Yet even today, when time and dissemination through recordings have made it familiar to a greater number of people, the St Matthew Passion is a work that can affect its listeners profoundly in live performance, as if it and the story it tells were being heard for the first time. Only when Mendelssohn rediscovered it and performed it in Berlin in 1829, to general acclaim and wonder, did it begin to enter into wider consciousness. After his death it lapsed into obscurity, at a time when, if Bach was remembered at all, it was as a famous organist and master fuguist, not as one who could stir the emotions or inspire religious feeling. In the composer's own time it would not have been known outside Leipzig, the town in which he lived and worked for the last 27 years of his life, and even there it received no more than a handful of performances under his direction. This continuing impact is in spite of the fact that Bach's great masterpiece is more widely known today than ever before. Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that for non-churchgoers nevertheless moved by the story of Christ's sacrifice, attending a performance of the St Matthew Passion can actually be a sort of substitute for going to church. Despite the fact that it rarely any longer forms part of an actual service, the work is for many a vital and meaningful component of the Easter experience. The St Matthew Passion is still performed more often than not during Holy Week, and such occasions continue to be invested with something of the sombre reverence of a religious celebration. Smyth's reaction is one we can recognise without much difficulty today. It was not only that the church seemed flooded with the living presence of Bach, but you felt as if the Passion itself, in that heart-rending, consoling portrayal, was being lived through as at no other moment of their lives by every soul in the vast congregation. She later recalled the impression it made on her: 'I despair of giving an idea of the devoutness of the audience. In 1879 the English composer Ethel Smyth attended a performance of the St Matthew Passion, given in Bach's own church, St Thomas's, Leipzig.
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