From 1723 until his death in 1750 Johann Sebastian Bach was responsible for the performance of an elaborate musical setting of the passion story during Good Friday Vespers in Leipzig. While some contemporaneous Lutheran composers took this responsibility as an opportunity to compose a new passion each year, there are only two extant passions by Bach, the St John Passion and the St Matthew Passion. Bach did, however, return to both passions multiple times, revising and re-performing each throughout his life. Bach's first performance of his St John Passion, for example, was in 1724; his last was in 1749.
Bach's passions continue to be important for performers and scholars alike, as evidenced not only by the many performances each year around the world, but also recently by two books published in 2014 on the St John Passion. While Eric Chafe's J. S. Bach's Johannine theology: the ‘St. John Passion’ and the cantatas for Spring 1725 (Oxford 2014) presents a complex reading of the passion's music, theology and context for musicologists, Andreas Loewe's Johann Sebastian Bach's ‘St John Passion’ (BWV 245) provides an accessible introduction to the work for non-specialists.
After a clear introduction outlining the book and introducing the study of ‘Bach and Theology’, part i includes four chapters contextualising Bach's theological world and its relationship to his compositional work. The first two chapters present an excellent overview of Bach's training as a church musician and his understanding of his vocation, while chapter iv presents a very good orientation to theological, liturgical and textual considerations in the St John Passion. Out of place in this otherwise excellent framing section is chapter iii, with its discussion of Bach's cantatas. It is unclear why this chapter is included, since it focuses on cantatas and on details of Bach's life and does not bear directly on theology or the St John Passion.
Between these introductory framing chapters and the commentary that makes up the bulk of the book, Chapter vi provides a new translation of the St John Passion libretto by Katherine Firth. The guiding philosophy of the translation is explained thus: ‘Firth's translation aims to be as close to the word choice, grammar, sequence and structure of the original libretto as possible, within the bounds of comprehensible English’ (p. 100). It is unclear, however, if Firth considered historical theology or historical linguistics in preparing the translation. Furthermore, it is curious that the chapter does not reference Michael Marissen's two recent translations of the libretto published in his Lutheranism, anti-Judaism, and Bach's ‘St John Passion‘ (Oxford 1998) and Bach's oratorios: the parallel German-English texts with annotations (Oxford 2008), both of which are liberally annotated in relation to theological and linguistic sources of Bach's time.
The remainder of Loewe's book presents a movement-by-movement commentary on the St John Passion with particular focus on how theological ideas are conveyed by the text and its musical setting. As a preface to the commentary, Loewe briefly highlights in chapter vii three theologians particularly important for our understanding of Bach's sacred vocal music: Martin Luther, Abraham Calov and Johann Olearius. Helpful here would have been a more detailed introduction to the authors and their works and how they are important in relation to Bach; in fact, such an expanded chapter could have been a significant and valuable addition to part i as a further consideration of the theological contexts in which Bach lived and composed.
A couple of points on Loewe's principal theological sources warrant further comment: (1) Loewe fails to clarify that Calov's Bible commentary (1681–2) is, in fact, a compendium of Luther's writings and that Calov only added his own commentary in the absence of extant writings from Luther on a passage; and (2) the title of Olearius’ five-volume commentary of 1678–81 is Biblische Erklärung; Loewe instead refers to it by words from later in the title, Haupt-Schlüssel.
The strength of Loewe's commentary lies in the connections that he makes between the passion's libretto and the writings of Lutheran theologians of the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century. And while focusing primarily on Luther, Calov and Olearius, Loewe also observes connections with other Lutheran theologians prior to or contemporary with Bach, including Johann Arndt, Johann Heermann, Martin Moller and Heinrich Müller. While it is impossible in most cases to draw a direct link between these writings and the libretto of the St John Passion, Loewe's commentary is valuable for demonstrating how the passion libretto reflects broader trends in Lutheran interpretation of John's passion narrative.
In addition to providing theological contexts for understanding the St John Passion's libretto, Loewe's commentary offers highlights of Bach's musical setting of the text with particular attention to how Bach emphasised key words and concepts through musical gestures. The types of musical gestures that Loewe discusses include: (1) striking melodic or harmonic intervals; (2) striking harmonies; (3) inclusion of ‘cross motifs’ in melodic lines; (4) use of dance rhythms; (5) examples of word painting; and (6) musical connections between movements. Given the nature of the volume as an introduction to the passion rather than as an in-depth analysis, the treatment of the music is fairly cursory and selective. Most of Loewe's observations on the music are accurate enough as far as they go (except for the musical connections between movements, which are generally so generic as to be unconvincing), but his aim was not to provide a detailed analysis of Bach's compositional procedures in the passion.
Despite a number of shortcomings highlighted in this review, Loewe's Johann Sebastian Bach's ‘St John Passion’ is admirable for its goal of bringing theological and musicological considerations to bear on this important Bach composition, and it is valuable both for its excellent opening chapters framing an historical perspective on Bach and theology, and for its discussion of how particular theological sources can illumine our understanding of the passion's libretto. It provides an invitation to encounter Bach's St John Passion in theological perspective, especially for those who are unfamiliar with discussions of Bach and historical theology or with the passion itself.
