A listening companion · Bach under Klemperer
Bach’s largest work, in one recording, track by track: the whole German text, every speaker and singer, and for each number its tempo, its harmonic tension and what it means. Along the way: how the Passion was sung in church, in the Catholic Holy Week and at a Lutheran Good Friday Vespers in Leipzig.
Recorded for EMI at Kingsway Hall and Abbey Road, London, in 1961, and released in 1962. Remastered by Warner Classics in 2023. Klemperer was 75, and had returned to the podium after severe burns suffered in 1958.
Running time: in 78 tracks: Part I , Part II . Track numbers follow the 2023 remaster as it streams; labels on the cards give the numbers of the New Bach Edition (NBA), used by most scores today.
The small roles are credited as listed on bach-cantatas.com; reissues differ in detail.
This is one of the great studio casts of the century: Fischer-Dieskau, then 35, as a Jesus of quiet authority; Christa Ludwig, at the height of her powers, in the alto arias, including Erbarme dich; Schwarzkopf, Gedda and Berry; and Peter Pears, Britten’s partner, an English tenor singing the Evangelist in German with complete command. Klemperer’s Passion is the slowest of the major recordings, nearly three and three-quarter hours, where most performances today take about two and three-quarters. It does not drag so much as stand still. The choruses are vast, the arias meditative, the chorales enormous. It is a monument of a lost way of performing Bach, and for many listeners still the most moving.
Each track has a card. The cards follow the listening map, one at a time: on a computer they open full screen and lock in place, and ← → step from one to the next; on a phone, swipe sideways. The address always names the card you are on, so a link to it opens it.
On each card: the complete German text, its speakers and singers, and three measures:
The text is printed in its original German, coloured by its layer, which is the clearest way into the work’s structure:
A Passion is the story of the suffering and death of Jesus as told in one of the four Gospels, sung in church in Holy Week. It is not an oratorio for the concert hall, though it has become one. It is the Gospel reading of the day, made very large.
In the Roman rite of Bach’s time, as since the Middle Ages, the Passion took the place of the ordinary Gospel at the Mass of four days of Holy Week: Matthew on Palm Sunday, Mark on Tuesday, Luke on Wednesday, John on Good Friday. It was chanted by three deacons on three reciting pitches:
From the fifteenth century the crowd’s words were often sung by a polyphonic choir. That is the origin of Bach’s whole cast: an Evangelist who narrates on a tenor reciting tone, a Jesus in the bass, and choruses for the turbae. At the words of Jesus’ death all knelt and remained in silence for a moment, a custom that sounds through the pause after und verschied.
Luther kept the Passion reading. In Leipzig it was sung for two centuries to the simple chant of Johann Walter’s sixteenth-century settings. Only in 1721 did the city hear its first “oratorio Passion”, with instruments, arias and chorales, at the Good Friday afternoon service. Bach’s St John Passion followed in 1724, the St Matthew on Good Friday, 11 April 1727, in St Thomas’s Church. He revised it in 1736 into the form we know, with two separate choirs and orchestras, and wrote out a fair copy in which the Gospel words are in red ink.
The Passion was sung at Good Friday Vespers, an afternoon service. The order, as recorded in Leipzig service books of the time:
A hymn on the seven last words from the cross.
From the plot to the arrest: Nos. 1–29, about an hour and a half under Klemperer.
A prayer for the Holy Spirit before the sermon.
About an hour, on the Passion.
From Caiaphas to the sealing of the tomb: Nos. 30–68.
Jacobus Gallus’s sixteenth-century motet, “Behold how the righteous man dies”, sung every Good Friday.
The Passion collect, a Bible verse and the blessing.
The service ends in thanksgiving.
The whole service lasted four hours or more. The congregation did not sing the chorales in the Passion with the choir, as is sometimes imagined, but they knew every one by heart: each chorale is the congregation’s own voice, sung for it.
Narrative and reflection. The Passion alternates between telling and responding. The Gospel moves the story forward in recitative; at each turn of the story it halts, and someone reacts: the congregation in a chorale, an individual in an arioso and aria. Picander’s text gives each aria an introductory arioso, so that the believer first observes (“Du lieber Heiland du”, “O Schmerz!”, “Erbarm es Gott!”) and then responds.
Two choirs, two orchestras. From 1736 Bach divides his forces into two complete ensembles, each with its own choir, soloists and orchestra, each with its own continuo organ. The double chorus allows dialogue (Zion and the Believers in Nos. 1, 30 and 60) and overwhelming mass (the crowd scenes). On Klemperer’s recording both choirs are the Philharmonia Choir, divided.
The halo. Whenever Jesus speaks, the strings hold sustained chords around his voice, as a kind of musical nimbus. It is absent just once: at Eli, Eli, lama asabthani, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
The Passion chorale. Hans Leo Hassler’s melody, best known as “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden”, appears five times, each time to a different text, key and harmonisation. It marks the stations of the story, and its harmony darkens as the story moves toward the death.
The Passion chorale, placed by its position in Klemperer’s timeline. Fill shows harmonic tension, from light (low) to dark (high).
A frame of E minor and C minor. Part I opens in E minor and closes in E major; the work ends in C minor. Between, the keys of the arias follow the drama: sharp keys for the earlier scenes, flat keys (A♭, E♭, B♭) for the crucifixion and burial.
After Bach’s death the St Matthew Passion fell silent for almost eighty years. On 11 March 1829 the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted it in Berlin, heavily cut, with the Sing-Akademie; it was a sensation, and the beginning of the modern Bach revival. Klemperer’s recording, made 132 years later, still belongs to that nineteenth-century tradition of the Passion as a monumental sacred drama for large forces.
One block per track, in proportion to its length under Klemperer. Upper row: harmonic tension. Thin row: the layer of text (Gospel, crowd, chorale, poetry). Tap a block to jump to its card.