Notice

Thanks to the essential biographical and monographic references on Johann Sebastian Bach, we know that the musician from Eisenach composed up to five passions for the Good Friday services. However, only two of them have survived in their entirety (libretto and music): the St Matthew Passion, BWV 244 (1727) and the St John Passion, BWV 245 (1724). With the upcoming performances of these two works at the Palau de la Música Catalana approaching, the musicologist Oriol Pérez i Treviño will immerse us in these passions to see how Bach's intention always sought to go far beyond wanting to teach the Gospel to delve into a much larger mission: to make people reflect. The reason is that Bach, a fervent Lutheran, materialized what Martin Luther pointed out in his Meditation on the Passion of Christ (1519): “It is more beneficial to reflect on the Passion of Christ only once than to fast for a whole year or to pray a psalm every day.”

The musicologist and essayist Oriol Pérez i Treviño (Manresa, 1972) is the author of different books, some of them related to the Bachian universe, among which Bach in times of pandemic (Dinsic, 2022) stands out.