‘Passion According to St. Matthew.’--This stupendous work, now universally considered the finest work of its kind, was written in 1729 and performed on April 15th of the same year at the afternoon service of Good Friday in the St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, but was later altered and extended so that it was not completed in its present form until 1740. While it was frequently performed in Leipzig until the end of the eighteenth century, it was practically forgotten by the outside world until 1829, just one hundred years after its first production, when it was given on March 11th, in the _Singakademie_, Berlin, under the direction of Mendelssohn. This generous artist is deserving of the deepest gratitude for his untiring enthusiasm in compelling the world to recognize the grandeur of this work and the greatness of its half-forgotten creator. He was evidently deeply struck with the strangeness of his own relation to the rescuing of the great work from oblivion, for, in commenting on the performance, he made the following reference to his own nationality--the only recorded instance of this kind: ‘It was an actor[77] and a Jew who restored this great Christian work to the people.’ It was not performed in London until April 6th, 1854. The first American performance was by the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston in 1874. The story of the ‘Passion according to St. Matthew’ was already embodied in the service at Leipzig and it was sung on Palm Sunday each year in choral form. The fact that the Passions were regularly given at church services, added to his own interest in the subject itself, probably inspired Bach to give artistic musical expression to the different versions of the Gospel narratives. While Bach wrote five Passions, four on the four Gospels and one by Picander, the greatest and last was the ‘Matthew Passion.’ The ‘Passion according to St. Luke’ is by many authorities not attributed entirely to Bach, for even though it were a youthful work, there are parts that cannot be reconciled with his general style of that period, though others bear his unmistakable stamp. Of the ‘Passion according to St. Mark’ only five lyric pieces are preserved in the Funeral Ode on the death of Queen Christiane Eberhardine. The Picander Passion is lost. The ‘Passion according to St. John’ was first performed at St. Thomas’ Church on April 7th, 1724, and is musically not much inferior to the great ‘Matthew Passion,’ but in the latter work Bach developed to a larger extent the element characteristic of the oratorio and united more closely the ecclesiastical and the folk-song quality. The fact that he was accustomed to the simple choral setting probably prevented him from giving anything like conscious dramatic effect, yet the complexity of his natural musical expression often led him to a dramatic climax of which he was not conscious, for his Passions were written for the church service only. As Bach was above all a devout Lutheran, he