The Great Passion: James Runcie

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Joyous, revelatory, and deeply moving, The Great Passion is an imaginative tour de force that tells the story of what it was like to sing, play, and hear Bach's music for the very first time. ( From Bloomsbury Publishing) For a time, Stefan lives with Bach’s family, the house full of activity, music focused, but also joyful. Until the death of their infant daughter. Bach had lost his first, beloved wife, and although he happily found love again, the pain remains. Now his wife is grieving. Stefan’s rival’s mother also dies. The awareness of life’s brevity and pain pervades their lives.

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Something is happening, though. In the depths of his loss, the Cantor is writing a new work: the Saint Matthew Passion, to be performed for the first time on Good Friday. As Stefan watches the work rehearsed, he realises he is witness to the creation of one of the most extraordinary pieces of music that has ever been written. In the midst of so much sorrow and loss, Bach is inspired to write a Good Friday cantata that will take listeners into the passion of Christ, putting them in the place of those who caused Jesus’ death and benefited from that act of love. The St. Matthew Passion is considered a masterpiece.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. As they prepare for the performance of the Passion, the true meaning of passion comes touchingly through the story. When a tragedy strikes the Bach’s family, Stefan witnesses someone else’s grief and the solace of religion and music. Stefan is told that no matter how deep the grief is, the suffering is not to dwell on it, but to learn and grow from it. You draw a moral lesson from the tragedy, and even when you morn, you still need to carry on with your life. Being an example for all to see is exactly what Passion is about. There are gaps of time into which we sometimes fall, when the pattern of our days is suspended. It happens when there is a birth or a death, an arrival or departure, the moments either side of it becoming forms of descent and recovery, when we do not know quite what to do or how long this bewilderment will last.

The Great Passion: : James Runcie: Bloomsbury Publishing

In general, I prefer not to talk of those years, now that my hair is thinned and grey, but once people discover how well I knew the family, they question what it must have been like to be amongst the first to sing Bach's music. I am unmarried and live without children and it's often the only subject they ever want to ask me about. My present occupation or state of health is of little concern. It's as if, as soon as my voice broke, my life ceased to be of interest. Stefan is still grieving for his mother when he arrives at the school. Harsh discipline and bullying make the adjustment hard. The cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, notes the boy’s beautiful singing voice and ability on the organ. The rival soprano seethes at losing his place of favor with the cantor. Stefan’s talent draws the attention of the Cantor – Johann Sebastian Bach. Eccentric, obsessive and kind, he rescues Stefan from the miseries of school by bringing him into his home as an apprentice. Soon Stefan feels that this ferociously clever, chaotic family is his own. But when tragedy strikes, Stefan’s period of sanctuary in their household comes to a close. Don’t cry for me, I’m going where music is born,” the devout J S Bach supposedly said on his deathbed. But James Runcie’s new novel explores the place where Bach’s music was born in rather more earthly terms. The “father of Western music” is here the work-hassled father of a chaotic human family in all its joy and grief. It can’t be a sombre reflection on something that happened long ago. We need agitation, conflict. Perhaps we can even imagine the past and the present speaking to each other: what it meant to those first witnesses to the Passion of our Lord, and what it means to us now: our truth and their truth, how people crucify Christ every day.’Could be my Covid brain right now but this just wasn’t The Great Passion for me. I was intrigued enough to take it to the end but relieved when it was over. I think I would have been more excited for a flogging rather than the slogging. WHAT might it have been like to sing at the first performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion? Sometimes, a work of art emerges from asking a question that no one else has thought to ask. James Runcie’s novel is an extraordinary work of imagination.

The Great Passion by James Runcie - The Church Times The Great Passion by James Runcie - The Church Times

Over the course of the next several months, and under Bach's careful tutelage, Stefan's musical skill progresses, and he is allowed to work as a copyist for Bach's many musical works. But mainly, drawn into Bach's family life and away from the cruelty in the dorms and the lonely hours of his mourning, Stefan begins to feel at home. When another tragedy strikes, this time in the Bach family, Stefan bears witness to the depths of grief, the horrors of death, the solace of religion, and the beauty that can spring from even the most profound losses. The boarding school is rife with beating and bullying, and Stefan runs away. We first meet Bach through his kindness to this desperately unhappy boy. At this point, Bach is 41, responsible for music in all Leipzig’s churches. As cantor in St Thomas’s church, he teaches at the school and has talent-spotted Stefan’s musicality as a singer. He encourages Stefan to return to school, but invites him to live in his own home. He also asks him, as son of a famous organ builder, to help him inspect a church organ. Alone with Bach, peering at organ pipes, Stefan shyly confesses he misses his mother. “Sometimes,” says the cantor, “I think a man misses his mother his whole life. But we are all orphans before the Lord.” The Great Passion is a finely crafted mystery of life itself and how one can be transformed through grief, music and love. With profound exploration of characters, bringing remarkably authentic and compelling depiction of musically talented family; and how their music transforms not only them, but also the others, by giving people comfort through music. The second part is solemn, ending with Jesus laid in the tomb. Bach leaves us contemplative and sorrowful, the chorus singing the universal cry of grief, “We sit down in tears/And call to thee in the tomb:/Rest softly, softly rest!” I wondered what music Bach presented three days later on Easter Sunday to speak of the joy of resurrection and the embodiment of hope? The novel is particularly successful in extracting Bach from the ivory tower in which we might imagine him and rooting him firmly in his time and place. He is referred to mostly as "the Cantor", stressing his role as the leader of the singing in Leipzig's St Thomas Church, rather than our modern idea of him as a composer. He is surrounded by an adoring (and adored) family, including his musically talented and almost perpetually pregnant second wife, Anna Magdalena. He is fond of sermonising, but he also likes horseplay with his younger children. He is an exceptional human being, but he is still human.The final part of the book culminates in the composing and performing of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on Good Friday and explores Jesus as “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” and the part that grieving boys and men have in bringing the music to glorious life. It is so moving to read.