St Matthew Passion
The tradition of singing the story of Jesus' passion during Holy Week (the week before Easter) goes back many hundreds of years to a time when a priest would sing the story instead of speaking it. Later a tradition developed of letting it be sung by a choir. During the Baroque period the Passion oratorio developed. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, written in 1727, is the most famous work in this tradition. It was probably first performed on Good Friday (11 April) 1727 in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was Kapellmeister. He made some changes to it by 1736 and performed it again on 30 March 1736. After that it was almost completely forgotten until long after Bach’s death. Even Bach’s music in general was forgotten by most people. In 1829 the composer Felix Mendelssohn discovered the music of the St Matthew Passion  and decided to perform a short version of it in Berlin. It immediately became extremely popular with the public and from then on Bach has always remained recognized as one of the greatest of all composers.