The idea of restoring “old” repertoire to modern audiences began with the rediscovery of Johann Sebastian Bach.  The works of Bach, so revered today, received almost no performances between his death in 1750 and Felix Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829.  In his book entitled The Early Music Revival: A History, Harry Haskell explains that during the early nineteenth century an elite circle of aristocratic amateurs began to see late Renaissance and Baroque music as fashionable.[1]  In 1800, Mendelssohn’s mentor, Carl Friedrich Zelter, began rehearsing Bach’s vocal music with Berlin’s Singakademie choir; however, Zelter felt that the works were too difficult to perform and not accessible to the general public.  Haskell contends that “to the average concert-goer, the early music revival amounted as yet to little more than an esoteric fringe movement.”[2]

However, “Mendelssohn changed all that by bringing Bach’s music out of the salons and into the public domain once and for all.”[3]  After being introduced through his teacher, Zelter, to Bach’s vocal music and eventually acquiring a copy of the St. Matthew Passion, Mendelssohn began rehearsing this monumental work with a small group of singers during the winter of 1827.  In January 1829, Mendelssohn and his colleague Eduard Devrient convinced Zelter to allow them to use the Singakademie for a public performance of the work.  Nearly a thousand people witnessed the seminal performance of the St. Matthew Passion on March 11, 1829 with Mendelssohn conducting from the piano.  With a choir of 158 singers, a full-sized Romantic orchestra, and significant cuts to the score, the performance did not attempt to recreate a baroque-style performance of the work (as it would have been heard by Bach’s contemporaries); but nonetheless, it was enthusiastically received.

The following day, Zelter reported to Goethe in a letter: “Our Bach music yesterday was happily launched and Felix made a strict, calm conductor.  I sat with the score next to the orchestra so that I could observe both my folks [performers] and the public together.”  And despite Zelter’s original doubts about the success of public performances of Bach’s works, two additional performances were scheduled within the next month, each before a capacity crowd.  Zelter himself conducted the third performance, on Good Friday April 17^th. 

Before long, historical concerts were all the rage in the musical capitals of Europe.  In Leipzig, Mendelssohn conducted a series of historical concerts with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the 1830s and 1840s.  In 1832, the Belgian scholar François-Joseph Fétis initiated a series of historical concerts in Paris that included a variety of Renaissance and Baroque vocal works including one concert devoted to opera from its inception in 1600 through contemporary opera of the 1830s.  Indeed, Haskell’s characterization of the nineteenth century as an “age of musical archaeology,” with the St. Matthew Passion as “its first major find”[4] aptly describes the fervor this repertoire created.