Customer Reviews

Hearing Bach's Passions

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In an essay accompanying his fine new recording of the Bach: St. Matthew Passion, Jos van Veldhoven explains how this book has influenced his perspective on that great work. Van Veldhoven's recommendation inspired me to read it, too, and I'm very glad I did.

Daniel Melamed's overarching theme is that a 21st century listener can never experience Bach's passions in the same way as those who heard them in church in Leipzig on Good Friday during the 1720s, 30s, and 40s. Nevertheless, we can greatly benefit from learning more about the circumstances of their creation and original performance.

Melamed brings the reader up to date with the latest Bach scholarship in a way that is completely accessible to the layperson (like me). The first four chapters discuss the performing forces that Bach used in his passions, the passions as narrative and meditative rather than dramatic works, the role of the two performing groups in the St. Matthew Passion, and the four versions of the St. John Passion. The final chapters are devoted to the three other passions associated with Bach: the anonymous St. Mark Passion (generally attributed to Reinhard Keiser or Friederich Nicolaus Brauns) that Bach performed at least twice, Bach's lost and probably irretrievable St. Mark Passion (assigned the catalog number BWV 247), and the anonymous St. Luke Passion (BWV 246) that Bach may or may not have written and may or may not have performed. Appendix tables provide the liturgy for Good Friday vespers in Leipzig, the passion scores in Bach's library, a calendar of Bach's passion performances, the vocal parts and performing forces for the passions, and lists of their movements.

This short book is an absolute delight to read and is essential for anyone who wants to develop a deeper understanding of Bach's passions. It complements Christoph Wolff's outstanding musical biography Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician.

This is a great book. As a bit of a Bach-o-phile I eagerly waited for the amazon delivery. I'm a musician and I loved how Melamed worked backwards from the Orchestral parts to "discover" what may have been indeed written by JSB or just an attribution. I think any one who's ever been in a high-school band or orchestra, and has had to deal with missing parts or badly copied parts will really get this book. It's very similar in scholarly style to
Ron Rosenbaums masterful, The Shakespeare Wars. The two authors are wonderful literary/musical scholars. Thanks.