For nearly a century after Bach's death in 1750, the St Matthew Passion went essentially unperformed. Musical taste had moved on, and Bach's reputation, while never entirely forgotten among specialists, had settled largely around his instrumental and keyboard writing rather than his large-scale sacred vocal works, which were considered old-fashioned and were rarely staged.
That changed in 1829, when the twenty-year-old composer Felix Mendelssohn, who had been given a manuscript copy of the score by his grandmother years earlier, mounted a performance in Berlin with the Berlin Singakademie, cutting roughly a third of the original score to fit contemporary concert expectations. The performance was a sensation, and it is conventionally credited by music historians as the single event that launched the wider nineteenth-century Bach revival, a rehabilitation of Bach's reputation that eventually restored not only the Passion settings but the cantatas, the Mass in B Minor and the instrumental works to the core of the Western classical repertoire.
Mendelssohn was twenty at the time and Jewish by birth, raised largely without religious instruction before his family's later conversion to Protestant Christianity, a biographical detail that has drawn its own scholarly attention given the specific antisemitic strand within the Passion narrative's reception history that this same work, unrelated to Mendelssohn's revival of it, has separately and repeatedly had to be examined for over the centuries since.