Mendelssohn and Bach in Berlin: The 1829 Revival of the St Matthew Passion

On 11 March 1829, in the concert hall of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, a twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn raised his hands before a choir of 158 singers and began a work that had never been performed outside Leipzig and had not been heard there for nearly thirty years: the St Matthew Passion. The tickets had sold out, and more than a thousand people were turned away. The audience included the King of Prussia, the philosopher Hegel and the poet Heinrich Heine. Within a few years Bach had become a national figure and his music a cause. Mendelssohn’s concert did not create Bach’s reputation, but it changed what people thought he was. Berlin is where our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour begins, and this is the story that explains why so much of the journey is about Bach’s afterlife as well as his life.

A forgotten Passion?

Bach’s music never disappeared entirely after his death in 1750. In Leipzig the St Matthew Passion was performed under the Thomaskantors until around 1800, and in 1780 Johann Friedrich Doles staged three of Bach’s Passions. Musicians knew the keyboard works through manuscript copies: Gottfried van Swieten carried them to Vienna, where Mozart studied them, and in 1802 Johann Nikolaus Forkel published the first detailed biography, ending with the words “Let Germany be proud of him!”

But the large choral works had dropped out of public life. To most listeners in the early nineteenth century, Bach was a learned master of counterpoint, admired by specialists and dismissed by many connoisseurs as a “dry mathematician” whose music would never appeal to ordinary audiences. His great Passions, written for Lutheran services in two Leipzig churches, were known mostly to the few people who had seen the scores.

The Sing-Akademie and its teacher

One of those places was the Berlin Sing-Akademie, a choral society founded in 1791 by the court harpsichordist Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch. From 1800 it was run by his pupil Carl Friedrich Zelter, a builder by training who became one of Berlin’s foremost Bach experts. The society owned one of the finest collections of Bach family manuscripts anywhere, and Zelter performed some of Bach’s music with his choir. He did not, however, believe that the Passion could be presented to the public.

Zelter’s most gifted pupils were the children of a wealthy Berlin banking family, Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, grandchildren of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. The family had joined the Sing-Akademie a generation earlier. In 1824 Felix’s grandmother, Bella Salomon, gave the fifteen-year-old a copy of the St Matthew Passion score, and from 1827 he and a few friends began meeting weekly to sing through it.

Why Berlin?

The revival happened in Berlin rather than Leipzig for a reason. The Sing-Akademie was a new kind of institution: a choral society of amateur singers drawn from the city’s educated middle class, modelled on London’s Academy of Ancient Music and devoted to performing serious older music. Zelter built it up steadily, adding an orchestra in 1807 and a men’s singing club, the Liedertafel, in 1808, and in 1827 it moved into a permanent home of its own near Unter den Linden, which quickly became one of the city’s main concert halls.

That combination of a large, trained amateur choir, a library of Bach manuscripts and a public that thought of music as part of its education was exactly what a revival needed. In Leipzig the Passion had belonged to a church service. In Berlin it became a concert, heard by a paying audience as a work of art, and that change of setting, more than any individual note, is what made it modern.

Persuading Zelter

The push to perform came from a friend. Eduard Devrient, a baritone and principal singer at the Berlin Royal Opera, sang in the weekly sessions and was moved by the drama of the work. Around the turn of 1828 and 1829 he persuaded Mendelssohn that the two of them should ask Zelter to let the Sing-Akademie present it in public, and he hoped to sing the role of Jesus. Zelter was reluctant, but he agreed, and the society’s board followed.

Devrient later recalled Mendelssohn’s remark as they walked home from that meeting: that it took “an actor and a Jew” to give back to the people the greatest Christian music. Mendelssohn had been baptised a Lutheran as a child, but the line captures how his Jewish family background shaped the way his role in the revival was seen, then and since. In 1832, after Zelter’s death, Mendelssohn hoped to succeed him as director of the Sing-Akademie, but the post went to Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen.

What audiences heard in 1829

The performance on 11 March 1829 was not Bach’s Passion as Bach had performed it. Mendelssohn conducted from the piano, with a choir far larger than anything Bach commanded, and he cut the work substantially, removing ten arias, about a third of them, along with several choruses and a few chorales. The effect was to sharpen the drama of the Passion story at the expense of the reflective arias. Critics have argued over these changes ever since, but they made the work playable for a modern concert audience that had never heard anything like it.

The response was overwhelming. A second performance followed on 21 March, Bach’s birthday, also sold out, and Zelter himself conducted a third on Good Friday. Within months the Passion was heard in Frankfurt, Breslau and Stettin, and a printed edition followed in 1830. Our list of books on Johann Sebastian Bach includes Celia Applegate’s Bach in Berlin, the best study of how this single concert crystallised the idea that music was central to German identity.

How the revival changed Bach’s reputation

After 1829, Bach was no longer only the composers’ composer. In Germany, his music became bound up with national feeling and with a revival of Protestant religious life, and the idea that recovering and performing it was in some sense national work took hold. Later in the century Wagner could describe Bach as embodying the history of the German spirit’s inmost life.

The scholarly consequences were just as large. In 1850, the centenary of Bach’s death, Robert Schumann and others founded the Bach-Gesellschaft to publish all of Bach’s works without editorial additions, a project completed in 1900. The same year, the Brandenburg Concertos were published for the first time. In England, William Sterndale Bennett founded a Bach Society in 1849 and conducted the first English performance of the St Matthew Passion in London in 1854. Each of these steps traces back, in part, to the Berlin concert of 1829.

Mendelssohn’s Bach in Leipzig

The revival also shaped Leipzig, where Mendelssohn directed the Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1835. In 1840 he gave an organ concert of Bach’s music in the Thomaskirche to raise money for a monument to Bach near the church. On Palm Sunday 1841 he conducted the St Matthew Passion there, in the church where it had first been heard, this time restoring some of the cuts he had made in 1829. Proceeds from the two concerts helped pay for the sandstone Bach monument unveiled near the church in 1843. Our article on the Thomaskirche and the office of the Thomaskantor explains what that church meant to Bach himself.

Mendelssohn also prepared editions of Bach’s organ music, including the Orgelbüchlein, published in 1844. He died in Leipzig in 1847, aged thirty-eight, in the apartment that is now the Mendelssohn House museum. His statue stands opposite the Thomaskirche. It was first raised in 1892, taken down by the Nazis in 1936 because of his Jewish ancestry, and re-erected in 2008.

How different was Mendelssohn’s version from what we hear today?

Quite different. Mendelssohn’s 1829 performance used a choir of 158 singers and a modern orchestra, with the conductor leading from a piano, and it omitted roughly a third of the arias along with several choruses. Today many performances, especially by ensembles using period instruments, restore the complete score and use much smaller forces, closer to the choirs Bach described in his memoranda to the Leipzig council. Both approaches have devoted listeners. Hearing a complete modern performance in Leipzig makes it easier to appreciate both what Mendelssohn achieved and what his audiences did not hear.

Where can you trace this story on the tour?

In three cities. The tour begins with three nights in Berlin, where the Sing-Akademie performances took place, including a concert at the Konzerthaus and a guided tour of the Berlin Philharmonie. In Leipzig, the group visits the Mendelssohn House, his last private address and the only one of his homes that can still be visited, and hears Bachfest concerts in the Thomaskirche, where he conducted the Passion in 1841. The tour ends in Hamburg, the city where Mendelssohn was born in 1809, and its Komponistenquartier presents the composers who lived and worked in the city, Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn among them. For the Hamburg chapter of the Bach family story, see our article on C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg.

Will the tour hear the St Matthew Passion?

It is not guaranteed, but 2027 is a good year to hope. Bachfest Leipzig 2027 takes the motto “Passion” to mark 300 years since the work’s likely first performance on Good Friday 1727, and runs from 10 to 20 June, overlapping the tour’s three nights in Leipzig. The tour’s six concert tickets are chosen from each year’s programme, so the works are confirmed only once the festival publishes it. Our article on Bachfest Leipzig explains how the festival is built.

What happened to the Sing-Akademie’s Bach collection?

It survived a remarkable journey. The Sing-Akademie’s archive, with its manuscripts by Bach and his family, was taken by the Red Army in 1945 and hidden for decades in Kyiv, at the conservatory there. After its rediscovery it was returned to Germany around 2000, and it is now one of the great resources for Bach research. Its survival means that much of what Mendelssohn and Zelter studied can still be consulted today.

The concert that turned a cantor into a classic

The Berlin revival is why Bach is now a household name rather than a specialist’s enthusiasm. It turned music written for a particular Good Friday in a particular Leipzig church into a monument of German culture, for better and sometimes for worse. Our overview of Bach’s Germany shows how the tour begins with that afterlife in Berlin and Potsdam before travelling back through Bach’s own life.

Hearing the Passion today, in a Leipzig church or a Berlin concert hall, is to hear both Bach and Mendelssohn: the music Bach wrote, and the conviction of a twenty-year-old in 1829 that a forgotten score deserved an audience.