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Bach’s St. John Passion is not the first oratorio he wrote but it is his earliest such work to survive. He composed it just after his 39th birthday, for a vesper service on Good Friday, while he was director of church music in Leipzig. It premiered on April 7, 1724, three years before St. Matthew, his only other surviving Passion (of the five he wrote) was performed, also on a Good Friday in Leipzig.

Felix showed exceptional talent as both a pianist and composer at a very young age. He gave his first public appearance as a soloist for Dussek’s “Military” Concerto at the age of nine. By the age of twelve, he was taken to give a performance of music by Bach and Mozart for the famed poet Goethe, with whom he developed a lasting friendship. Indeed, it is said that the third movement Scherzo of Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-flat Major, was inspired by Goethe’s poem, “Walpurgis Night’s Dream”. Felix continued to develop as a composer in his youth under the tutelage of Carl Frederich Zelter. He wrote five operas and eleven symphonies, among other works, before reaching adulthood.

The play—which told the story of Rosamunde, a royal heiress, who was brought up incognito as a shepherdess by a mariner’s widow but sought to reclaim her throne—has not survived. Neither had the Schubert score until Grove and Arthur Sullivan, who had gone to Vienna specifically to research Schubert, found it in 1867. Grove said he discovered the score in the bottom of a cupboard, tied with cord, and covered by the dust of almost a half century. He presumed it had been put there after the second performance (when the play closed) and had remained there, undisturbed, ever since.