uit Daniel R. Melamed, Hearing Bach’s Passions (2005/2016).
This overview is confirmed by a number of ‘church service orders’ (Kirchen Agende). Martin Petzoldt and Robin A. Leaver give similar overviews but with more detail and some variations (a motet at the beginning) and a ‘reading’ of the Passion from a gospel-harmonisation. I doubt that would be maintained when the narrative was also sung (in the Passion). a ‘doublure’. Which Passion? Apparently there was choice, liberty. A list:
uit Daniel R. Melamed, Hearing Bach’s Passions. (2005/2016). There is a fairly broad consensus about 1727 as the first version of the St. Matthew Passion, but it remains hypothetical, for no material (documentary) evidence available. Personally, 1729 convinces me more: Bach working on the St. Matthew Passion during Lent and then being commissioned to enhance the funeral of Leopold von Köthen, thus killing ‘two birds with one stone’ (the Funeral Music has 10 choruses/arias in common with the St. Matthew Passion).
