Book URL: https://www.areditions.com/rr/ycm2/ycm2_017.html The St. Matthew Passion by Richard Davy from the Eton Choirbook is the earliest surviving polyphonic setting of the passion by a known composer. Much of it is intended to be chanted to the Sarum recitation tone for the passion, but Davy sets polyphonically the synagoga¿the sayings of the disciples, the priests, Pilate, and others¿making a total of forty-two polyphonic movements. Unfortunately, its first two folios are missing, making it necessary to reconstruct the first eleven movements completely, and two of the four voices for the next twelve. Such reconstructions have been attempted before, but this edition brings together new analytic tools to aid in the reconstruction and, as an additional option for the presentation of the work, sets the entire passion to the early English translation of the gospel by William Tyndale, a student at Magdalen College Oxford only a few years after the composer¿s period of residence there.

St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has reverberated, from early Christian apologetics and heretics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Blumenberg's guide through this unending story of divine abandonment is Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental Matthäuspassion, the parabolic mirror that bundled eighteen hundred years of reflection on the fate of the crucified and the only available medium that allows us post-Christian listeners to feel the anguish of those who witnessed the events of the Passion. With interspersed references to writers such as Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Freud, and Benjamin, Blumenberg gathers evidence to raise the singular question that, in his view, Christian theology has not been able to answer: How can an omnipotent God be so offended by his creatures that he must sacrifice and abandon his own Son?