florida state university college of music performance practice

persuaded that popular “classical” works in contemporary society‟s repertory are worthy
because they have survived from the past. In contrast, those works that have fallen into
anonymity are often due to their mediocrity and should remain in the shadows. While in
certain situations this could be considered true, one of the successes that came out of the
early music movement was an avid interest in recovering lost works. Many of these
works demonstrate they do not fit the stereotypical model of evolutionary thought.
Numerous examples of recovered works have turned out to be masterpieces and only
became obscure due to reasons including lost manuscripts rather than the notion that they
are mediocre.
While the St. John Passion was never lost throughout the years, musicologists,
performers, and the listening public began to regard the work on its own merits as a tour
de force, not better or worse than Bach‟s other large-scale works, but as different. The
interest of research concerning the St. John Passion grew substantially after Arthur
Mendel‟s published 1973 St. John Passion edition and his 1974 Kritischer Bericht for the
Neue Bach Ausgabe. In 1981, Julius Hereford‟s doctoral student, Helmut Roehrig
published his dissertation that analyzed the St. John Passion in light of the Neue Bach
Ausgabe. However, one would be remiss in not recognizing that perhaps the influence of
technology, if not the number one force, was a major contributor in thrusting and
catapulting the popularity of such works like the St. John Passion.
In 1982, with the introduction of the compact disc, it became much cheaper to
produce recordings. Record companies sought to “cash in” on the rising demands for
early music. Consumers who were looking for recordings of obscure works and
historically informed interpretations were on the rise. As a result, many record companies
sought to record, release and market recordings as obscure and “authentic” or
“historically-informed” in hopes of convincing the public that their listening library
needed the “correct” performance of a particular work. Even though these were
marketing ploys by record companies, it undoubtedly benefited the public with the
presentation of works that previously were unknown by many or, in the case of the St.
John Passion, increased its popularity as one of the most performed works in Bach‟s
repertory. As a direct consequence, there have been close to eighty known commercial
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