"Matthew" the noise of the people and the expression of keen remorse
are subordinated to love and human tenderness and infinite sorrow. The
small number and conciseness of the people's choruses have already
been alluded to, and it may easily be shown that the penitential music
is brief compared with the love music, besides having a great deal of
the love, the yearning love, feeling in it. The list of penitential
pieces is exhausted when I have mentioned "Come, ye daughters," "Guilt
for sin," "Break and die," "O Grief," "Alas! now is my Saviour gone,"
and "Have mercy upon me"; and, on the other hand, we have "Thou
blessed Saviour," the Last Supper music, the succeeding recitative and
song, "O man, thy heavy sin lament," "To us He hath done all things,"
"For love my Saviour suffered," "Come, blessed Cross," and "See the
Saviour's outstretched arm," every one of which, not to speak of some
other songs and most of the chorales, is sheer love music of the
purest sort. This, then, seems to me the difference between the
"Matthew" Passion and its predecessor: in the "John" Bach tried to
purge his audience in the regular evangelical manner by pity and
terror and hope. But during the next six years his spiritual
development was so amazing, that while remaining intellectually
faithful to evangelical dogma and perhaps such bogies as the devil and
hell, he yet saw that the best way of purifying his audience was to
set Jesus of Nazareth before them as the highest type of manhood he
knew, as the man who so loved men that He died for them. There is
therefore in the "Matthew" Passion neither the blank despair nor the
feverish ecstasy of the "John," for they have no part to play there.
Human sorrow and human love are the themes. Whenever I hear a fine
rendering of the "Matthew" Passion, it seems to me that no composer,
not even Mozart, could be more tender than Bach. It is often hard to
get into communication with him, for he often appeals to feelings that
no longer stir humanity--such, for instance, as the obsolete "sense of