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For nearly 74 years from the death of J.S. Bach in 1750 to Mendelssohn’s fifteenth birthday in 1824 the Matthäus Passion had all but disappeared. Young Mendelssohn’s prized birthday gift – a bespoke copy of the Passion – was to change music history when five years later he mounted its first performance in the nineteenth century in Berlin.

Today it is inconceivable to imagine music without Bach, but in the 1820s his music had been relegated to no more than the exercise-book for students of counterpoint. Turning often to Bach’s music after 1829, Mendelssohn performed the Passion again in Leipzig in 1841. Now in a romantic era with a symphonic sized orchestra and choir, he remodelled both the role of the Evangelist and soloists, compacting the Passion’s length by some 30 percent.

After his death in 1847 Mendelssohn’s ‘edition’ of the Passion lay fallow with his heirs in London, his grandson eventually bequeathing it to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A first complete reconstruction of Mendelssohn’s material by Malcolm Bruno and Caroline Ritchie is published in December 2023 by Bärenreiter Verlag, and the first recording by the Bach Choir of Bethlehem to be released in March 2024 on the Analekta label.

The Bach Choir of Bethlehem & Bach Festival Orchestra
Christopher Jackson