New Perspectives on J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion : The Choreographic Vision of John Neumeier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In 1980–1981, the American choreographer John Neumeier, director of the Hamburg Ballet since 1973, created a ballet to Bach's St. Matthew Passion . Aware that choreographing a revered icon of sacred music might be viewed as a violation of its sacrosanct status, he expressed his belief that "A choreographic realization of the Matthew Passion only appeared justified to me if it gives a new, unique dimension to the work … [and that like music] dance offers a means of escape from the grip of time and history to achieve inner reflection and a psychic state." In this essay, we discuss representative sections of the ballet and explore Neumeier's realization of these goals. Sometimes he focuses on visualizing a movement's structure and enhancing its affective and dramatic impact with contemporary ballet choreography. In other movements, he employs eclectic modern dance styles that, while contrasting in striking ways with the music, also enhance it. Both approaches inspire new dimensions and inner reflection. Ultimately, the choreography represents a visual corporeal transcription of the score and its timbres, which, without altering them, contributes new aesthetic perspectives. Our choreo/musical analysis will also address relationships between the ballet and issues in subsequent musicological scholarship, including aspects of Bach's performance practice, his cyclical versus linear approach to time, his occasional composition of works that threaten to stretch performers beyond their limits, and concerns about antisemitism in the turbae. The Hamburg Ballet has performed Matthäus-Passion , which has become one of Neumeier's most important and signature creations, throughout Europe, as well as in Japan, China, Canada, and the United States. The ballet reveals new and unexpected dimensions and affective experiences to audiences already familiar with the St. Matthew Passion and introduces it in a compelling manner to those who have never experienced one of Bach's most esteemed works.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".