St John Passion/ Bach

I must admit I am no fan of Church choral music. Perhaps it’s my own religion or perhaps it’s the discomfort of a church. However as it was a Good Friday I was happy to muck in with the National Rust team in a visit to the Bach oratorio St John Passion at the Nice Opera House.

This time I was in a box. There are stalls called Les orchestres, three rows of balcony boxes with one central grand box , where the Mayor of Nice and senior white white robed churchmen sat , situated each side of the stage and above two more levels of seating. The box is small and cannot accommodate more than 3.

The oratorio, based on the gospel according to St John, combines a choir of 22, an orchestra with a couple of instruments you would not see in a contemporary orchestra and individual singers  The conductor has to pull all these together. The soprano Liesel Jurgens  as Mary Magdalene sang with clarity and passion.

There was one aspect of this otherwise enjoyable concert that troubled me and this was a number of pejorative reference to ‘the Jews’ who were complicit in the killing of Jesus, an accusation that sustained many centuries of oppression, vitriolic conduct and discrimination. I was not alone as one conductor Lukas Foss, who fled Nazi Germany in 1937, refused to conduct the work until the reference was change to ‘people’.

The work was based on the Lutheran translation of the Bible and Martin Luther had published an anti-semitic tract. The question was posed in a post recently how was it that a civilised country like Germany  endorsed the Nazi creed. Perhaps the seed of anti-semitism in the national psyche was there a long time before Hitler.