“One peculiar trait in Bach’s nature,” says Kretzschmar, “is revealed in the cantatas in grand, half-distinct outlines, and this is the longing for death and life with the Lord. This theme is struck in the cantatas more frequently than almost any other. We know him as a giant nature in all situations; great and grandiose is also his joy and cheerfulness. But never, we believe, does his art work with fuller energy and abandonment than when his texts express earth-weariness and the longing for the last hour. The fervor which then displays itself in ever-varying registers, in both calm and stormy regions, has in it something almost demonic.”[74] The work that has most contributed to make the name of Bach familiar to the educated world at large is the Passion according to St. Matthew. Bach wrote five Passions, of which only two—the St. John and the St. Matthew—have come down to us. The former has a rugged force like one of Michael Angelo’s unpolished statues, but it cannot fairly be compared to the St. Matthew in largeness of conception or beauty of detail. In Bach’s treatment of the Passion story we have the culmination of the artistic development of the early liturgic practice whose progress has already been sketched. Bach completed the process of fusing the Italian aria and recitative with the German chorus, hymn-tune, and organ and orchestral music, interspersing the Gospel narrative with lyric sections in the form of airs, arioso recitatives, and choruses, in which the feelings proper to a believer meditating on the sufferings of Christ in behalf of mankind are portrayed with all the poignancy of pathos of which Bach was master. Injudicious critics have sometimes attempted to set up a comparison between the St. Matthew Passion and Handel’s “Messiah,” questioning which is the greater. But such captious rivalry is derogatory to both, for they are not to be gauged by the same standard. To say nothing of the radical differences in style, origin, and artistic conception,—the one a piece of Lutheran church music, the other an English concert oratorio of Italian ancestry,—they are utterly unlike also in poetic intention. Bach’s work deals only with the human in Christ; it is the narrative of his last interviews with his disciples, his arrest, trial, and death, together with comments by imagined personalities contemplating these events, both in their immediate action upon the sensibilities and in their doctrinal bearing. It is, therefore, a work so mixed in style that it is difficult to classify it, for it is both epic and implicitly dramatic, while in all its lyric features it is set firmly into the Evangelical liturgic scheme. The text and musical construction of the “Messiah” have no connection with any liturgy; it is concert music of a universal religious character, almost devoid of narrative, and with no dramatic suggestion whatever. Each is a triumph of genius, but of genius working with quite different intentions.