florida state university college of music performance practice

the St. John Passion. While no one can argue that these works are indeed spectacular
creations of art, what can be attributed as the bias against acknowledging the St. John
Passion in the same class?
First, unlike Bach‟s other large-scale works, the lack of one definitive version
discouraged many conductors to program the work. Perhaps without the clarification of
one particular version gave the impression that the St. John Passion was an
undistinguished work in Bach‟s corpus. Additionally, there are often two generalizations
made when making decisions concerning a work‟s value. There is the assumption that
works composed later in a composer‟s life are always more sophisticated than those
composed early in the composer‟s career. Second, works that are compositionally longer
are often judged as superior when compared to shorter counterparts. Despite its various
versions, the core of St. John Passion, when compared to works such as the Mass in B
minor and St. Matthew Passion, is both compositionally early in Bach‟s oeuvre as well as
shorter in length. The three factors explored above could account for the many years in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the St. John Passion suffered neglect.
In the middle of the Twentieth Century, the fortune of the St. John Passion began
to change. In addition to the two important 1950 recordings by conductors Grossman and
Shaw, G. Schirmer published an edited vocal score of the St. John Passion in 1951. The
vocal score included forty-three pages of introductory notes by musicologist Arthur
Mendel. Mendel‟s unique and impressive foreword provided detailed information
regarding the St. John Passion and performance practice suggestions on a myriad of
issues such as history and structure, performing forces, notational conventions, chorale
fermatas and expressive devices such as dynamics, ornamentation and articulation. This
introduction followed by Mendel‟s historic editing of the St. John Passion for the Neue
Bach Ausgabe in 1973 distinguishes him as perhaps the one singular personality that
transformed the work from obscurity to a recognition of its deserved esteem.
However, it should be pointed out that while Mendel‟s work was indisputably
important to the exposure and dissemination of the St. John Passion in the later half of
the twentieth century, the musical establishment‟s attitude and climate, as influenced by
the early music movement had also changed. No longer did musicians subscribe entirely
to the evolutionary position of musical works. The ideology of the evolutionary view is
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