St. Matthew Passion

So, I’ve been just a big consumed the past week and a half with  Arrowhead Chorale performances of the St Matthew Passion (a work by J.S. Bach).  When I found out that the St. Matthew Passion was going to be  part of our season this year, I was incredibly excited.  I love Bach, and the St. Matthew Passion has always been at the top of my list of major classical masterworks that I would someday love to sing.  I loved doing the St. John Passion a couple of years ago, and  was thrilled that we were going to attempt St. Matthew. It’s a BIG work of music for double choir (plus children’s choir for the opening chorus), orchestra, continuo, organ, and a series of soloists.  Truly, how Bach integrates arias, chorales, chorus,  and distinctive orchestra sound makes this  one of the greatest musical compositional masterworks.  It is also very long.  The music from start to finish takes 3 hours without an intermission, the break written into the music where churchgoers at the time would have heard a 2 hour sermon on Good Friday.

We started working on the music right after Christmas.  There was so much work and preparation put into this concert.  The very finest orchestral musicians in the area were funded through various grants to play with us.  Everything was sung in German, so the translation of the story, which literally tells  passion story from the gospel of Matthew, was projected onto a screen for the audience to follow as it was sung.  The plot is moved along through lots of recitative.  Soloists expound on the themes of the scripture, chorales bring home the meaning of what happens to the congregation as participants in the story, and the choir gets to do all sorts of singing, in true double choir format, sometimes joined together and sometimes singing as two distinctive groups.  We get to set the stage, be the crowd, create special musical effects.

Here’s what I love about Bach’s music:  it is almost always complex and challenging, like putting together a super complicated puzzle that necessitates  you to work with all sorts of tiny and intricate pieces that you have to get just exactly right before you can move on and work with the next intricate pieces.  It requires  you to work so hard, but in the end, if you put in the work, it always fits together and makes perfect sense.

I felt as prepared as possible a week before these concerts that took place last Friday and Sunday, which was Palm Sunday, and pretty much the perfect timing for the St. Matthew Passion.  Last week was filled with extra, very long rehearsals.  The day of the first rehearsal with orchestra I thought my throat was getting scratchy, which worried me.  The next day I felt OK, though, and I thought I might get lucky and not get sick.  I had just been sick a few weeks before, and when I got sick then, I actually consoled myself upon completely losing my voice, telling myself I might as well just get all the sick out of my system at once so I wouldn’t be sick for St. Matthew Passion, and I’d be able to sing my heart out at the actual concerts.  But, of course, the day before the first concert, I really started feeling bad.  It was the night of our longest rehearsals when I started to cough a bit, and I ended up having to leave the stage because standing so long actually made me start to black out and shake uncontrollably, which was just a little too much drama than I would have preferred.  I’m not the type of singer to pass out frequently.  I’m the type of singer that likes to get the job done.  I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have started to black out if I hadn’t been sick.  It really is so hard on your body to stand perfectly still in one place for hours and hours, holding a heavy folder of music.  Because this work is so big, the music score is enormous to be holding that long and totally messes with your alignment.

ANYWAY, even though I slept all Friday morning, I was still coughing even worse that the night before and my voice was weak, so I knew that singing was not going to be and option for the first concert. I elected to sit out in hopes that if I rested my voice I might be able to sing on Sunday.   It was so disappointing.  I sat in audience and consumed 24 cough drops while my colleagues were doing an amazing job bringing  the crucifixion to life in the front of the church.   I wanted  to just run up on stage and join them because my brain was singing everything right along with them.  My mouth was raw from all of the cough drops, because the moment I didn’t have a cough drop I was coughing.  IThe concerts were being recorded for Minnesota Public Radio, so I really didn’t want to be coughing in the audience and ruining the music.  Even though I didn’t want to sit in the audience, it  did put my in the unique position of having really, really studied this piece of work performed in front of me and getting to watch it all unfold where I could read all the subtitles of all the parts was actually pretty special. I understood the music in a new way that had never happened even when  listening to a recording with the score in front of me.  Seeing, reading and hearing all at once  gave me a completely different perspective, and I understood for the first time some of the sound pictures Bach created.  It was so amazing to hear  the relationships between the instruments, the text, the vocal colors created.  This work was the reason that many years after his death Bach was hailed a musical genius even though he wasn’t really noticed when he was actually alive and creating.  It is a moving monument of music.  There were many, many beautiful moments.

Getting to see the big picture made joining in with my voice on Sunday even more meaningful.  Plus, I was so grateful to get to participate.  I had been coughing like crazy in the morning that day, and I ended up coughing like crazy in the evening, but for that window of time in the afternoon the coughing lightened up and I was able to sing for the entire concert.  It wasn’t prefect singing on my part, because sometimes when I’d inhale I would start to cough quietly and would need to skip a phrase or two, but getting to actually participate was somewhat of a miracle,  which I attribute to answered prayer.  I really, really wanted to be singing.