Excerpts from the Passion according to St. Matthew , BWV 244 Bach's Passion according to St. Matthew , his grandest musical setting of the drama of the Crucifixion, is perhaps his, or perhaps anybody's, greatest work. Musically, religiously, philosophically, architecturally, or merely in terms of how much the CD's are going to cost you, it is Bach's most difficult work. The St. Matthew can consume a lifetime of study. Instead, buy an album of excerpts, and listen to it a sufficient number of times that the beauty and power of the music alone motivates you to find out more about what it is all about, and begin to familiarize yourself with the entire work and its background and context. There is nothing better.
Individual movements span the emotional range from frolicsome joy to deeply pensive melancholy.
Bach's unceasing use of contrapuntal melody requires as much intellectual and emotional involvement by the listener as the performer to unravel their uncompromisingly dense rhetorical web. Violinists and 'cellists both often hold this exquisitely subtle music to be the pinnacle of their respective repertoires. A huge symphonic tone-poem for solo violin in the form of an extended set of variations over an unstated figured bass , the Chaconne relates an unspoken story that rises from a dark mourning to light, sunshine, and the joy of springtime, only to sink back again hopeless into the wintry gloom from which it arose. An incomparable panoramic journey through the emotions that define what it means to be human, the Chaconne , wrought from a single, unaccompanied violin, is a work of art before which one should bow down in reverent awe. Not that there are some that are mediocre, but you will either like this extremely exotic and cerebral form of music or not.