Bach's protean Passions: Daniel R. Melamed, Hearing Bach's passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15.50 * Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthaus-Passion, Fruhfassung, BWV244b, ed. Andreas Glockner, Neue Bach Ausgabe series II, vol.5b (Kassel: Barenreiter, 2004), 160

Abstract

What does a title like Hearing Bach's passions suggest? Surely such a book would concentrate on listening culture, so it might conceivably begin with a close study of the cultural and religious presuppositions of Bach's hearers, of several different backgrounds and with different degrees of exposure to music. Then there might be a close study of how this broad culture feeds into the way Bach wrote the music, as an active listener in his own right. The study could then go on to ask how later listeners heard this music, depending on their nationality, background and era—then to questions of how listeners today might hear this, as Christians or Jews, believers or unbelievers. (There is, after all, a great deal of material showing the variety of responses to the issue of anti-Semitism and the St John Passion in recent years.) Reception theory, some brand of semiotic theory, perhaps psychology too, might all come into play to give an idea of how Bach's passions are constructed by different forms of listenership, ending with the thorny issue of what is actually ‘there’ in the music. Is there something essential that travels from one age or culture to the next? Does the complex intertwining of religious and musical belief (together with the archetypes of sacrifice and atonement) tell us anything about the human condition in general, or is it more a question of the specific, historically conditioned, environment of western modernity?