Colonial Australians may have struggled with JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion, but the composer’s music quickly found a following Down Under. He is now acknowledged as a genius, of course, but was there something about his rebellious nature, reflected in his music, that appealed to audiences here? A cosmological connection perhaps? Steve Dow talks to musicians and musicologists about why Australians can’t get enough of Bach.

Bach Akademie Australia performing at the 2025 Sydney Festival. Photo © Wendell Teodoro

When Johann Sebastian Bach’s great sacred oratorio was first presented in colonial Australia, the performances were more comically grim than grand. 

In 1875, the Melbourne Philharmonic Society assumed that classical audiences would know the composer’s chorales, so it hyped up the country’s first staging of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which tells...