Passion as History, History as Passion

Abstract:In late summer 2000, the International Bachakademie Stuttgart presented four new settings of the Passion of Christ to honor the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. Commissioned from a quartet of internationally respected composers, the terms of the project, titled "Passion 2000," called for each composer to select one of the canonic Gospels, and write a setting in his or her language of origin. The composers were Sofia Gubaidulina, Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, and Wolfgang Rihm. Given the coincidence of the Bach anniversary with the millennium, the four Passion 2000 pieces each dealt with Bach's legacy, but also with the historical weight and expectations of the turn of the millennium and the violence of the receding twentieth century. In this article, I focus on Rihm's setting, Deus Passus: Passions-Stücke nach Lukas, which carried a particular burden as Rihm was constructed as the representative of the German Passion tradition. I argue that Rihm's numerous Bach references, embedded throughout the piece, are not merely allusive, but narrative. Through a close reading of some of the piece's most important movements, I argue that Rihm's Passion joins a long tradition of rethinking the figure of "Bach," who in this piece becomes a symbol of the unresolved past.