The “Passions” are still more extended, and were written for use in the Reformed Church in Holy Week.  As an art-form they are unique, combining a number of elements and having all the apparatus of an oratorio plus the congregation, which took part in the performance by singing the hymns dispersed through the work.  The service (for as a service, rather than as an oratorio, it must be treated) roots in the Miracle plays and Mysteries of the Middle Ages, but its origin is even more remote, going back to the custom followed by the primitive Christians of making the reading of the story of the Passion a special service for Holy Week.  In the Eastern Church it was introduced in a simple dramatic form as early as the fourth century A.D., the treatment being somewhat like the ancient tragedies, the text being intoned or chanted.  In the Western Church, until the sixteenth century, the Passion was read in a way which gave the service one element which is found in Bach’s works in an amplified form.  Three deacons were employed, one to read (or rather chant to Gregorian melodies) the words of Christ, another to deliver the narrative in the words of the Evangelist, and a third to give the utterances and exclamations of the Apostles and people.  This was the Cantus Passionis Domini nostri Jesu Christe of the Church, and had so strong a hold upon the tastes of the people that it was preserved by Luther in the Reformed Church.

[Sidenote:  The service amplified.]

[Sidenote:  Bach’s settings.]

Under this influence it was speedily amplified.  The successive steps of the progress are not clear, but the choir seems to have first succeeded to the part formerly sung by the third deacon, and in some churches the whole Passion was sung antiphonally by two choirs.  In the seventeenth century the introduction of recitatives and arias, distributed among singers who represented the personages of sacred history, increased the dramatic element of the service which reached its climax in the “St. Matthew” setting by Bach.  The chorales are supposed to have been introduced about 1704.  Bach’s “Passions” are the last that figure in musical history.  That “according to St. John” is performed occasionally in Germany, but it yields the palm of excellence to that “according to St. Matthew,” which had its first performance on Good Friday, 1729, in Leipsic.  It is in two parts, which were formerly separated by the sermon, and employs two choirs, each with its own orchestra, solo singers in all the classes of voices, and a harpsichord to accompany all the recitatives, except those of Jesus, which are distinguished by being accompanied by the orchestral strings.

[Sidenote:  Oratorios.]

[Sidenote:  Sacred operas.]