Bach, Mendelssohn and Dwight's Journal of Music

On 6 May 1854 John Sullivan Dwight reported in his eponymous Journal on the first British public concert performance – in English translation – of Johann Sebastian Bach's Matthew Passion. ‘The Grosse Passions-Musik of Sebastian Bach,’ Dwight wrote, ‘was performed, for the first time in England, last month by the Bach Society in London, under the direction of [William] Sterndale Bennett. The performance was merely preparatory to one on a grander scale shortly to be given by the Bach Society.’ Dwight's source was an anonymous article entitled ‘The Bach Society’, published on 8 April 1854 in the pre-eminent British music journal, The Musical World: A Weekly Record of Musical Science, Literature, and Intelligence. The performance had taken place on 6 April 1854 in one of London's most famous concert halls, the Hanover Square Rooms, with Bennett following Felix Mendelssohn's pared-down version of the score. The anticipated second performance of the Matthew Passion would take place in the same venue later that year, on 28 November 1854. In its review of the April premiere, the Musical World incorporated an account of Bach's Passions from a concert programme of the London New Philharmonic Society, when some ‘selections’ of the Matthew Passion had been performed. Defining a ‘Passion’ as ‘an oratorio which has for its subject the transactions of the last hours of the life of our Saviour’, the writer considered the dramatic power of Bach's Matthew Passion as far excelling the compositions in that genre of other German composers working in the Lutheran tradition of liturgical passions (such as Johann Mattheson, Georg Philipp Telemann and Carl Heinrich Graun). Dwight included in his article the New Philharmonic Society concert programme notes; he also addressed his American public directly. ‘When shall we have a chance to hear [the Matthew Passion] in our oratorio-loving Boston?’ he asks; ‘Verily it were a worthy task for the ambition of our choral societies, and would probably reward study (if not pecuniarily, at least in other forms not altogether profitless) as well as gay Rossini's “Moses”.’