Residentie Orkest and the St Matthew Passion


Bach and his passion

For many people, spring doesn’t begin with blossoming trees, but with the first notes of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Every year, thousands seek out that same experience: a moment of stillness, reflection, and comfort. Johann Sebastian Bach’s music is thus more than just a concert; it is a tradition. For the Residentie Orkest , this Easter tradition Residentie Orkest since 1907.

And to think that the St. Matthew Passion was left to gather dust after Bach’s death. It was the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy who managed to bring the “Grosse Passion” back to the music stands. On March 11, 1829, roughly a hundred years after the premiere in Leipzig, he conducted the first performance at the Berlin Singakademie from behind the grand piano !). It did feature a massive choir—158 singers—and numerous cuts: chorales and arias, in particular, had to be sacrificed.

Nevertheless, it was a great success, and Bach’s music began a well-deserved revival. The Netherlands followed in 1870 in Rotterdam, and not long after, it was Amsterdam’s turn. It was Willem Mengelberg who, starting in 1899, established the Passion tradition of annual performances on Palm Sunday at the Concertgebouw. Mengelberg’s approach, incidentally, was quite different from what we are used to today: a large choir and orchestra (450 people!) and no Baroque instruments. He also shortened the work considerably. And yet a performance still took an eternity because of the slow tempos.

"The St. Matthew Passion is about man in all his facets, and Bach knows how to express human emotions such as unconditional love, betrayal, sorrow and self-sacrifice in an unparalleled way."

- Peter Dijkstra


’s MasterpieceWhere does one even begin when trying to say something meaningful about this centuries-old masterpiece? Jan Willem de Vriend once remarked: “This piece humbles me. I feel like a tiny mouse in the world’s largest cathedral, doing my best not to get lost.” According to Peter Dijkstra, chief conductor of the Netherlands Chamber Choir, who is once again conducting the St. Matthew Passion with the Residentie Orkest this year, “the story of Jesus’s suffering, as Bach set it to music, has enormous dramatic power, and the human aspect of the story fascinates me: it is about humanity in all its facets, and Bach knows how to express human emotions such as unconditional love, betrayal, sorrow, and self-sacrifice in an unparalleled way. These emotions are universal, and that makes the St. Matthew Passion a timeless masterpiece. As a religious person, the Passion story means a great deal to me, and the masterful way in which Bach sets this work to music adds an extra dimension to it. I regard the performance of a Passion as a recurring ritual, and it has a fixed place not only in the church year but also in my life."

Tradition
The St. Matthew Passion stands in a long tradition, Bach did not come up with it plumply. For as early as the tenth century, the passion story - the story of Christ's suffering and death - was sung on Good Friday . Here the roles of Christ, narrator (evangelist) and people were divided among different (groups of) singers. Around 1500, polyphonic passions emerged, and as we enter the Baroque era, we see the emergence of the oratorio passion: the literal text from the Gospel of Matthew is supplemented with new, free texts that serve as meditations and chorales. And so it is with Bach, where the free texts are written by Picander, the pseudonym of the young Christian Friedrich Henrici (1700-1764), Opperpostkommisar at Leipzig.

Structure
The structure of the Matthäus is quite clear. After the grand opening chorus - "Kommt, ihr Töchter, half mir klagen" - the evangelist tells (or rather recites) Jesus' Passion story with minimal musical accompaniment. These recitatives are punctuated by arias and chorales sung by soloists and choir. Jesus, of course, also appears, sung by a low male voice and accompanied by lovely strings, as if by a halo. Except for the phrase "Eli, eli, lama asabthani" ("My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me") where the strings are absent: Bach thus illustrates the complete desolation of Christ. The Matthäus ends at death and entombment with the final chorale 'Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder', sung by both choirs. Indeed, two choirs, because the Matthäus is double-choired which produces a fantastic stereo effect but especially a tremendous vividness in the sung texts.

Most Beautiful Choice
Unfortunately, we know nothing of the very first performance on Good Friday , April 11, 1727. No records survive what listeners thought of the piece. They probably reacted coolly to the new-sounding portions of the Passion. In any case, since Bach's music was part of the church service on Good Friday , people will not have run away. Incidentally, that did happen when the St. Matthew Passion was first performed in Amsterdam in 1874. Audience members walked out of the hall during the final chorus. According to tradition, conductor Johannes Verhulst turned around and cried out with tears in his eyes: "People, what are you doing? You are running away from the most beautiful song ever written! Those days are really over.
Jan Jaap Zwitser

Last tickets for our Matthäus Passion in Leiden and The Hague?
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Residentie Orkest and the St Matthew Passion

  • First performed in 1907 in Rotterdam.

  • In 1908, it was The Hague’s turn—though it was actually two weeks after Easter.

  • Back then, a ticket cost 0.75 guilders, but you were allowed to bring “a lady” along.

  • In 1910, the audience in The Hague was asked “not to leave before the final chorus had ended.”

  • There was only a ten-minute intermission between the acts.

  • In 1935, the first collaboration with the Hague Sailors' Choir took place.

  • After World War II, the Residentie Orkest performed at the "Matthäustempel" of the Netherlands: the Grote Kerk in Naarden, featuring famous soloists such as Jo Vincent, Elly Ameling, and Aafje Heynis.

  • In 1947, the Residentie Orkest performed Residentie Orkest St. Matthew Passion fifteen times.

  • After numerous performances in Naarden, the orchestra has also performed frequently at the Pieterskerk in Leiden, Last alongside the renowned Netherlands Chamber Choir.

  • In 2006, a unique version was performed: Jan Rot’s Dutch translation. The Dr. Anton Philipszaal was almost too small, and the audience rewarded the choir, soloists, and orchestra with a standing ovation lasting well over twenty minutes. Could Bach ever have imagined that?