Bach’s St Matthew Passion: ‘When you’re unpacking a role like the Evangelist, it’s so vast, so enormous’

For a great number of musicians today, all roads lead to Bach. It doesn’t seem to matter what their own area of specialisation is. Bach is a spiritual leader, an explorer and an intellectual giant whose work is also highly expressive. (The two don’t always go hand in hand.) He appears in the daily rituals of more musicians than any other figure I can think of, usually as the composer to get immersed in at the start of the day.

Bach was 37 in 1722, the year Johann Kuhnau died and the post of music director at the Lutheran Church of St Thomas in Leipzig became vacant. Luther himself had preached at the church in 1539. Given Bach’s current reputation, it might be assumed that he was a shoo-in for the job. Quite the opposite.

The post was first offered to Georg Philipp Telemann, four years older than Bach, whose star burned more brightly than any of his German colleagues’ at that time. He was hugely prolific, worked in opera as well as in the church, and was active in promoting the newfangled idea of public concerts. He accepted the Leipzig post but then changed his mind after a better offer that kept him in his Hamburg base for the rest of his life.

The second choice was Christoph Graupner, just two years older than Bach, who had studied with Kuhnau and, like Telemann, had worked in Leipzig. He also accepted the post, but he had to withdraw when his employer, the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, refused to release him (although it did increase his remuneration).

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‘What used to appear to all of us against the background of these times as a possibility that could only be dreamed about, has now become real: the Passion has been given to the public, and has become the property of all’

—  Fanny Mendelssohn, on the revival of Bach's St Matthew Passion

In a statement that’s now famous for all the wrong reasons, Leipzig city council decided that “since the best man could not be obtained, mediocre ones would have to be accepted.” The “mediocre” man who was chosen was Bach. Fast-forward 300 years and it’s Bach who, by some margin, eclipses the once more fashionable Telemann and Graupner.

But Bach himself has had his ups and downs. That certainly applies to one of his greatest works, the St Matthew Passion for two choruses, each accompanied by its own orchestra, with solo vocal parts for narrator (the Evangelist), Jesus, Peter, Judas, Pontius Pilate and a string of minor roles. First performed in 1729, it is the largest of the two settings of the Gospel that have survived from the five that Bach composed. It lay neglected from the 1740s until a young Felix Mendelssohn revived it in concert in Berlin in 1829, the composer adapting and recontouring it to the taste of the time.

Mendelssohn had been given a copy of the then still-unpublished score of the St Matthew Passion for his 15th birthday, in 1824. Five years later his sister and fellow composer, Fanny, would write: “What used to appear to all of us against the background of these times as a possibility that could only be dreamed about, has now become real: the Passion has been given to the public, and has become the property of all.” Nearly 1,000 people had to be turned away from the performance, so two further performances were arranged, the last one falling on Good Friday. The persona of the Bach that we know today had been born.

For Gavan Ring, the Co Kerry tenor who sings the demanding role of the Evangelist at the National Concert Hall on Good Friday afternoon, Bach is “the single most important figure in classical music, probably the single most important as far as the development of western music is concerned”.

He doesn’t stop at that, rolling in popular music and jazz, too. “Without him we wouldn’t have Mozart, Beethoven, Puccini, Benjamin Britten, quite possibly The Beatles and Ella Fitzgerald, too.” And the St Matthew Passion? “Obviously, it’s a retelling of the story of the Gospel of St Matthew. But the more that I work on it, and the more that I delve into it, I feel it is a real story of and a real retelling of what it means to be a human being.”

‘Ever since I was five or six years old I was hooked on opera. I almost think of the Matthew Passion as a grand opera and the John Passion as a chamber opera’

—  Gavan Ring, tenor

Ring apologises in case that sounds a bit generic. “But what I mean by that is that, despite the fact that the story itself concerns the Son of God, which is lofty enough to begin with, what Bach does tremendously well, and what the crux of it is, is making those human connections and those human reflections, particularly in relation to the story of St Peter, and even of Judas as well. It’s almost like Bach asks you the question, What would you have done in a related situation in your own life?”

[ Bach for the future ]

We’re all flawed, he points out, “Every single one of us. Most of us would like to think that in a time of crisis, or in a time of huge life upheaval and trouble, we would act with great integrity. But we don’t know until we’re put in that kind of situation, as St Peter was, and Judas as well, in that position of human frailty. I love the line that Christus speaks in the Matthew Passion when he says, ‘Der Geist ist willig, aber das Fleisch ist schwach’... ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ Ultimately, it’s a reminder that we are both human and that we’re not perfect.” He invokes the idea of striving and links it to being guided to a road to Damascus.

‘When you get down and dirty, as it were, with something on the scale of the Evangelist, it transforms the meaning of the work for you... when you’re unpacking a role like the Evangelist, the fulcrum of the work, it’s so vast, so enormous’

—  Gavan Ring

Most of Ring’s work is in opera. “Ever since I was five or six years old I was hooked on opera,” he says. “I almost think of the Matthew Passion as a grand opera and the John Passion as a chamber opera.” The passions came into his life while he was still at school, in the Schola Cantorum of St Finian’s College in Mullingar, and he has sung in Bach passions before. But the tenor role of the Evangelist is new to him. He didn’t begin his professional career as a tenor, and it’s just five years ago that he made the transition from baritone.

[ A passion for perfection ]

He has never, he says, experienced “the same degree of catharsis with learning new material” as he has with the Evangelist. “There’s nothing quite like being involved to that degree with any work. When you get down and dirty, as it were, with something on the scale of the Evangelist, it transforms the meaning of the work for you. I did the John Passion quite a bit as a baritone, Christus and Pilate and bass solos. But when you’re unpacking a role like the Evangelist, the fulcrum of the work, it’s so vast, so enormous. That guy just talks and talks and talks, in recitative after recitative after recitative. And they seem to grow textually and in complexity as the work goes on.”

When I speak to Ring he’s working on Simon McBurney’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute with English National Opera. ENO, whose artistic director is Belfast-born Annilese Miskimmon, is one of those unfortunate companies snarled up in the swingeing cutbacks arising from Arts Council England’s current culture wars. “It’s not particularly easy for ENO,” says Ring, “but they’re putting their best foot forward in the best way they possibly can. And they’re producing some really great work.”

This year is the centenary of the death of Giacomo Puccini, and Ring is clearly proud of the fact that he has been granted Arts Council of Ireland funding to take a production of the composer’s La Bohème to his home town of Cahirciveen in August. It’s a production from Cork Opera House that he sang in a couple of years ago as part of the Cara O’Sullivan Associate Artists programme. It’s not often that a town with a population of about 1,300 gets to host an opera production. It was in Cahirciveen as a 16-year-old, in 2004, that he got to produce his first concert. “It’s quite cool that 20 years later, I’m actually bringing something which is as close to the full operatic experience as you could possibly manage to bring down to Cahirciveen.”

The opera is “slightly truncated,” he says, because there’s no chorus, but he believes that gives it “a greater degree of context and an even greater level of accessibility”. And, like the St Matthew Passion, “this La Bohème has a narrator” – the actor Éadaoin O’Donoghue – “who plays the part of an older Musetta, to allow the piece to flow in the absence of the chorus”. It’s conducted by John O’Brien and directed by Conor Hanratty, and the Mimì is Rachel Croash. Ring’s pleasure at the idea of audiences in rural Kerry not having “to traipse up to urban centres the whole time” is manifest.

“Let’s bring them out west,” he says. “Let’s bring them to the next-stop-America territories like Cahirciveen.”

St Matthew Passion, sung by Gavan Ring, Dan D’Souza, Kelli-Ann Masterson, Bethany Horak-Hallett, Liam Bonthrone and Michael Mofidian, with Cór na nÓg and the National Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under David Young, is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, at 3.30pm on Friday, March 29th. La Bohème is at Daniel O’Connell Memorial Church, in Cahirciveen, Co Kerry, on Sunday, August 4th