Bach Was a Footnote Until a 20-Year-Old Conductor Brought Him Back

When Bach died in Leipzig in 1750, he was known mostly as a former Thomaskantor and a virtuoso organist. His sons were the famous composers in the family. The St Matthew Passion, written in 1727, had been performed sporadically at the Thomaskirche during his life and then quietly disappeared from the repertoire. Outside Leipzig, almost nobody knew the piece existed.

Felix Mendelssohn's grandmother, Bella Salomon, gave him a manuscript copy of the score in 1824 when he was 15. He read it obsessively. Five years later, on March 11, 1829, he conducted it at the Singakademie in Berlin — the first known performance of the work outside Leipzig in nearly a hundred years.

The version that audience heard was not what we hear today. Mendelssohn cut ten arias and six chorales, halving the running time. He used a 158-voice choir, far larger than Bach's group at Leipzig, and conducted from the piano rather than a harpsichord. It was a Romantic-era performance of a Baroque work, in every sense an interpretation. The audience included the King of Prussia, Heinrich Heine, and Hegel; over a thousand more applied for tickets and were turned away, prompting a repeat ten days later.

What followed was a full Bach revival. Within a generation his works were being collected, edited, and performed across Germany and beyond — the Bach-Gesellschaft formed in 1850 specifically to publish his complete output. The reputation that now seems eternal was, in 1828, in real danger of staying obscure. It took a teenager with a manuscript and the nerve to stage it.