There’s something about Matthew! The puzzling preponderance of Passions

By Anne Hodgkinson, 17 March 2025

In the Netherlands, one sign of spring as reliable as hay fever is the announcements of performances of J.S. Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’ in the weeks before Easter. Whether it’s the local choral society or the country’s top choirs, it seems everyone puts one on. You’ll see other passions and composers, but the St Matthew is the most frequently performed by far. The fact that this is the appropriate time of year liturgically (Jesus was crucified and died on Good Friday) partly explains the timing. However, there are more performances of it in the Netherlands, in both per capita and absolute terms, than anywhere else in the world, even in Bach’s native Germany. On average there are about 200 performances here every year, compared to only a few in, say, Germany. What is going on?

The tradition began with reciting the Gospels on Good Friday. (The medieval ‘Passion play’, one of the mystery plays, is a secular offshoot whose descendants include the hit musical ‘The Passion’ and ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’.) Over the centuries, simple chant became more polyphonic, that is, having more than one vocal line at once, then added instruments, and by the Baroque period the standard forces had expanded to choir and orchestra, plus soloists including a narrator (the ‘Evangelist’) and Jesus. Bach’s St Matthew Passion is a masterpiece. First performed in 1727 in Leipzig, presumably on Good Friday, it is big, employing two choirs and two orchestras plus vocal soloists, and it usually lasts at least three hours. Bach weaves the story through a huge range of emotions and colours in chorales, choruses, arias and duets, giving it a dramatic power verging on the operatic.

For some Christians it is a consummate religious experience. They can experience Jesus’ suffering vicariously and have moments for reflection in the chorales (hymn tunes; Bach’s audience would have sung along with them). The piece ends solemnly with Jesus’s burial as the grief-stricken choir – unaware he’ll be resurrected in three days – wishes him ‘Ruhe sanfte, sanfte Ruh’ (‘gently rest’). Applause is often considered inappropriate after church performances. Martin Luther is on record as expressly disapproving of acting out the Passion ‘in words and pretense’, since both complicated polyphony and sheer beauty would distract attention from the message. Christians, he felt, should experience Christ’s suffering in real life. (He’d be rolling in his grave listening to this music!) Nevertheless, Protestants and Catholics alike kept the Passion oratorio as part of their Good Friday liturgy. Bach’s piece uses the Luther Bible as a basis, compatible with the Dutch Reformed Church’s mix of Calvinism and Lutheranism.

For the non-religious, St Matthew Passion is also sublime both as drama and as music. Its depth of feeling is something many people don’t associate with Bach, whose ingenious counterpoint is sometimes considered too mathematical to tick any emotional boxes. It has an amazing diversity of melody, harmony, flashy passages, poignant moments and some stunning effects, like the shimmering strings that always accompany Jesus when he sings, like a sonic halo, to name just one. It’s full of details; you can listen to it over and over and find something new every time.

It’s indisputably great music. So why don’t other countries put it on as much as the Netherlands? I think the answer is a confluence of several factors in addition to sheer excellence: the ‘Mengelberg tradition’ and its opposition; the strong Dutch choral presence and a good Lutheran ‘fit’; the early music movement; and the fact that the original language isn’t a problem for the Dutch.

After Bach’s death in 1750, his music was largely forgotten. The St Matthew Passion was not performed again until 1829. The composer Felix Mendelssohn conducted a choir and orchestra of hundreds (Bach may have used 50 or 60), at the time appropriate for such a monument, and made drastic cuts to the score, including two-thirds of the arias. Today these adaptations would be unconscionable violations of the composer’s intentions, but despite or perhaps because of them, the concert was a hit. The first performance in the Netherlands was in 1870 in Rotterdam. In 1899, Willem Mengelberg conducted the piece with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Toonkunstkoor Amsterdam in The Concertgebouw for the first time. Their annual Palm Sunday concerts became so popular they were even broadcast live on the radio.

In a recurring and centuries-old debate over whether religious music should be enjoyed as music, a growing faction felt that Mengelberg’s interpretations were over-romantic and heavy (he once had 1,650 performers in all), with an ‘empty virtuosity’ that occluded the spiritual message. Mengelberg was Catholic; you could reasonably liken his performances to an overdecorated Catholic church. Many Protestants felt strongly that the piece should only be performed in a church, on Good Friday. An opposition movement was born, and in 1921 the Netherlands Bach Society (Nederlandse Bachvereniging) was founded with the aim of making the spirit of Bach’s religious music ‘speak as purely as possible’. Their first St Matthew Passion was on Good Friday in 1922, in the Grote Kerk in Naarden. Now there were two camps, and both ‘types’ of performances continued to proliferate.

Then came World War II and the occupation. One could be forgiven for thinking that the Dutch might have stopped putting on or attending a long oratorio by a German composer, sung in German. And the piece’s anti-Semitic undertone would not have gone unnoticed, especially once the atrocities began. But the Passion performances only seemed to offer solace and hope, and to bring people together. The piece is now a ‘civic ritual’ all over the country. Good Friday in Naarden is the one to see and be seen at, especially for government dignitaries – it’s often sold out a year in advance.

The 1960s saw the Early Music revolution, a movement committed (not entirely unlike Mengelberg’s detractors) to performing Renaissance and Baroque music in the way the composers intended. It made classical music cool, adding a younger, ‘hipper’ audience. Today orchestras including the Bach Society playing ‘authentic’ instruments or copies have joined the mainstream, alongside performances by modern orchestras playing modern instruments.

The Netherlands has a strong choral tradition and consequently, many choirs. Most vocal music works best in its original language, and the German language is familiar to people on both sides of the conductor here. The St Matthew Passion is so much a part of choral repertoire here that many choirs give multiple performances every year. One particular for-profit outfit crams over 35 into the season, sometimes two a day, and even one on Easter Sunday (my husband comments, ‘Luther would be somersaulting in his grave!’).

I’ve sung it many times (both choir 1 and 2), and during the 1990s I toured with it in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Israel. Eight performances in ten days was exhausting. I think it’s a masterpiece and fun to perform, although personally I find the chorales ponderous, especially if the conductor is milking them for meaning.

If you haven’t ever attended one, I do recommend it (trigger warning: contains descriptions of graphic violence). It’s so good that one Prof. Luth of Groningen said, ‘even mediocre performances of it are impressive’. The Bach Society’s will be excellent and you can look for tickets here (full disclosure time: my husband is one of their singers) but there are many more everywhere. Happy Easter!