St Matthew'S Concert Choir Why Not Join Us Www.Smce.Org.Uk: Fill & Download for Free

Bach was pretty good at stuff. Once, when he was meeting King Frederick the Great (of Prussia), the King gave him a melody and challenged that he couldn't write a fugue to it. The melody the king gave him was basically total gibberish (just a couple levels up from banging his fist onto the keyboard, probably just to be a jerk), but Bach came back a couple of months later having written two Ricercars, ten Canons, and a full trio Sonata, based on this total nonsense melody, all of which worked brilliantly. Oh, yeah, and he also encoded a series of complex and fun riddles into the whole piece. I'm sorry--WHAT? The man was basically a Dan Brown novel. (The piece was the Musical Offering).So when we talk about Bach, it's important to know how we're defining "greatest work," because there was a LOT of great stuff, by different rubrics. But there were only two genres that Bach wrote the real defining pieces for: oratorio and liturgical Mass.The Mass form had been the defining structure of music for centuries, for a number of sociopolitical reasons (cliff notes version: important music was church music and vice versa). Essentially every composer who predated Bach (and many who followed) attempted to write at least one magnum opus in the form of a Mass. Bach didn't just write a good Mass, he knocked it out of the park. Completed over the course of decades, his B Minor Mass has been argued by many to be the greatest piece of music ever written. And it's really quite difficult to argue that any other Mass ever written was nearly as influential, beautiful, exciting, or "great." Just listen to this amazingness from the BBC Proms a couple years ago:The other form in which Bach wrote the archetypal piece is the oratorio. The piece, as I'm sure you've guessed, was the St. Matthew Passion. There have been other maybe-equally important oratorios (Handel's Messiah, Mendelssohn's Elijah), but the St. Matthew Passion has moved a seemingly-unprecedented number of composers to create great works. I don't know if I can express what a staggeringly perfect piece this is, from characterization to musical form and identity. Just listen to this gorgeous aria (of course I picked the bass aria) and tell me this isn't one of the most perfect things ever written:Of course, at this level, it's very hard to say which is the greater of the two works. The St. Matthew has a more manageable number of performers, so it tends to get done more often, but the merits of both are so huge that the comparison is impossible to make without oversimplifying. But suffice it to say that if you don't think the Saint Matthew Passion is Bach's greatest work, it's purely a matter of taste.

According to FOX's Book of Martyrs"IV. MatthewWhose occupation was that of a toll-gatherer, was born at Nazareth. He wrote his gospel in Hebrew, which was afterwards translated into Greek by James the Less. The scene of his labors was Parthia, and Ethiopia, in which latter country he suffered martyrdom, being slain with a halberd in the city of Nadabah, A.D. 60."According to Dictionary.com - The world's favorite online English dictionary! , a halberd is "a shafted weapon with an axlike cutting blade, beak, and apical spike, used especially in the 15th and 16th centuries. Also, halbert [hal-bert, hawl-, hol-; formerly haw-bert]."

No. Matthew’s Gospel is quite easy to understand when you know that it contains some 90 per cent of Mark’s Gospel, often word for word in the Greek language. New Testament scholars also explain that Matthew contains much material from the hypothetical Q document, which it shares with Luke. If you feel you understand a passage in Mark’s Gospel you will probably understand the parallel passage in Matthew’s Gospel.Matthew becomes different when it contains material not shared with Mark or Luke, but even then it is easy to understand what the author has written. It contains a nativity account that is completely different to the parallel account in Luke, and this only becomes hard for readers to understand because they try to understand how all the nativity events portrayed in Matthew and Luke could have happened in some sort of sensible sequence. Let go of Luke and the Matthew sequence is entirely logical.The author obviously had a good knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures and frequently refers to those scriptures to emphasise something written in his gospel. We can make it difficult for ourselves by accepting his use of links to the Hebrew scriptures as spiritually meaningful, or we can recognise them as simply part of Matthew’s style.Understanding the author’s fondness for miracles helps us to understand some of Matthew’s miraculous sequences. In Jesus: The Evidence, Ian Wilson says of the discovery of the empty tomb as portrayed in Matthew:Because the Matthew gospel alone tells the story of the guard, the violent earthquake and the ‘angel of the Lord’ rolling away the entrance stone, it is probably safest to regard these as pious embroideries by an author demonstrably over-fond of the miraculous.