VW9 and the ‘St. Matthew Passion’

On the face of it, Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony are two works which could hardly have less in common. Even the one feature they might be said to share at the outset – some form of E minor tonality – has come to divide them by the end: the Baroqueperiod work concludes not in the starting key but in a ‘progressive’ C minor, and it is, curiously, the 20th-century symphony which not only returns to its original tonic but also makes use of the Baroque feature of the ‘picardy third’.