Elizabeth Field, concertmaster of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, writes a guest blog sharing her experience of preparing and recording Mendelssohn's arrangement of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. This recording is featured on Choral Showcase airing on January 12 at 9PM ET.
Part 1: Playing the music of dead, white (mostly) men and my journey through Historical Performance-Practice
My father, who was an avid concert goer, never shirked center stage in offering what he believed were the most profound and probing questions of our times. He would ask me, “When we applaud, do we clap for the performer or the composer?” I was a young violinist at the time and bristled at what seemed like an elementary question. Of course the applause was for the performer. The music didn’t have life without us! The implicit truth, which I believed my father missed, was that the composer had already been applauded, proven by the fact that their music continued to be performed long after they were gone. The performer’s job was to honor a preexisting greatness. How well did the performer fulfill that task? Well, how loud was the applause?
My father’s question lingered though. I began to question my partnership with the many dead composers I played, especially those I most adored from 200 years ago. This puzzle led me to Cornell University in 1990 to study 18th-century Historical Performance Practice (HPP) - a central study to the burgeoning early music movement at the time. Cornell had a DMA program strictly for performers. The mission statement seemed to boil down to: “We have all the books and scores, you can play your instrument, you figure it out”. So, ‘figure’ I tried. I read lots and lots of books and treatises, and looked at scores of scores, wrote esoteric papers, and learned how to play the baroque violin.
Years later, in October 2023, armed with my bank of knowledge about historical performance practices, I excitedly embarked on The Bach Choir of Bethlehem’s unique project of recording Felix Mendelssohn’s version of JS Bach’s monumental St Matthew Passion. Along with our Director, Christopher Jackson, and producer Malcolm Bruno, we realized we were staring down a compound challenge of HPP. Were we performing Bach or Mendelssohn? Which source of performance practices should we draw from? Where would our own voices fit in?
It has taken most of a lifetime to simply come to terms with playing Bach’s music in a way that honors all parties involved. I learned a lot of ‘rules’ of HPP and have continually pursued the art of translating 18th-century expression for today’s audiences. The most important principle I learned was that 18th-century musicians separated ‘expression’ and execution’ with execution always being in service of expression. Everything then that I studied at Cornell, all the things that I learned were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ways to play, were merely tools. In the end it was still up to me to use those tools in the service of a moving performance. This recording project layered Mendelssohn atop of Bach. How would we honor Bach, but also Mendelssohn who had his own ideas on how to make an effective translation for his audience? A somewhat troubling realization was that despite Mendelssohn being an undisputed genius, most professional musicians today have far greater exposure and performance history with Bach’s music than Mendelssohn did. Would any of us dare suggest we understand Bach better than Mendelssohn did though?
Part 2: Two arias, a personal journey, and a plea for forgiveness
In the St Matthew Passion, Bach separated the instruments into two orchestras with each concertmaster playing a different obligato aria. Mendelssohn changed Bach’s concept of two equal orchestras to one orchestra that expanded and contracted. One fallout of this change was that he gave the concertmaster of Orchestra 1 both arias. Because of the chair I occupy, I have played Erbarme Dich (written for the concertmaster of orchestra 1) many times and Gebt Mir (written for the concertmaster of orchestra 2) much less so.
When you repeat a piece often throughout your career, you begin to feel a sense of ownership towards it. It is a unique bond that you forge with your own personal ‘expression/execution’. I have invested a huge amount of thought into Erbarme Dich, exploring tone color, phrasing, harmonic rhythm etc. This b-minor aria is in 12/8 with 4 large beats per bar. In a nerdy nutshell, my idea is that the entire first bar of this piece is a highly decorated single note, a b-natural. Each beat essentially begins and ends with a b and the last two beats are a sustained … b-natural. More importantly, there are no slurs added by Bach. This implies a syllabic separate bowing which is sustained and is absent the rhythmic inflections that can be implied with slurs in baroque music If I honor what I see in Bach’s notation, I find that the whole measure feels like a continuous B-natural spun with decorative threads of contiguous notes. The entire bar feels like one large beat with 4 expressive gestures, rather than 4 inflected beats.
To my horror, when I saw Mendelssohn’s score, he had added slurs to each beat. For me, this disrupted the seamlessness of the single note idea in favor of 4 individually inflected beats. I tried and tried to make this work. But my relationship with Bach’s version was simply too overpowering. I could not give it up. I was facing down the main challenge of this project; honoring both composers while staying true to ourselves. I personally cannot perform if I don’t completely believe in my musical concept. This was my rationale for ignoring Mendelssohn’s changes. I, not anyone else, was playing on this stage in Bethlehem PA in 2023. So, while I felt comfortable using a 19th-century tone color rather than a purer early 18th-century voice, I wouldn’t give up the phrasing and harmonic rhythm that bonded me so closely to this piece. I just hoped Mendelssohn would forgive me.
I had the opposite experience with Gebt Mir. Malcolm Bruno, amazingly, had a copy of the part used by Karl Eckert, a student of Mendelssohn’s and the concertmaster for the performance of The Mathew Passion in 1841. This is one of those wow moments for a performer. But, as shocked as I was by Mendelssohn’s slurs in Erbarme Dich, I was doubly shocked that Herr Eckert had added errant slurs to Bach’s bariolage which is the lifeblood of this aria. Bariolage is repeated string crossings from melody notes to a common note on an adjoining string. This type of baroque bariolage is comfortably executed with an un-cambered, short, lightweight baroque bow where the melody is played with downbows. This technique is much more awkward using a modern and heavier cambered bow with a hatchet-head tip. As a student, I was taught to add the kinds of slurs that Herr Eckert added in 1841 to all bariolage passagework simply to make it playable. This reversed bowing places the melody on upbows in the upper and lighter half of the bow. It is a fun and satisfying bowing, not unlike what fiddlers use. I will dare to suggest though, it would have been unrecognizable to Bach. Now, I was looking at hand-written markings (in red pencil no less!) in Mendelssohn’s original parts which implied modern bowings that would be thoroughly enjoyable to play on my modern violin. (The recording of Mendelssohn’s St Matthew Passion with The Bach Choir of Bethlehem was made on modern instruments at a=440) Since I did not have the same attachment and personal history with this aria as I did with Erbarme Dich, I jumped two centuries in execution. All my precious HPP tools be damned. I indulged in full out, unapologetic modern playing.
My plea then is, Herren Bach and Mendelssohn, please both forgive me for my wayward journey from Now, to Bach, to Mendelssohn and inevitably, back to Now.
Violinist Elizabeth Field, distinguished for her passionate and stylistic playing on both period and modern instruments, is the founder of The Vivaldi Project. Field is concertmaster of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem and has performed with a wide variety of ensembles throughout the US: from Washington DC’s acclaimed Opera Lafayette to the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. She has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Hungaroton, Naxos, Dorian, and MSR. Field holds a Doctorate in Historical Performance Practice from Cornell University and has held professorships at Sacramento State University and the University of California at Davis, she is currently on faculty at George Washington University. Her DVD with fortepianist Malcolm Bilson, Performing the Score, has been hailed by Emanuel Ax as both “truly inspiring” and “authoritative.” Seen and Heard International proclaimed that Field “played so thrillingly that if Mendelssohn had heard Field play he would have written her a concerto too.”
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