BBC Proms Masterworks: Bach's St John Passion BBC Proms

It's a Coliseum of music, the Royal Albert Hall.

Imagine what it's like being on that stage

with 6,000 people waiting with bated breath

to be taken to a cosmic realm of musical joy.

But there's more. The responsibility of anyone playing at the Proms

is also to the pieces they're performing

and to the composers who wrote them.

And every Thursday night here on BBC Four,

the stakes are the highest of all.

Because we're going on a journey through musical masterworks

from the last 300 years of music history.

Well, I call it history,

but this isn't music in a past tense.

If these performances are going to shake you up, as you should do,

then they have to make all of these pieces -

symphonies, concertos, passions - matter right now.

They have to sound like the most extreme, the newest,

the most essential music you've ever heard.

Cos we're not going to let them get away with anything less

than a transcendent performance, now, are we?

Welcome to Masterworks At The Proms.

And we're going to start with

one of the most astounding works of Western music -

Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion.

Bach made this work for a liturgical context

and it was first performed on Good Friday 290 years ago

in St Nicholas Church in Leipzig.

And its music is pitched at the furthest reaches

of Bach's compositional virtuosity -

in its arias, in its operatic storytelling, and in its choruses.

But Bach also grounds the drama

in the chorales he places throughout the story.

So here's the challenge for tonight's performers,

the Zurich Chamber Orchestra and the Zurcher Sing-Akademie -

to make us all feel like participants

in the drama of Christ's Passion,

and to implicate us - all of us - in the profound moral

and emotional questions it raises.

Tonight's conductor, leading all of this, is Sir Roger Norrington.

Sir Roger, what about your vision of what this piece is?

After all, this kind of Passion setting

was criticised in Bach's lifetime for being too operatic...

-Absolutely.

-And yet we might think it's too devotional for our tastes.

How do you see the idea of what this Passion might be?

It's both, of course.

Of course it was devotional and of course it is dramatic.

The choruses are fantastically dramatic,

even more so than in the Matthew Passion.

And the arias, some of them are a little bit thoughtful,

but others are very, very active,

like the first tenor aria at the end of part one.

And it's interesting coming back to the John Passion,

because I don't do it very much at all, I'm not a Bach expert -

as it says in the Proms guide, I'm a...

It's time to switch off. I'm not a Bach expert.

But of course I've done an awful lot of Bach and I love it.

But coming back to it, as I do every 15 or 20 years,

I'm struck this time by how...

How extremely positive it is.

That it's tremendously powerful and strong.

It isn't wailing and sad.

Even the final chorus, although it's a sort of lullaby,

is powerful.

It's looking forward to our salvation.

For people coming to this for the first time, people who...

Especially where we are now in civilisation,

people watching this performance

may or may not worship the Christian God.

Does it then just become a good story?

It's an incredible story.

Any time you play a religious piece, you're...

You're dealing with these extraordinary events.

Bach was simply setting the text and following every nuance of it.

People think of Bach as terribly religious -

I don't think he was like, you know, he could have been a priest.

He was a musician.

He could have been in London writing for the theatre.

It's an astonishing work of music.

It's an extremely serious work of devotion.

Um...

and we just bring all our energy to it

to make it work as well as we possibly can.

So, to Part One of Bach's St John Passion.

After the tormented and searching opening chorus,

Jesus is taken captive and his disciples react with confusion,

and even violence.

And at the end of the first part, after about half an hour or so,

Peter three times denies that he is one of Jesus' followers.

Now, at the centre of the action is the Evangelist,

who's sung tonight by the tenor James Gilchrist.

And the Evangelist is the person who tells the story.

He's the person who connects all of the levels of the Passion together.

Listen to him and you can't possibly get lost.

This is a story, a Passion,

that's both narrated and lived and embodied.

Yes, this is a masterwork,

but this is music that means absolutely nothing at all

without the participation of an audience.

This audience, which we're all part of.

You know what? Right now there are all kinds of different emotional

and musical outcomes that are possible.

Is this going to thrill us with an evangelical hope,

or rather confront us with this music's doubt and darkness?

APPLAUSE

REPEATING

REPEATING

APPLAUSE

What's fascinating about that,

the end of the first part of the John Passion,

is that Bach doesn't end with a big dramatic number,

instead with one of those communal, contemporary hymn tunes.

And what I think you can't really prepare for

until you're really encountering the experience

of being in and with the Bach St John Passion

is the sense of all of these different layers of the music,

really, are just so many ways of telling the story.

The effect, especially the way

that Sir Roger Norrington is conducting this,

where one number is moving immediately into the next,

so, recitative immediately into chorale,

immediately into aria, you know,

it just becomes one gigantic, multi-layered telling

of this uniquely thrilling story.

I also really like the way in the performance

that each individual musician and singer feels like part of the drama,

the way that the woodwind soloist stood up to accompany the arias,

the way that some of the singers in the choir

came forward to take the smaller parts,

like Peter at the end of the first part.

Well, before the much longer second part of the St John Passion,

Christ's trial and death, more from Roger Norrington.

Now, in the next 80 minutes of lacerating music and drama,

it's the solo arias, the arias for solo voice,

that run like a golden thread throughout,

turning anguish into beauty.

One of the most striking is the long tenor aria,

huge aria, where he...

Christ has just been beaten,

so there's blood all over his back, and the text says,

"This is like a rainbow in heaven

"giving a promise of hope" so you've got the suffering on one side

and thanks on the other side all the time. Striking.

-And done with music of great beauty...

-Intense beauty, yes.

..but that sums up one of the real issues in this piece.

I mean, we're asked to really contemplate

absolutely horrifying images

and nonetheless find a great beauty in them, in Bach's music,

but somehow we're supposed to

have torture transcended into something beautiful.

I mean, it's full of these really horrifying moments, actually.

It's full of horror and yet the piece is about hope.

And I suppose, you know, if you lived at that time,

I mean, how many of Bach's children died? His first wife died.

Mozart, a few years later,

only he and his sister survived out of seven children.

They were used to hanging on with their fingernails to life

and anything that could give them hope was very important to them

and incredibly powerful.

The thing is, for me, by the end of the John Passion,

I find it profoundly emotionally ambiguous...

-Right, OK.

-..because we end with the image of Jesus buried,

the resurrection, we might know is going to happen,

but it's not necessarily assured.

We're supposed to be with Christ

and empathise with the pain of what's just happened, rather...

But hang on.

The music is sad,

it's like a minuet.

-This is the final chorus.

-The final, big chorus.

But again, it's positive, it isn't saying, "Oh, how sad",

it's saying, "How wonderful that this has been achieved."

The famous aria, Es Ist Vollbracht...

"It is accomplished."

Yeah, it's not, "Oh, dear, I'm dead",

it's "I have won."

"I have won and I have won your redemption."

And don't forget, after this slightly sad final chorus,

which I do, actually, very strongly,

because it's so affirmative against your view,

but after that comes this fantastic chorale, where they say,

"Lead me forth to glory."

I mean, it's a fantastic moment,

and that's not at all sad.

So, I think it's sadness and hope and glory all in one extraordinary piece.

Well, his hope or my ambiguity, joy or darkness.

What's definite is that there's a transformative power

in the music of Part Two of Bach's St John Passion,

including the arias for solo bass,

which are sung tonight by Hanno Muller-Brachmann,

who stepped in at the last minute to be at tonight's Prom.

The Evangelist is again the key to the drama.

From Christ's trial and Pontius Pilate's moral torment

to his crucifixion and death.

80 minutes of music maybe, but a completely clear dramatic shape.

The music of the trial scene is the most vivid and fast-paced

and cinematic in the whole Passion.

Now, Roger Norrington also said to me

that he wants the final music of the St John Passion,

the last chorus and the very final hymn tune,

to be what he called

-"a Salvation Army moment."

-APPLAUSE

Now, what he meant by that

is that it should be performed, sung, and perhaps even listened to,

with a fervent evangelical energy

rather than the philosophical or theological doubt

that I was going on about.

Now, I'm fascinated to see how and if that works,

because can we really find joy

through this most intense of all depictions in music

of suffering and pain?

APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE INTENSIFIES

CHEERING

APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH

APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH

-You see what I mean about the end?

-I do, I do.

-Keinen Zweifel.

-Keinen Zweifel!

-HE LAUGHS

Roger... OK, look, I see what you mean.

That final chorale, I mean, nobody's ever done it like that.

I've never heard it done like that.

It was.... It is a call to joy, done like that.

Yes, it is. It is. The whole piece is a call to joy,

but through somebody else's suffering.

-The Germans have a word for it - Schadenfreude.

-Indeed!

But it's not just the final chorus,

it's the whole trajectory of that performance.

I don't think I've ever heard, and probably many people in the hall,

a John Passion that has moved so quickly,

not necessarily in individual movements, but it's moved fast.

It's got a forward trajectory, yeah, tried to get that.

And a sort of positive... Whenever possible, positive.

Occasionally there's a moment of quiet.

But on the whole, it's positive.

It's all been foretold, and now it's fulfilled.

The final moment, then,

when the solo singers were also part of that final chorale,

-the chorus put their books down.

-Yeah.

Do you feel also a connection with the audience at that point?

Yeah, I think, in a way, the chorales...

I don't think they were ever sung by the audience,

but they represent, as it were, you know, all of us, the common man.

The arias are way beyond us, the speech comes from the Gospel,

but the hymns are what we could sing if we were good enough, so to speak.

It's the public voice. That's why I do them sort of big, on the whole.

-And you're singing with them at the end.

-Yeah.

After all, you sang the tenor solos of this piece 50 years ago,

you know it better than anyone. Roger, thank you very much indeed.

-Thank you. It's been a joy.

-Great privilege.

You know, the thing about this piece is that,

in a way, it doesn't make sense today,

because the story, Christ's story, is no longer central to our culture

in the way that it was in the Leipzig of the early 18th century

when Bach was there.

And yet, it has a way

of somehow making his time our time,

of turning suffering into joy, and it's Bach's music that does that.

Now, Bach himself would say that that's thanks to God,

that that's really God's achievement.

But I would say, rather, that it's Bach's.

Ultimately, this is a piece that makes Christ's Passion,

wherever we come from and whatever we feel about it, our own.