Ninety Volunteers, One Market Square. The Choir That Gave America Its First B Minor Mass Will Sing the St Matthew Passion in Leipzig on Its 300th Birthday, and the Concert Is Free.

The Bach Choir of Bethlehem is ninety people who are not paid to sing. It was founded in 1898 by John Frederick Wolle, an organist at Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and in 1900 it gave the first complete performance in America of Bach's Mass in B minor. Its 2026–27 season, the fifth under its artistic director Christopher Jackson, went up on its website on 25 August and was reported by OperaWire on Monday 7 September 2026. The season runs from a free lunchtime concert in a Moravian church on Tuesday 8 September to the four-day Bethlehem Bach Festival in May, and then it leaves the country.

In June 2027 the St Matthew Passion turns 300. Bachfest Leipzig, run by the Bach Archive in the city where the Passion was first heard, has put the whole of its 2027 festival, 10 to 20 June, under the word "Passion", and its preview programme lists the Bethlehem choir in two concerts. One is the choir's own: three cantatas in the Peterskirche under Jackson. The other is the reason to read on. On Saturday 12 June 2027 at eight in the evening, on Leipzig's market square, eight choirs from six continents, the MDR Symphony Orchestra and six soloists will perform the St Matthew Passion under Simon Halsey, and the programme's price line reads "Eintritt frei". The Bach Choir of Bethlehem is the only North American choir on that list.

The season, as published

The choir's season page, its season brochure and the OperaWire report of 7 September give the following. Prices are from the brochure.

Jackson's letter on the season page states the destination plainly: "In June 2027, we return to Bachfest Leipzig as the sole North American choir in a worldwide commemorative performance of the St. Matthew Passion, marking its 300th anniversary and bringing Bethlehem's century-long devotion to Bach back to the city where this masterpiece was first performed." The festival in May is built to face that trip. On Friday 14 May at 7pm, in Packer Memorial Church on the Lehigh campus, the choir sings Felix Mendelssohn's 1841 arrangement of the St Matthew Passion, the version it recorded in 2023 in a new scholarly edition, at $40, $30 and $25. On Saturday 15 May the Mass in B minor follows at 2:30 and 4:30pm, $45 to $70 with a $20 livestream, a work the choir says it has offered "for more than a century". The guitarist Eliot Fisk is artist in residence; the soloists are the sopranos Sherezade Panthaki and Katelyn Grace Jackson, the mezzo Meg Bragle, the tenor James Reese and the bass-baritone Edmund Milly. At 2pm on the Saturday there is a twenty-minute outdoor chorale sing beside Packer Church with the Festival Brass Choir, which the brochure calls a beloved tradition and which is the smallest rehearsal in the world for what comes in June.

Leipzig, from the preview programme

The Bach Archive's preview of the 2027 Bachfest is a fifteen-page PDF in German and English, published ahead of general ticket sales, which open on 24 November 2026 (10 November for members of the festival's friends' associations). The festival's artistic director, Michael Maul, writes that "the 2,816 bars of the object of these celebrations will be sounding five times in all, but each time in a different way", and then makes the offer that turns a festival into a civic event: "you are all invited to join in an open-air performance on market square – at least with the immortal Bach chorales". He also explains why a good two dozen Bach choirs from around the world are in town: "True to our motto »BACH – We are Family«, a good two dozen Bach choirs from all over the world will be providing the opening act to the St Matthew Passion: all the cantatas in which Bach has Jesus speaking."

The day-by-day listing gives all five Passions; three of them, and the Bethlehem cantata concert, are below. The preview warns that every ticket price is provisional until the public budgets it depends on are settled.

The choirs in the market-square Passion come from the United States, Paraguay, Japan, the Netherlands, Australia, South Africa and Germany. The preview says the choir will also sing in the Peterskirche with a Leipzig ensemble on the Monday, and the choir's own brochure notes that its June 2027 Bach at Noon in Allentown moves to the first Tuesday of the month "due to Germany Tour". A patron tour built around the choir's dates, sold by Encore Tours, runs from 6 to 15 June 2027 at $6,299 with flights from Newark or $4,699 without; it includes a reception with Jackson and the executive director Leela Breithaupt, and a visit to the Thomaskirche hosted by its music director.

Two cautions belong here rather than at the end. The preview is a preview: the Bach Archive's website does not yet list the 2027 concerts individually, and details can move before the November sale. And Bethlehem is not the only North American choir at the festival. The same listing has the Ottawa Bach Choir opening the cantata series on 11 June Bach Collegium San Diego singing on 14 June and the Bach Cantata Vespers Chorus of Grace Lutheran Church, from Illinois, on 15 June. The choir's claim, and ours, is narrower and holds: on the market square, in the Passion itself, Bethlehem is the one choir from this continent.

1727, 1829, 1841, 1900, 2024

The Passion the square will sing was, in the words of Bachipedia, "probably performed on Good Friday in 1727" in Leipzig; the 1736 revision is documented in the Thomaskirche, with both organs and two continuo groups. After Bach's death it went largely unheard until Mendelssohn and Zelter revived it in 1829, and Mendelssohn's 1841 Leipzig version is the one Bethlehem takes to Packer Church in May. The Bach Archive is treating 2027 as the 300th anniversary and says so in its programme; the exact date of the first performance is a matter for scholars, the year is not.

The choir's own arc starts in the same church tradition. The Moravians settled Bethlehem in the colonial era; Wolle, one of their organists, founded the choir in 1898 and led the B minor Mass in 1900 and the Christmas Oratorio in 1901, the first complete American performances of each, according to the choir's history. In summer 2024 the Moravian Church Settlements of Bethlehem, Herrnhut in Germany and Gracehill in the United Kingdom were granted UNESCO World Heritage status, and the choir marked it with a statement in which Jackson said: "The Bach Choir of Bethlehem would not exist without Herrnhut and the Moravian Church."

It had just been there. The choir's 2024 European tour, by its own account its first abroad since 2003 and its first in Germany since 1995, took it to Potsdam and then, on 10 June 2024, to the Thomaskirche as one of the international choirs invited to sing Bach's second Leipzig cantata cycle, then to Herrnhut, Schwäbisch Gmünd and Salzburg. Laurence Vittes, who followed the choir to Leipzig and Herrnhut for Seen and Heard International, heard it enter the cantata Herr Christ, der einige Gottessohn "with healthy, broad, beautiful swathes of sound" and wrote that the rest of the tour was meant to show why it is "considered one the country's finest choirs for Bach and persuasive ambassadors for American music". In the same season, the choir says, its recording of the Mendelssohn Passion on Analekta made the Times of London's mid-year list of the best classical albums of 2024. Three years later the same choir is booked for the Passion on the square. That is how an invitation compounds.

Packer Memorial Church on the Lehigh University campus, where the Bethlehem Bach Festival performs the Mass in B minor, a tradition the choir dates to 1900. Photograph by Peter L. Moore, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped.

The ledger of an unpaid choir

The choir describes itself, on its About page, as ninety volunteer singers who "collectively donate over 10,000 hours annually for rehearsals and performances", performing "40 concerts and educational programs per year for an audience of more than 22,000". By our arithmetic that is about 111 donated hours per singer per year, nearly three working weeks each, and an average of 550 listeners per event.

The money side is public because the choir is a registered charity. Its Form 990 filings, via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, show total revenue of $1,734,891 and total expenses of $1,616,765 in the year to 30 June 2025, with net assets of $10.6 million. Over the fourteen fiscal years from 2012 the choir's revenue has moved between $1.18 million and $1.94 million while expenses have climbed, unevenly, from $1.09 million to about $1.6 million, with one $2.0 million year in 2024. The chart above draws the two lines. In the 2024 filing, contributions and grants were $983,990 and programme service revenue, which is mostly ticket income, was $229,641; the 2025 return shows $918,636 and $159,861. Put those together with the volunteer figure and the model is visible: in 2024 about one dollar in six was earned at the door, two in three were given, most of the remainder was investment income, and the singing itself is free labour worth, at any professional rate, a second budget the choir never has to raise. Total expenses divided by the stated audience come to about $73 per listener per year, of which a Bach at Noon listener pays nothing.

The brochure adds that a "three-year, $2 million campaign" now underway supports Bach at Noon, the schools programme, the Bel Canto youth chorus and the festival, "while supporting the 2027 Leipzig Choir Tour", and has funded a new conducting fellowship. Whatever the festival contributes, the choir is raising money to fly its unpaid singers to Saxony, and that is worth saying before anyone assumes a European booking pays for itself.

For singers

Two doors are open. The 13th Biennial Bach Vocal Competition for American Singers, run with the American Bach Society, closed its applications on 23 May 2026 and holds its finals in Bethlehem on Saturday 24 October 2026 before Jackson, Meg Bragle, Jessica Beebe and Matthew Dirst. It is open to US citizens and permanent residents born after 24 October 1994; up to eight finalists are chosen from video recordings of two Bach arias; the winner takes a $3,000 career development grant and a solo engagement with the choir in a future season, and up to three further awards of $500 may be made. If the biennial pattern holds, the next call will come in 2028, and it will be on Cadenza's competitions board when it does. The other door is the choir itself, which schedules auditions for volunteer singers through its website; the brochure's phrase for what those singers get in 2027 is "the rare opportunity to encounter Bach's music in the places that shaped it".

If you go

• Bethlehem, Tuesday 8 September 2026, 12:10pm. The 150th Bach at Noon in Bethlehem, Central Moravian Church, free. Livestreamed on the choir's YouTube channel and broadcast on WWFM.
• Bethlehem, Friday 14 May 2027, 7pm. Mendelssohn's St Matthew Passion, Packer Memorial Church, $25 to $40. Saturday 15 May, 2:30 and 4:30pm, the Mass in B minor, $45 to $70, livestream $20.
• Leipzig, Saturday 12 June 2027, 8pm. St Matthew Passion on the Markt, admission free according to the preview; bring a chorale book. Public sales for the ticketed Bachfest concerts open on 24 November 2026 at bachfestleipzig.de.
• Leipzig, Monday 14 June 2027, 8pm. The Bach Choir of Bethlehem and Collegium Lipsiensis, Peterskirche, cantatas 152, 108 and 11, €39.

The case against this article

The Leipzig dates come from a preview programme and are subject to change; the Bach Archive's website does not yet list them individually. The "sole North American" line is the choir's, and it is true of the market-square Passion, not of the festival. The 10,000 hours, 90 singers, 40 events and 22,000 listeners are the choir's own figures, unaudited, and appear with small variations across its pages (an older history page says 31 events for more than 20,000; a 2024 release says 95 singers; the published roster runs to about 118 names including members on leave and choral scholars). The financial figures are from IRS filings as transcribed by ProPublica, and the door-money ratio is computed on the 2024 return, the last full year before the current tour campaign; on the 2025 return the door share is nearer one dollar in eleven. The 1727 premiere date is given as probable by the source we cite. None of this changes the two facts at the centre of the piece: the choir is listed for the free Passion on 12 June 2027, and its singers are paid nothing to sing it.

The question

The programme lists eight choirs for one performance of a work that runs close to three hours. How many of Bethlehem's ninety will stand on the square, how will the eight be balanced against a symphony orchestra outdoors, and will the Bach Archive publish the crowd count afterwards? The festival's own pages describe the market square as the home of its open-air concerts, so the setting is not new; the scale is. The choir that sang the Mass first in America in 1900 will find out on a Saturday night in June what it sounds like when a whole city is invited to join in.

Related: The Odds, our investigation into orchestral jobs and graduates. Auditions, competitions and calls are on cadenza.work/browse.

Cover photograph: The Bach Choir of Bethlehem photographed in Washington on 16 April 1925; the companion negative in the same series is catalogued "at W.H.", the White House. National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LCCN 2016850334), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped..