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March 11, 2010

Next week the Trinity Choir will perform Johannes-Passion, also known as St. John’s Passion, J.S. Bach’s oratorio dramatizing the suffering of Jesus in his final days. <p>In the modern world passion connotes a strongly felt emotion: passionate love or passionate hate. Etymologically speaking, this is a relatively new understanding of the word. The first recorded use of passion in a romantic context is found in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare used passion 140 times in his plays in a variety of contexts and helped create the modern meaning of the word.<p> But before Shakespeare and his contemporaries reinvented the English language, passion referred specifically to Jesus’ suffering. The word derives from the Latin root pass or pati: suffering, feeling, enduring. It is related to the Greek word pathos, which means suffering or experience, and both words can be tracked by to a common base in the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language thought to have existed about 5,500 years ago. Passion shares a root with many modern words, including compassionate, patient, passive, and compatible. <p>The word passio appears in context of Christ’s suffering first in Vetus Latina, a collection of disparate Latin translations of the Bible, in the 2nd century CE. The term was widely used in medieval religious literature, and entered into most European languages during that time. It became passiun in Old French and crossed into spoken English during the Norman conquests in the eleventh century. <p>Musical passions, like Johannes-Passion, grew out of Catholic liturgy in the eighth and ninth centuries, when the priest and deacons would take turns intoning parts of the Gospel during Holy Week. The priest would chant the words of Jesus. One of the deacons would speak as the Gospel writer and the other would read for the crowd. Over time, specific musical patterns became associated with each character. <p> Passions developed as church music gained in complexity. By the late fifteenth century, a Franco-Flemish composer named Jacob Obrecht had created the first complete choral composition of the passion story. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hundreds of composers created passions. <p>Johann Sebastian Bach wrote Johannes-Passion in 1724, when he was in charge of the music at two important churches in Leipzig. The work is based on chapters 18 and 19 of the Gospel of John. Bach wrote several other passions, including the better-known Matthaus-Passion, based on the Gospel of Matthew.