Religious Aims in Mendelssohn's 1829 Berlin-Singakademie Performances of Bach's St.

Matthew Passion
Author(s): Michael Marissen
Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 718-726
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/742355
Accessed: 18-11-2016 16:17 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Musical Quarterly

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Religious Aims in Mendelssohn's 1829

Berlin-Singakademie Performances

of Bach's St. Matthew Passion

Michael Marissen

Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 Berlin-Singakademie performances of

Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion have been widely discussed in the secondary literature, and one might reasonably assume,
especially after Martin Geck's stimulating monograph on the topic,
that there remains little or nothing to say about the facts of the historical situation or their interpretation. 1 Geck and other writers, however, have had a somewhat difficult time knowing what to make of
the performances, partly because they have relied almost exclusively
on critical reception (contemporary reviews, letters, etc.) and have
not looked in sufficient detail into what Mendelssohn actually did
with Bach's music in his performances. Furthermore, certain fundamental questions have received little or no attention: why Bach, and
why the Matthew Passion? Although I do not want to deny the importance of nationalist and historicist tendencies on Mendelssohn's part, I
think religion played a greater role than is generally acknowledged. I
would argue that religious aspects are among the most important in
understanding why Mendelssohn chose a work by Bach, why he chose
the Matthew Passion in particular, and why he made specific, extensive
cuts from the Matthew Passion.

Why, then, did Mendelssohn choose Bach for his conducting

debut with the Berlin-Singakademie? Mendelssohn's choice may have
been motivated by more than aesthetic criteria alone. He certainly
had easy access to Bach's music. A great deal of Bach's massive choral
output was owned at the time by the Singakademie itself,2 and all of
the large-scale Bach vocal works (e.g., Mass in B Minor, Matthew and
John Passions, Christmas Oratorio, Easter Oratorio, Ascension Oratorio,
Magnificat) were available in one form or another in Berlin.3 As a
skilled performer and composer, he presumably wanted the music to
be great, and as a professing Lutheran, he also wanted the music to be

718

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Religious Aims in Mendelssohn's 1829 Performances 719

specifically Christian. His friend, the actor Eduard Devrient, who

spurred him on and helped him make the involved arrangements for
the Singakademie performances, reports that Mendelssohn exclaimed
at the Opernplatz, "to think that it has to be an actor and a Jew who
bring back for the people the greatest Christian music."4 Mendelssohn
himself stressed the music's greatness and its Christianity.
A Bach passion setting would seem to have represented an obvious choice for Mendelssohn, a famous convert from the Jewish to the
Lutheran faith. Mendelssohn must have considered the Matthew Pas-

sion, in the context of his Lutheranism, as the ideal choice among

Bach's passion settings. The Mark Passion copy that might have been
available to him was incomplete,5 and the Luke Passion, if it was available to him at the time, would probably have been rejected because of
doubts about its authenticity.6 This left only the John and the Matthew
Passions. The John Passion was already long known to Mendelssohn
from informal readings as a choir member under the director of the
Singakademie, Karl Friedrich Zelter,7 and he was given a score of the
Matthew Passion as a Christmas gift in 1823 from a family member.8
Zelter apparently had access to all of Bach's passion settings, for he
reportedly argued with Mendelssohn and Devrient against the idea of
a Matthew Passion performance on the grounds that it was too difficult
for the choir, that violinists did not any longer understand how to
play this kind of music, and that if it were really possible, "all four of
Bach's passions would already have been performed."9
Mendelssohn's choice for Bach was also a choice against the
piece traditionally performed by the Singakademie at passion time
each year in Berlin, Karl Heinrich Graun's Der Tod Jesu. Because of
Mendelssohn's and Devrient's efforts, this much-loved work was
replaced for the Holy Week performance of the 1829 season by Bach's
Matthew Passion. Graun's piece was criticized by some in the nineteenth century as inferior music to Bach's, but this alone does not
explain its eventual rejection. For Mendelssohn, the work's overtly
anti-Jewish text may also have played a role. (The Singakademie was
almost certainly unconcerned about this aspect of Graun's music.
Consider, for example, that Mendelssohn was rejected as Zelter's successor in part because of his Jewish background. 10)
While many have argued the relative aesthetic merits of Bach's
John and Matthew Passion settings, most Bach devotees do come down
in favor of the Matthew. Nonetheless, I believe it is also worth considering if Mendelssohn might have chosen the Matthew largely for textual reasons. Its message is quite different from that of the John
Passion, which focuses on the trial of Christ and his identification as

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

720 The Musical Quarterly

the "victorious king" (Christus victor).11 Within the biblical narrative,

those Jews who do not accept him as king are seen as the ones essentially responsible for bringing about Christ's death. The Matthew Passion focuses much more on Christ as "suffering servant," one who is
guiltless and whose death is brought on by the guilt of all (and here
the Jews and the Romans are instrumental in bringing about Christ's
death). Bach establishes this theme of the Matthew Passion unmistak-

ably in the opening movement, a powerful triple-choir lament combining a chorus representing the Daughters of Zion, a chorus of the
Faithful, and an extra soprano line for the traditional German Agnus

Dei, the chorale "O Lamm Gottes unschuldig"--a procession toward

death redolent of the seventeenth-century Trauerspiel. In Christian

symbolism, "Zion" (also sometimes called "the Daughter[s] of Zion" or
"the Daughter[s] of Jerusalem" by the Old Testament writers) is understood to mean the Church; "the Faithful," or "the Faithful Soul,"
stands for both the individual believer and the Church. 12 In personifying these two concepts, the Matthew Passion text instructs us in the
opening chorus, and continually through the passion setting, to meditate on all of humanity's guilt versus Christ's innocence. 13
That religious considerations played a significant role in the
decision to perform the Matthew Passion can be inferred from the writings of Mendelssohn, his sister Fanny, and others. The music theorist,
critic, and friend of Mendelssohn Adolph Bernard Marx referred to
the performance as a "high-feast of religion and art," and he called
the Matthew Passion a "living church service of the congregation." He
also remarked that "already in the rehearsals with reduced forces the
artistic and religious sense of the participants was highly stimulated."
Mendelssohn's sister Fanny wrote in a letter to Karl Klingemann,
"The overflowing hall provided a church-like aura." The historian
Gustav Droysen, a teacher and close friend of Mendelssohn, saw and
valued the Matthew Passion not only as a great art work, but as the
living "music of Protestantism." And Mendelssohn himself wrote in a
letter to his friend Franz Hauser, an enthusiastic collector of Bach
manuscripts, "[the choir] sang with a devotion, as if they were in
church. . . . The public . . . felt that this was not a matter of music
and concert, but rather of religion and church." In a letter from the
late 1830s regarding repertory for a Cologne music festival, he suggested Handels' Messiah and perhaps some Beethoven cantatas, but
remarked that Bach's Matthew Passion would be unsuitable, as "there
is nothing of the concert in it."14
Further understanding of Mendelssohn's reception of Bach's
Matthew Passion may be gained by considering the parts of it he actu-

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Religious Aims in Mendelssohn's 1829 Performances 721

ally performed. This question has not been given much attention in
the secondary literature; writers almost invariably report that Mendelssohn's cuts were a matter of taste, or that they were made for
purposes of greater dramatic concision. 15 These conclusions, however,
do not fully acount for Mendelssohn's performance materials. Once
again, theological considerations played a central role.
What changes did Mendelssohn make? He cut all the solo arias
but two, about a half dozen chorales, and many small snippets from
within the recitatives (most of these cuts are from part 2 of the passion, which involves the arrest and trial scene). Mendelssohn probably
did cut the arias partly for aesthetic or dramatic reasons, but he may
also have had religious motivations for doing so. These motivations
were probably influenced by the religious philosophy of Friedrich
Schleiermacher, of whose circle in Berlin Mendelssohn was a member. 16 In particular, an essential element of Schleiermacher's thought
is his Christocentric, communal theology (Gemeindetheologie). Schleiermacher stressed the second article of the creed ("I believe in God the
son") in contrast to Enlightenment deists, who emphasized the first
("God the father"). He also placed less emphasis on religious individualism and more on the (Protestant) congregation. The influence of
Schleiermacher's ideas may help to explain why Mendelssohn keeps
most of the verbatim biblical account (the recitatives) and the group
responses (the chorales), but was less interested in the individual's
responses (the arias). Schleiermacher was present at the first of Mendelssohn's performances of the Matthew Passion, but no record of what
he thought of it survives among his published or unpublished writings. 17

Mendelssohn's colleague Devrient does mention reasons for the

cuts in passing. He says the two men had met several times to consider how to shorten the Matthew Passion for performance and notes
that it was really unthinkable to perform the whole thing because it
"showed so many signs of the tastes of its times." By this he presumably meant the arias, which were textually out of date, in contrast to
the chorales and biblical accounts, considered timeless. Devrient says
they saw their goal as "to give some impressions of the Matthew Passion's excellence,"is which apparently meant that the arias had to be
cut, though from a few of them the instrumental introductions were to
stand. He goes on to say that "even from the gospel text, that which
didn't belong to the passion story had to be taken out."'19 Curiously,
Devrient does not say anything about the chorales. Fanny Mendelssohn wrote that her brother had made "appropriate" cuts, confirming at least that a strong need was felt to shorten the work in

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

722 The Musical Quarterly

particular ways.20 Of the project in general, Devrient concluded,

"often enough we were of divided opinion on some of this, because it
involved matters of conscience, but we apparently made the right
decisions, for they were stuck to pretty much in subsequent performances."21

Mendelssohn's cut of all the solo arias but two, some of the biblical account, and some of the chorales leaves us to consider how to
account for these apparently diverse choices. Even if Mendelssohn
considered Bach's Matthew Passion too long for a performance, one
would still assume that his cuts would not have been made arbitrarily.
In fact, nearly all of the cuts are in texts that ran the risk of being
perceived as anti-Jewish.
Consider first the cuts from the recitatives, the verbatim biblical
account. These cuts often involve only a few seconds of music and
therefore must have been textually-motivated. In recitative 33
(39),22--the Jewish legal proceeding before Christ is turned over to
the Roman authorities--Mendelssohn cut the phrase "and though
many witnesses [i.e., Jewish witnesses] came forth, all testimony was
found false" and resumes with "two witnesses came forth and said, 'he
claims he can break down God's temple and rebuild it in three
days' "23 (emphasis added). In recitative 43 (52), he cut the betrayal
of Christ for thirty pieces of silver. Also within 43 (52), he cut Pontius Pilate's question to Christ, "Don't you hear how severely they
[Jews] complain against you?" In 45a (54), he cut the evangelist's
saying "that they had turned [Christ] over out of envy [or malice; aus
Neid]." All of these cuts remove from the text negative character
depictions of Jews.
Toward the end of the biblical account there are two other recitative cuts, and these concern the role of women as witnesses to the
events surrounding Christ's crucifixion and burial. Feminist biblical
criticism has rightly focused much of its attention on this part of the
Bible: in light of the fact that women in New Testament times were
not considered to be legally binding witnesses, the gospel stories
appear to be advocating a new status for women, one that the early
Christian church (and the church altogether, until fairly recently) did
not recognize. Mendelssohn apparently believed that the several parts
of Matthew's narrative that mention women "didn't belong to the
passion story."24 In 63c (73), immediately after the tearing of the
temple veil (when it becomes clear that Christ was the Son of God),
Mendelssohn cut the text, "and there were many women there" and
resumes at "in the evening, however, there came a rich man." In 66a
(76) he cut a short sentence on the presence of the two Marys at

Christ's grave; the passage is marked by a "Vi-...-de" (i.e., an indi-

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Religious Aims in Mendelssohn's 1829 Performances 723

cation to skip over the material in between) and by a large mark crossing it out in Mendelssohn's score, and one wonders if he was
particularly vehement about the exclusion. Apparently Mendelssohn's
attitude toward women was largely of the conventional patriarchal sort
(consider, for example, his ambivalent support for his sister Fanny's
compositional career, which is well documented in the Mendelssohn
literature, and his disdain for "unfeminine" women in Berlin intellectual circles).25 This attitude may also explain some of Mendelssohn's
cuts from the Matthew Passion.

In addition to the arias, Mendelssohn also cut several chorales.

He cut only one chorale from part 1, 17 (23), which includes the line
"I will stay here with you"; perhaps Mendelssohn worried that the line
implied that disloyalty was to be expected from Jews. The other chorales cut are from the arrest and trial scenes: 32 (38), with its closing
line "protect me from wicked malice [or perfidy; 'B'hiit mich fur falschen Tticken!']"; 37 (44), with its line "who has so struck you, my
savior, and so nastily injured and tormented you?"; and finally, the
second verse of famous passion chorale "O Haupt voll Blut und

Wunden," 54 (63), with its closing line "[who has] so scandalously

mauled you?"26 In all these chorale cuts, as with most of the recitative
cuts, Mendelssohn seems to have been motivated by concerns about
negative character depictions of Jews, though there are also several

chorale cuts, 40 (48), 44 (53), and 46 (55), that are not explained by

this rationale.

Finally, Mendelssohn did retain only two solo arias in his perfor-

mances, 6 (10), "BuB und Reu," and 39 (47), "Erbarme dich." In

light of the nature of Mendelssohn's chorale and recitative cuts, the
inclusion of these two arias would seem likewise to have been textually motivated. Mendelssohn evidently believed that the forceful guilt
themes of the first aria and the call for mercy and redemption in the
second captured the edifying message he wished his performances to
project to his 1820s Berlin audiences.27 "Erbarme dich" clearly harks
back to the triple chorus of the opening, where, after the choruses of
the Faithful and the Daughters of Zion have instructed us to look
upon our guilt ("seht, seht, auf unsre Schuld"), the final soprano
chorale line cries out above the other two now-joined choruses,
"Erbarm dich unser, O Jesu!"
Notes
This essay was delivered as an informal talk on 21 Feb. 1993 at the conference "The
Mendelssohn Family: Music, Gender, and Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany," Institute for German Cultural Studies, Cornell University. My thanks to

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

724 The Musical Quarterly

Paula Morgan, music librarian at Princeton University, for providing microfilms of

Mendelssohn's Matthew Passion performance materials in the Bodleian Library,
Oxford, and to Michael P. Steinberg and Daniel Melamed for criticisms and encouragement.

1. Martin Geck, Die Wiederentdeckung der Matthduspassion im 19. Jahrhundert: Die

zeitgendssischen Dokumente und ihre ideengeschichtliche Deutung (Regensburg: Bosse,

1967). For a useful summary of Geck's findings, see Gottfried Eberle, 200 Jahre SingAkademie zu Berlin: Ein Kunstverein fiir die heilige Musik (Berlin: Nicolai, 1991),

87-99. See also Walter Blankenburg, "Die Berliner Wiederaufftihrung der MatthiusPassion-Denkmal oder Programm?" in Bachtage Berlin: Vortrdge 1970 bis 1981, ed.

Gtnther Wagner (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hinssler, 1985), 23-31; and Ingeborg Drewitz, "Marz 1829-oder die Sakularisierung der Kdtnste," Wagner, 201-10; and Arno
Forchert, "Von Bach zu Mendelssohn," Wagner, 211-23.
.2. See Georg Schdtnemann, "Die Bachpflege der Berliner Singakademie," BachJahrbuch 25 (1928): 138-71; Werner Neumann, "Welcher Handschriften J. S.
Bachscher Werke besaf die Berliner Singakademie?" in Hans Albrecht in Memoriam,

ed. Wilfried Brennecke and Hans Haase (Kassel: Birenreiter, 1962), 136-42; and

Friedrich Welter, "Die Musikbibliothek der Sing-Akademie zu Berlin," in SingAkademie zu Berlin: Festschrift zu 175 jahrigen Bestehen, ed. Werner Bollert (Berlin:

Rembrandt-Verlag, 1966), 33-47.

3. See the provenance lists for the relevant works in Hans-Joachim Schulze and
Christoph Wolff, Bach Compendium: Analytisch-bibliographisches Repertorium der Werke

Johann Sebastian Bachs (Frankfurt: Peters, 1985-).

4. ". . . daB es ein Kom6diant und ein Judenjunge sein miissen, die den Leuten die
gr6bte christliche Musik wiederbringen" (Geck, 32).
5. His friend Hauser appears to have owned a partial copy of Bach's Mark Passion
(only the libretto to this work is extant). It is unknown, however, when Hauser copied this score. See Andreas Gl6ckner, "Johann Sebastian Bachs Auffiihrungen zeitgen6ssicher Passionsmusiken," Bach-Jahrbuch 63 (1977): 75-119, at 90-91.
6. A copy of this Luke Passion came into the Vof Collection in Berlin sometime
before 1836; see Hans-Joachim Schulze, Studien zur Bach-iJberlieferung im 18. Jahrhun-

dert (Leipzig: Peters, 1983), 95. On Mendelssohn's connections to the Vof Collection, see Susanna Grofmann-Vendrey, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy und die Musik der
Vergangenheit (Regensburg: Bosse, 1969), 214. In a letter of 1833 to Hauser, who had
recently acquired Bach's own (unattributed) copy of this Luke Passion setting, Men-

delssohn casts grave doubts on the idea that it was composed by Bach; see GrofmannVendrey, 209-10. Current Bach research also doubts Bach's authorship. The leading
Bach scholar of the nineteenth century, Philipp Spitta, however, considered the Luke
Passion genuine, and even highly superior, music of Bach's; see Johann Sebastian Bach,

vol. 2 (Leipzig: 1880), 338-47.

7. See Schuinemann, 155.
8. Mendelssohn's score had been copied from a (now lost) score that Zelter had had
prepared, for the most part, from Bach's original performing parts, which were owned
by the Singakademie. It is widely and erroneously reported (see, e.g., Geck, 18) that
Mendelssohn's score had to be copied from the autograph score owned by the Bach

manuscript collector Georg Poelchau on account of a metaphorical father-son rivalry

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Religious Aims in Mendelssohn's 1829 Performances 725

between Zelter and his composition student Mendelssohn. For a corrected account of
the source materials, see Alfred Dirr, ed., Johann Sebastian Bach, Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke, II5: Matthaus-Passion, Markus-Passion, Kritischer Bericht (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1974), 94-96. In his memoirs (1866) Mendelssohn's theologian friend Julius
Schubring indicates that Mendelssohn's score had been copied from Zelter's materials

(see Geck, 33).

9. ". . . so wiren schon lingst alle vier Passionsmusiken von Bach aufgefiihrt"
(Geck, 29).
10. Some Mendelssohn scholars have overemphasized this aspect of the Singakademie's decision-making process. For a full account, see William A. Little, "Mendelssohn and the Berlin Singakademie: The Composer at the Crossroads," in
Mendelssohn and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), 65-85.
11. For an excellent introduction to the differing theological emphases in Bach's two
passion settings, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Bach Among the Theologians (Philadelphia: For-

tress Press, 1986), 74-115.

12. The theological background to all of this is explained well in Lothar and Renate
Steiger, "Die theologische Bedeutung der Doppelch6rigkeit in Johann Sebastian Bachs
'Matthius-Passion,' " in Bachiana et alia musicologica: Festschrift Alfred Diirr zum 65.

Geburtstag, ed. Wolfgang Rehm (Kassel: Birenreiter, 1983), 275-86.

13. See especially numbers 1, 10 (16), 19 (25), 29 (35), 39 (47), and 67 (77); the
numbers in parentheses are those of the original edition of the Thematischsystematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach-Bach-

Werke-Verzeichnis ("BWV"), ed. Wolfgang Schmieder (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hirtel,

1950), while the others are those of the second edition (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf &
Hartel, 1990).
14. Geck prints most of the relevant sources: "Hochfeier der Religion und der
Kunst" (25); "lebendigen Gottesdienst der Gemeinde" (68); "Schon in den kleinen
Vortibungen war der Kunstsinn und die Religiositit der Theilnehmenden hochangeregt worden" (56); "Der iiberftillte Saal gab einen Anblick wie eine Kirche" (43);
"die Musik des freien, evangelischen Glaubens der Gottvertrauenden" (58); "sie san-

gen mit einer Andacht, als ob sie in der Kirche wiren. . . . Das Publicum .
fiihlten daB hier nicht Musik und Concert, sondern Religion und Kirche sei"
(GroBmann-Vendrey, 49; only the first part of this quotation appears in Geck, 42).
"Es ist nichts ConcertmiBiges darin" (GroBmann-Vendrey, 90).

15. Only Geck (36-37) and Barbara David Wright ("Johann Sebastian Bach's
'Matthius-Passion': A Performance History 1829-1854" [Ph.D. diss., University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1983], 253-68) specify what Mendelssohn's cuts were, but
they too suggest that the cuts reflected problems of dramatic continuity and taste.

16. Wulf Konold, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und seine Zeit (Regensburg: Laaber,
1984), 16. For an introduction to Schleiermacher, see Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher:
Life and Thought, trans. John Wallhausser (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973).

17. Geck, 34, 49.

18. "Eindruck seiner Vorziiglichkeit zusammenzuhalten" (Geck, 31).

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

726 The Musical Quarterly

19. "Auch vom Evangelium muBte fortbleiben, was nicht zur Passionserzihlung
geh6rt" (Geck, 32).
20. "Felix ging die ganze Partitur durch, machte einige wenige zweckmiBige Abktirzungen" (Geck, 32).

21. "Oft genug waren wir zwiespiltiger Ansicht, denn es gait eine Gewissensaufgabe;
aber was wir schlieBlich festgestellt, scheint doch das Rechte gewesen zu sein, da es
spiterhin bei den meisten Auffiihrungen angenommen waren" (Geck, 32).
22. Regarding the numbering systems, see note 13 above.
23. Geck erroneously reports that Mendelssohn cut the second half of the verse here

at Matthew 26:60 (37).

24. See note 19 above.

25. See Nancy B. Reich, "The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel," in Todd, 86-99.
When discussing with Mendelssohn the possibility of a performance of the Matthew
Passion, Zelter threw in all sorts of objections, including "[on the governing board of

the Singakademie] there are many people and many tastes and inclinations-and
there will also be womanish minds to deal with, you know!" ["da sind gar viele K6pfe

und viele Sinne-und Weiberk6pfe sind auch dabei, ja!"] (Geck, 29). Was this simply Zelter's way of thinking, or did he also believe that this kind of reasoning would

appeal to Mendelssohn?
26. While some blame Jews ultimately for Christ's being "scandalously mauled," it
should be pointed out that at this point in the passion narrative it is not the crowd
(Jews) who abuse Christ, but the soldiers (Romans).

27. Mendelssohn, in a letter of 1835 to Bruno Bauer, compared his own compositional ambitions to the "edification" generated by Bach's passion music; see Leon
Botstein, "The Aesthetics of Assimilation and Affirmation: Reconstructing the Career
of Felix Mendelssohn," in Todd, 5-42, at 24. A sense of the depth in meaning of
Bach's "Erbarme dich" aria is powerfully captured for modern audiences through its
use at the opening and close of Andrei Tarkovskij's film Offret Sacrificatio (The Sacrifice), 1986.

This content downloaded from 128.4.110.180 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:17:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms