The best recordings of my favourite Passion

In the autumn of 1632, a man called Kaspar Schisler returned home to the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. He didn’t walk through the gates in daylight, but waited until night, sneaking in past the tower guards. A few days later he was dead from the plague that was swelling and blistering its way across Europe — a plague which, until that point, strict quarantine had kept out.

Within a year it had killed a quarter of the town. The remaining residents gathered together and made a vow: if they were spared, they would stage a play of the life and death of Jesus, and would continue to do so every ten years in perpetuity. The plague abated and the Oberammergau Passion Play became a fixture, performed every decade since — part of a long tradition of dramatised Passions that stretches back to Pope Leo in the 5th century. This year’s performance has been postponed until 2022.

The root of the religious Passion is the Latin patior — to suffer or endure. Perhaps this is the reason why, while we’re happy simply to commemorate Christmas and the Easter resurrection, we have always enacted the story of Christ’s crucifixion. Suffering isn’t something you can spectate. We can peer through a stable window, stand back and marvel at the empty tomb, but the bloodied and broken body requires something else — a sharing of the burden, an act that makes both the story and the suffering our own.

Like the patrons in renaissance paintings of the crucifixion, incongruous in their Sunday best as they pray among the mourners at the foot of the cross, we feel the need to insert ourselves into the narrative. That’s why the greatest musical settings of the Passion aren’t necessarily the most dramatic, they are those that leave space for the listener to occupy.

And that’s why, while current fashion dictates that I should be championing Bach’s St John Passion for its brutal, breathless action — verbatim theatre, centuries ahead of its time — it’s the St Matthew that has my heart, that I come back to when times get tough.