Patrick Grahl is Bach’s Evangelist for the St. Matthew Passion
David Lewellen
PUBLISHED
Tagged Under: 2025.26 Season, Chorus, Guest Artist
Patrick Grahl brings a full lifetime of experience to narrating the St. Matthew Passion.
Grahl, who will sing the central role of the Evangelist in the Milwaukee Symphony’s upcoming performances of Bach’s masterpiece, was born and raised in Leipzig, Germany, the city where Bach composed most of his sacred music — and as a child, he sang in the choir of the St. Thomas Church, where Bach served as music director for the last 27 years of his life.
In his first year as a chorister, Grahl sang the choral soprano part of the St. Matthew Passion. “It was great luck that I had the opportunity to come in touch with the tradition of Bach,” he says. Singing in the composer’s own church wasn’t intimidating at first — “as a child, you don’t think about it,” he says. But as an adult, he knows that “Bach’s grave is about 20 meters away, so you have to do it very well.”
As time went by and his voice changed from treble to tenor, Grahl’s experience gave him a natural pathway into singing Baroque music as a career. But he makes a point of singing at least one opera production a year. “It’s important for the health of your voice to do both,” he says.
The St. Matthew Passion is dramatic in its storytelling, and it has sometimes been staged as if it were an opera. Bach wrote a word-for-word setting of Jesus’s arrest, crucifixion, and death as told in the Gospel of Matthew, ending on the evening of Good Friday with the stone rolled across the tomb. Jesus’s speeches are assigned to a baritone, but the Evangelist, or narrator, is a tenor who handles the bulk of the biblical text.
However, the Passion narrative also stops frequently for the chorus or soloists to reflect on what the story means. The tenor solo arias are often assigned to a different singer from the Evangelist, but in Milwaukee, Grahl will be doing double duty — which is the way he prefers it. “If you’re only singing the arias, it’s so boring,” he says. “You have to sit for a long time and then come in focused.” The arias also give him a chance to be “more operatic, more romantic” than in his role as a narrator.
Grahl frequently sings with orchestras that specialize in early music, and he says, “It’s very good for me to be a part of both worlds.” The exchange back and forth, he says, helps groups like the MSO play in an authentic style while using richer-sounding modern instruments.
Clear diction is crucially important to singing the part, Grahl says — even for an audience that does not understand the original German. But he hopes the familiar story will help the Milwaukee audience understand some of what he is singing. And in contrast to the American custom of projecting the English translation on a screen above the stage, he says that in Germany, concertgoers scan a code as they enter and spend the performance staring at the words on their phones. He much prefers singing to an audience that is looking up.
“In the best case, the conductor and the Evangelist are in partnership and leadership,” Grahl says — and as a student he worked with Peter Schreier, who sometimes took on both roles in the same performance. He learned that “it is always necessary that everyone be able to follow you. When your recitative leads into the next chorale, the tempo has to be so clear that the choir has no possibility to misunderstand.” And being technically sound allows him to “be more free with some of the other elements.”
Grahl still lives in Leipzig, and several months ago, he met there with MSO Music Director Ken-David Masur, also a native of the city, to spend some time working through the piece and talking about it. The two have not worked together before, Grahl says, but “I think we’ll have a good time.”
