heart be pure as thine resound’. It’s pretty powerful. And of course, Jesus’s voice is also cast in that. That bass in the recitative is in the bass register as well.

Richard Westerfield: Often, it’ll be the same singer who’ll do both. Jesus has died now, so he’ll sing that solo. That’s how it was apparently performed in Bach’s original performance. You know, he Bach didn’t have a ton of resources, so he would, you know, I don’t know if they were paid double time or double, doubling, right, for doing that, but they did that. But anyway. Yes. So you’re absolutely right. But it’s my favorite aria in this whole piece. It’s just so wonderfully unselfconscious and just straightforward, absolute 100% devotion that you hear expressed in this very, very joyful aria with these old oboes, the low set oboes that sound so warm and inviting, doubling the strings in a just a very pastoral setting. It’s in 12 eight, as we noted before, and it’s connecting to the first movement, The meter of 12 eight. He says, Jesus, make my heart pure so that I can bury you inside my heart, so that I can entomb you inside my heart, so I can take you in. I want you inside of me. And he says this in a way that we can all identify with. He’s relating to what’s just happened, which is that Joseph of Arimathea has donated this off-the-charts, top-of-the-line tomb for Jesus never been used. Usually, tombs are used by whole families, and this has never been used. It’s brand new, and it’s an incredible sacrifice for this guy, whoever he is, for Jesus, and Jesus has been laid to rest there. And this is the aria that follows. He says, I want to bury or take Jesus into my own heart. You’ll just sense the sincerity and unselfconsciousness of this beautiful aria.

*Music*

Richard Westerfield: After this, there’s, of course, a B section. All these arias are in an ABBA form. In song form. The B section says some new things, but what I love at the end is that he says, world, get out, let Jesus in. He’s just making a choice and it’s the last thing he says before the A section reprises and we hear this music again.

*Music*

Mia Chung: So, Rick, how does Bach conclude a work of this magnitude? Jesus has died. There’s just the sense of darkness and despair. And he closes it now with a chorus. Walk us through that.

Richard Westerfield: This is a grand funeral type chorus with two choruses, very much like the opening chorus, which we’ll talk about next. And it has a feeling of sadness, but there’s also a lot of it’s in C minor, but a lot of it’s set in E-flat major, the relative major of C minor. And so it has a very positive tone as well. It’s trying to balance kind of the sadness and loss that we feel at Jesus’s death, with the fact that this is accomplished so much for the world and for humanity and for creation by rectifying all things and bringing things to rights through his taking on all the sin that’s brought about all this destruction and decay and alienation and everything. So there’s this positive? It’s not just the resurrection that does that. The resurrection vindicates that it inaugurates that. It seals it in a way. But the work of Jesus is done on Good Friday. The accomplishment of Jesus is Good Friday.

*Music*

Mia Chung: Okay, Rick. So we’ve just sort of journeyed through the high points of the entire work. Now that brings us back to the beginning of the passion which we said we would save for last. And in fact, it might have a different sort of resonance because we’ve walked through some of the high points already. But this opening number is really a universe unto itself. There is so much packed into it, but it does this powerful job of setting the stage for this enormous work. So walk us through how Bach does that.

Richard Westerfield: The opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion is one of the most magisterial preludes, if you can even call it a prelude to any work of this kind of music, any oratorio-like work. There’s really nothing like it. There was nothing like it that preceded it. It’s really extraordinary in so many ways. It’s for two choruses with their own orchestras, plus a third treble chorus, a boy choir with its own organ and Bach uses this to have us envision a scene where the daughters of Zion are on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to lament the death of Jesus. They’re calling to us to come help them lament. Come, all ye daughters, help me lament. They then break into two choruses, one speaking to the other, asking questions back and forth of the other. Because the way the Saint Thomas Church was laid out, the choirus’s were situated antiphonally, so across from one another. So it would have created a really interesting spatial sound for you sitting in the congregation listening to this back and forth. And they say, see? And the other one says, what? And it says, see the bridegroom. Then again, they say, see? And the second quarter says, how? See him like a lamb, the bridegroom like a lamb.

Richard Westerfield: So we’re having this picture of a bridegroom of a royal wedding. Which is why we have this dotted rhythm. Bom bom bom, very royal sounding like a lamb. Which is why we have this very somber key of E minor. So both of these things come together and they come together in the key signature in the meter, which is 12 eight, which is associated with pastoral music in Bach overwhelmingly uses 12 eight for music that’s about shepherds and sheep, and lamb. So in that sense, it connects to Jesus as the lamb who was slain in this movement. But 12 eight is also used in things like How Bright Shines the Morning Star, which is about kingship and royalty. So it’s also associated with Jesus as being a king. So it’s the king who becomes a lamb. This is the story of a crucified king who is being redeemed to restore the kingdom of God as it was originally intended. Where there is justice, where there’s peace, where there’s righteousness. And that’s what he’s here to do. That’s what this work that he’s going to accomplish in the next 2.5 hours is all for. It’s to bring about this kingdom where we’re freed from the things that tend to pull us down into our less noble selves.

Richard Westerfield: So this is happening. These questions are happening back and forth. And all of a sudden we hear this new thing, which is this third chorus of trebles, either girls or women, or in Vox de boys singing a solo soprano part to the old German Agnus Dei, Lamb of God, which was O Lamb of God, nicht schuldig, ‘O Lamb of God, not guilty,’ who was slaughtered on the beam of the cross. And it goes on. And this kind of stands like a light over everything that’s happening, all this dialog that I described. And this comes out like this glinting bright light over the ensemble in E minor. So it’s just glorious in its effect. And again, the congregation is sitting there. They’re listening to this strange music they don’t know about the Daughters of Zion talking to one another, asking these questions. And then they hear a hymn they’ve known since they were three years old, this old German hymn, O Lamb of God, nicht schuldig. And it’s just a magical moment. And it carries on the whole hymn. All four stanzas of the hymn are sung and played in this movement.

Mia Chung: I find this extraordinary for several reasons. The expression of his own personal faith, right? The richness of the music. But there’s something very deeply, artistically speaking, contemporary about it. Right? Not only is it very expressive of his own personal state. I mean, this is like Beethoven we think of as a composer who just really plumbed the depths of his personal experiences and feelings. Right. But Bach is doing this way ahead of Beethoven, right? Investing his own personal feeling, but almost cinematographically like a film even before film existed, right? Pulling us back to a moment, it’s almost like a commentary. Like in questioning. This has happened, right? As if it brings us to the end. But we’re now back at the beginning. It’s like this virtual loop. Right. A cycle that’s almost, you can go on and on. So what a brilliant way to open the work. It’s extraordinary. So deeply personal, but artistically very contemporary, experimental, if you will, and almost like a movie.

Richard Westerfield: Yeah. Very much. It’s. There’s a theologian I love at Cambridge, Simeon Zahl, who uses the term, technology of the heart. And he applies this to liturgies and sacred works of all kinds. But this is really what Bach is doing. He’s creating a technology of the heart where he’s bringing us down a path using the technology of music, if you can use the word that way. He’s working us wonderfully and bringing us to a place where we can begin to humble ourselves and be open to what the Bible is going to tell us in this passage. So he’s working us brilliantly in this technological way, using everything that he’s got at his disposal to create an effective technology, how we feel. Because what we think in the end doesn’t matter. We’re not just thinking things. It’s about what we feel. Cranmer said, “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.”

*Music*

Mia Chung: Well, Rick, we’ve sort of traversed the St. Matthew Passion in its entirety, of course, highlighting key moments. And we just discussed the opening number, if Bach were alive today, and certainly in some ways he still is right, because his music is continuing to be performed and so we definitely catch the spirit and meaning, and intent that he wanted us to understand. But let’s talk about the relevance of this message in our current context. What is it saying to us, the 21st-century listener?

Richard Westerfield: Well, I think he’d be baffled by the 21st century listener. In some ways, we’re so different from him. But we all know that there’s something a little bit off about us. We would call it different things. The way I think of it is you’re at a party, everybody’s getting together, having a good time, and at the end of it someone says, let’s take a selfie. It’s a group selfie. And so they take the picture and then text it around to everybody, and you get the ding on your phone and you press it and you look at it. And who’s the first person you look at? It’s you. It’s you over everybody. There’s just something funny about that. You know, we’re just a little too interested in ourselves. There’s just something funny about it. And if you follow that through and kind of go, well, there’s something off, all of this is based on that idea that there’s something that needs to be put to rights. Something has to be fixed. There’s a problem. And from that problem grows all the problems that we have, from our personal problems to our problems with taking care of the creation to everything. And that’s what Bach is working with. If you don’t think there’s a problem, then this isn’t going to make any sense at all. Bach is going to be befuddled and probably get frustrated. He was a very tempestuous guy. But if you can see that, then I think if you can see that there’s something broken, however you want to define it, and there are lots of ways of thinking about it, really are, then I think that’s a starting point into this music, because this is one solution that’s on offer.

Mia Chung: You invoked Augustine earlier on as an inspiration to Martin Luther and then Martin Luther to Bach. And it’s very sort of Augustinian to talk about sort of the yearnings of the heart and how the heart is led in various different directions. But these are really expressions of a yearning for Christ ultimately. 

Richard Westerfield: You’re longing for something you don’t know what it is.

Mia Chung: Exactly, exactly.

Richard Westerfield: The heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. Well, what is that? You know you don’t know. But even to be searching means that there’s this phrase of Blaise Pascal, the mathematician Blaise Pascal. He said, thou wouldst not seek me, hadst thou not already found me. But to seek is already in a sense, to find.

Mia Chung: And that’s so powerful. And then for Bach to then expound on the jewel that is to be found. Right. The truth that leads to flourishing, regardless of what one has done or experienced, or where one is from, or what time one lives in, or where one lives. You know, it’s this universal solution to the fundamental problem which you outlined earlier on.

Richard Westerfield: Right. And everywhere that I’ve been doing this piece involved with this piece doesn’t matter what country, what situation. Super top orchestra, not very good orchestra, all over the place. Everybody finds this something in this and is moved by it. There’s a lot of tears in the orchestra and in the choir. And it’s not something people just show up and play through and go home and take their check. It’s really, you can come to this from so many ways and be richer at the end of it. Especially if you’re a Christian, I think, but it’s not like just for Christians at all, it’s for everyone.

Mia Chung: In closing, I just remember this famous quote from a scientific researcher in Holland who used to listen to Bach St. Matthew Passion annually. And I referenced this in the introduction of this presentation that it’s performed hundreds of hundreds of times in Holland, during this Lenten season. But this is what he said, “The only time that I wonder if there is a God is when I hear Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.”

Richard Westerfield: You remember Claude Frank? I’m sure you knew Claude Frank, he was the same way. So many musicians are like that, I’ve heard that so many times. That’s so great. 

Mia Chung: Maybe that’s a great way to close this presentation. And also, Rick, thank you so much for sharing the richness of your thinking as you integrate theology and composition and sort of interpretation and your experience with this work. It’s been a very encouraging time, I should say, and rich as well. And I also just want to thank everyone who’s joined us for this presentation today, and wish everybody a really meaningful Good Friday. And of course, the joyous day of Easter to come. Thank you, everybody.

Richard Westerfield: Thank you.