Bach's Passions occupy an unrivalled position in the canon of music written for Easter. But they cast a long shadow, writes Aengus Collins

As Easter rolls around, so too do J.S. Bach's great Passions. It is no surprise that they have became the central musical works of the festival. Monumental achievements by any artistic criterion, together they represent the highest point in the writing of sacred music. After Bach, something died in the relationship between religion and music.

His two surviving Passions, the St John and the St Matthew, attain a perfect balance between the musical and the sacred. Uniquely so. For many of his predecessors, music was often a vehicle for religious expression; for many of his heirs, it was the reverse. With his Passions, however, Bach produced both supreme musical expressions and supreme expressions of Christianity's central narrative.

This is a balance most of us can now appreciate only in the abstract. Things have moved on too far for us sincerely to experience the Passions as works of liturgical exegesis rather than as high-water marks in the history of Western art. Church performances of the pieces are appealing, but we listen as audiences of concert-goers, not as congregations of worshippers.

But perhaps it has always been thus. Perhaps audiences have never been able to appreciate Bach's marriage of the religious and the artistic.

One person at the first performance of the St Matthew Passion is reported to have noted that "when this theatrical music began, all the people were thrown into the greatest bewilderment. Everyone was genuinely displeased by it and voiced complaints against it".

History has not agreed with this verdict, of course. Bach's Passions have attained an unrivalled position in the canon of sacred music. Deserved though this is, however, one unfortunate consequence of his Passions' pre-eminence is the length of the shadow they have cast over other settings of the Passion and over a significant body of other music written around the Easter story.

The musical form of the Passion developed over many centuries. The narration of the story in the four Gospels of the New Testament forms the core of the Holy Week liturgy.

Its liturgical use was first recorded in the fourth century. Initially, the gospel texts would have been chanted by a single singer, with variations in pitch and tone lending a degree of drama to the recitation, before, in the 13th century, the Passion began to take on a recognisably dramatic form with the division of its parts among three singers.

A fascinating, highly dramatised example is The Passion Play from the Carmina Burana manuscript (hauntingly recorded in 1990 by Marcel Pérès and the Ensemble Organum). To contemporary ears, the simple plainsong of this earliest music bears little relation to the richly layered architecture of Bach's much later works.

It is as the Passion moves into the golden age of vocal polyphony, in the 15th and 16th centuries, that we begin to encounter versions more recognisably musical to modern ears. They are characterised by the soaring, intricate interweaving of vocal registers and melodic lines, achieving inspiring musical and emotional effect from forces far more restricted than those Bach's music would employ. Orlande de Lassus and Tomás Luis de Victoria were among the major composers of this era to turn their hands to the Passion.

In the 17th century, the liturgical and artistic significance of the Passion as a musical form waned in Catholic lands but flourished in German-speaking territories, benefiting from Luther's imprimatur.

The real epoch-changing development came in the mid-1600s, however, with the addition of instrumental accompaniment to the setting of the Passion. With this, the scene was set for the emergence of Bach's monumental works.

But the Passion is by no means the only musical form associated with the Easter period. This should come as no surprise. Until the baroque period at least, music and religion were inextricably bound. It would have been remarkable had such a central Christian festival not given birth to diverse musical expression.

Some of the most notable Easter music involves settings of medieval texts. Foremost among these is the Stabat Mater, a poem of 13th-century Franciscan origin addressed to the Virgin Mary grieving at her son's death. It is an immensely moving text and one that has prompted repeated settings since then, maintaining the attention of leading 19th-century composers in a way the Passion did not.

Rossini, Dvorák, Lizst and Verdi all wrote major settings, less solemn in tone perhaps than versions from the 18th century, such as those by Pergolesi and Domenico Scarlatti, whose in turn differed markedly from the a capella polyphony of settings such as those by Palestrina, Lassus and Josquin des Prez. (Incidentally, one of Lassus's finest works is another piece with Easter associations, The Tears Of Saint Peter, a majestic setting of a 20-stanza meditation on Peter's denial of Christ.)

Another work with medieval origins is the Membra Jesu Nostri, a text drawn from the Bible and the writings of St Bernard of Clairvaux. It is a cycle of seven cantatas, each of which contemplates part of Christ's body on the cross. It was set to music in 1680 by Dietrich Buxtehude, a man whose music greatly influenced Bach's.

Heinrich Schütz, another of Bach's German predecessors, wrote a number of Passions, as well as a setting of The Seven Words Of Jesus Christ On The Cross, a text that draws from across the Gospels the final utterances attributed to Christ. (Haydn, in his Seven Last Words, would later compose instrumental music based on the same passages.)

The only other Easter music with a liturgical role comparable to that of the Passion is that for the now largely defunct Tenebrae. This richly symbolic office consists of evening services for the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of Holy Week, during which a series of 15 candles are gradually extinguished, leaving only the paschal candle alight, to be revealed on Easter Sunday.

The structure of the Tenebrae office is beautifully stylised, with the number three, standing for the trinity, recurring. Tenebrae lasts for three days. Each day's service is divided into three nocturns. Each nocturn is then divided into three psalms, three readings and three responsories.

Musically, it is the responsories and some of the readings - those drawn from the Lamentations of Jeremiah - that are significant. The Lamentations have been set by many composers, including Victoria, Thomas Tallis and François Couperin.

But the Tenebrae responsories are more striking: a body of 27 deeply poetic texts that trace the events of the Crucifixion, though in a less direct, more beguiling way than the gospel texts as used in the Passion. The responsories date from the fourth century, but their most famous musical settings came at the height of the Renaissance era of polyphony: those by Victoria, Marco Antonio Ingegneri and Carlo Gesualdo.

With increasing secularisation, of society in general and music more particularly, there has inevitably been a fall-off in the writing of sacred music. Musically, the church has long since yielded to the concert hall. Nevertheless, Easter still brings forth new music, including a range of settings of the Passion. Eberhard Wenzel in 1968 wrote a Passion for liturgical use, though most 20-century settings have been concert pieces, such as those by Ernst Pepping, Krzysztof Penderecki and Arvo Pärt. There has even been a Passion of Bach's life, Mauricio Kagel's 1985 Sankt-Bach-Passion.

And in 2000, for the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, a series of new Passions was commissioned, including Sofia Gubaidulina's magnificent St John Passion. There could scarcely have been a more appropriate tribute to Bach's masterpieces and to the history they built on.

Passing the baton Bach's inspiration and legacy

By Eileen Battersby

Passion week is a time for contemplation. It also inspires performances of some of the most magnificent choral works ever written. The majesty of J.S. Bach's St Matthew Passion soars as powerfully now as when it was first performed, in 1727, as does the sheer beauty of his earlier, rather more intimate St John Passion.

Both works are influenced by, and build on, a Passion form mastered by an earlier if far more conservative German genius, Heinrich Schütz. Bach's vision was wider, more innovative, almost improvised and his artistic range awesome: he wrote great music for every instrument, particularly for the organ, and, most gloriously of all, for the human voice. Yet for all his superb chamber music, Bach, the professional church organist, was fully at home in the world of sacred music. He could not wait for inspiration before composing a cantata: it was part of his daily job.

But for a later giant of German music, Johannes Brahms, born in 1833, choral music was not his first love - although by the end of his life he would write more than 180 songs, including Four Serious Songs, Vier Ernste Gesänge.

The last great Romantic, the first great modern, a lifelong melancholic and unrequited lover of Clara Schumann, Brahms established himself first as a gifted pianist, then as a composer for that instrument. Those pieces composed during the 1850s included three sonatas, the last of which, in F minor, hints at the tension between the passionate and contemplative. It has the rich dark tones and extraordinary sensitivity that were fundamental to the man and his music.

This reflective mood set the scene for his great choral work, Ein Deutsches Requiem, A German Requiem. It is a remarkable work of beautiful solos and dramatic choruses that, particularly in its concluding fugue, fittingly reflects Brahms's artistic debt to the choral music of Bach and Handel, both of whom he admired. Unlike traditional requiems, it is not a lamentation for the dead. It is more a meditation on death and mourning - and, significantly, offers comfort. He worked at it on and off for a number of years, beginning soon after the death of Robert Schumann, in 1856.

Yet it was his mother's sudden death, in 1865, that proved crucial. His requiem is composed of a series of seven settings of Old and New Testament texts, taken from Luther's Bible. It is more about the living than the dead and attempts to ease our thoughts more towards the Resurrection than Judgment Day.

Initially completed as a six-movement work for solo baritone, chorus and orchestra, A German Requiem was first performed in Bremen, on Good Friday of 1868. It was well received, but Brahms had misgivings. For performance the following year, he added a further movement, which would become the fifth and final version. It was this part that included the beautiful soprano soloist.

The chorus features the telling passage, roughly translated from the German, "I will comfort you as one whom his own mother comforteth," or, "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you." As a work, A German Requiem is lyrical, dramatic, sombre, uplifting and ultimately reassuring. It begins slowly, with a muted restraint that nevertheless grows in emotional force. In performance, it is unforgettable.

• The Guinness Choir, with soloists Mary Hegarty and Philip O'Reilly, and with the Hibernian Orchestra under David Milne, is performing A German Requiem at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin at 8 p.m. today. The programme, in aid of the Carmichael Centre, also includes Bruckner motets and Mozart cantatas