What's that old maxim... no politics or religion at the dinner table? It's a concept that would have made Johann Sebastian Bach scoff. His St. John Passion is 300 years old, and it invites its listeners to grapple with those exact topics. In fact, when Bach wrote this Passion, he refused to shy away from the difficulty of the Gospel text, and used his music to highlight the very personal struggles his congregants felt between politics and religion, and the question of what role government should play in their daily lives.
Sound familiar?
This is the magic of this piece for me: it boggles my mind that the music J.S. Bach wrote in the 1700s is still so deeply relevant to our lives today.
The piece isn't just an ideological struggle, either. Bach, as always, is a composer who keeps his instrumentalists and singers and conductors humble. Bach didn't care if a line was technically unplayable, or if he didn't give his singers a single moment for a breath. He composed the music exactly the way he believed it needed to be written in order to convey its meaning in the most perfect way, which makes for unbelievably beautiful and poignant music, and a bit of an ego check for musicians.
It's been a good while since Louisville's had a chance to hear a Bach Passion performed, which is why I was thrilled to speak to Dr. John Dickson, the director of the Louisville Master Chorale, about their upcoming performance. In our conversation above, you'll hear why this 300-year-old edition is special, the particular challenges of piecing together a Passion, and what lies at the heart of this monumental work.
St. John Passion (1725)
Sunday, March 16th at 3pm
St. Francis in the Fields Episcopal Church
Tickets here
