florida state university college of music performance practice

majority of the work. The performance was also unusual for the fact that instead of the
Evangelist‟s role being sung, it was expressively read by a Moravian minister.
Performances of the St. John Passion in the early twentieth century often featured
large forces. For example in the early 1930s, a 300-member chorus presented the work in
French. However, there were a few recordings in the minority, like the German
musicologist Fritz Stein‟s late 1930s recordings that were stylistically more attuned to
performance practice. While many performances of St. John Passion were often
abbreviated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the 1950s an increase
interest in complete performances of the work was present.
Around the middle of the twentieth century, the scholarly work of Arthur Mendel
had great consequence on the popularity of the St. John Passion. His knowledge of the
work can be seen in the forty-three pages of introductory notes regarding performance
practice considerations located in the beginning preface of the 1951 G. Schirmer St. John
Passion vocal score. In 1973 Mendel‟s scholarly work continued with his historic editing
of the St. John Passion and in 1974 the published notes regarding his findings in the
Kritischer Bericht for the Neue Bach Ausgabe.
All of this work in scholarship added to the work‟s exposure and increased
popularity. In the coming decades, several other significant publications were added to
the Passion‟s bibliography. In 1981, Helmut Roehrig published his dissertation that was a
conductor‟s guide to the St. John Passion as influenced with recent developments from
the Neue Bach Ausgabe. Toward the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-
first centuries, several additional studies were published. In 1998, Michael Marissen
looked for the presence of anti-Semitic undertones within the work. First published in
German in 1998 and later translated into English in 2002, Alfred Dürr focused in
succinctly presenting the history, analysis and meaning of the work. Lastly, in 2005
Daniel Melamed frames his book in a context of contrasting and comparing Bach‟s
Passions. This book devotes time in describing and summarizing the latest scholarship in
performance practice matters and how it relates to Bach‟s Passions.
All of these works in the latter part of the twentieth century and early twenty-first
century spend considerable time in dealing with theological matters of Bach‟s text and
150