The Great Passion

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I love, love, love, LOVE this novel. I love it because it is beautifully written. It is such an incredible read. Amazing narrative style. I do recommend listening to Bach's St. Matthew's passion--either in German or English. You can find it easily online to stream. (Several different recordings are found on Spotify.) Stefan is taken in by J.S. Bach and his family and he is provided guidance in keyboard, organ, composition and above all sacred vocals. He is a fine boy soprano with carrot red hair who is grieving, bullied and trying to find meaning in the world, himself and God. We are taken by the hand into the world of sacred music, Lutheran wisdom (and platitudes), platonic and romantic love, deep everyday spirituality and the roles of the artist, the student, the woman. So, I thought this was good but not perfect. I think you need to have an interest in music, including in the details of performance, and in the history of religious thought; I do (especially in the former); I enjoyed the book and I can recommend it. To conjure him as a man, a writer needs to focus very sharply, and, whether in his bestselling Grantchester stories or award-winning documentaries, Runcie is expert at focus… Warmly, reverently, Runcie brings alive what it is like to take part, for the very first time, in one of the most extraordinary pieces of music ever written Daily Telegraph Brilliant ... Readers will be enriched by this novel and its glimpse at genius' The Times, Historical Fiction of the Month

Runcie is brilliant at chronicling Bach’s mission to take the messiness of grief and love and turn them into something beautiful and sacred. Even readers as tone-deaf as I am will be enriched by this novel and its glimpse at genius The Times, Historical Fiction of the MonthSet in Leipzig in 1726, it is written as the memoir of Stefan Silberman, an 11-year-old chorister who is studying music at St Thomas’s choir school and encounters Johann Sebastian Bach as “The Cantor”. Stefan is talented, but traumatised by the recent death of his mother, and he is cruelly bullied. We have to make them think that their lives depend on how well they listen. We have to present the hardest and most bitter sorrow anyone has ever known.’ Something is happening, though. In the depths of his loss, the Cantor is writing a new work: the St 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. I particularly enjoyed this title for two reasons. First, I was fascinated by the author's exploration of Bach's spirituality. I assume I'm like many people in thinking of Bach primarily as a composer in the abstract, a man who produced music and about whom I know little else. I'd connected Bach's music more to the liturgical calendar and his day-to-day work demands rather than to his faith. Runcie's Bach is spiritually driven, and for him spirit and music are a single entity.

There is nothing like a novel to make a historical character alive. Truly in my mind Bach was a stout old guy in an elaborate wig. His music was somehow detached from his actual personhood. But wow, this book brings Bach to life. I don’t know much about this time period in Europe so it took me a bit to get my bearings in Stefan and Bach’s world. Bach’s role as Cantor had him composing music for worship services and he took church music Seriously. I love how this novel shows Bach as a devout man of faith who tries with his music to proclaim the glory of God. There is a LOT about music in this book (of course) and a lot of it went over my head, I’m sure, but it is also beautifully woven into the story. The local church and its very Scripturally based music is very much at the heart of the story. Bach takes him into his home, where he is looked after by Anna Magdalena. His musical talent grows under Bach’s tutoring, and he begins to fall in love. But tragedy overwhelms the household with the death of Bach’s three-year-old daughter, Etta. Faith is tested. Is untimely death a punishment? Why do the innocent suffer? Bach’s faith and obsessive brilliance dominate the narrative, but he is touchingly human in his failings. For perhaps we can only appreciate what it is to be alive by recognising what it means when that life is removed from us. We are ravaged by absence. The void opens around us…Then, afterwards, when life forces us to continue, and we resume what is left of our time on earth, we listen to music as survivors…We grow to understand that our wounds give life its richness… It is important to celebrate each day. It doesn’t matter how small a pleasure was or how long it lasted but each simple pleasure needs to be marked. It can be the sight of a flower or a smile of a friend or the silence at the end of a piece of music. We may travel through the valley of the shadow of death, but how we live is what matters, don’t you think? We have to make full use of the opportunities and talents that God has given us. Do not forget the Parable of the Talents. It commands us to work.

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.

The Passion of the title is Bach's St. Matthew Passion—a massive, ground-breaking choral work that explores the depths and commonalities of grief. The St. Matthew Passion employs two choirs and two orchestras and runs for just under three hours. In the latter half of the book, Bach begins composing this work and Stefan is there as a singer, as a copyist, and as a boy witnessing an exceptional moment in Western music. 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 other students, jealous of his favored treatment and private tutelage, bully him. Bach takes him into his home where his wife and he are kind. Anna, who is very kind and loving and reminds him of his own mother. Under Bach’s teaching, Stefan’s musical ability and skill improve greatly. And Bach always uses music as a metaphor for God’s love and grace; beautiful lessons abound throughout the book. Bach’s 3 year old daughter died of a fever and Bach thinks it best for Stefan to return to school so his family can grieve alone. Stefan blames himself since he had the fever first and may have infected little Etta. This begins as Stefan Silbermann hears of the death of Sebastian Bach, the news coming to him when he receives a letter in his workshop where he makes organs, assisted by other men. He asks the five men for a moment of silence, and recognizing the solemnity of the moment, they clap their hands in preparation of prayer. They all knew Bach, even if not as closely associated as Stefan Silbermann had been. All the stars for this profoundly moving and lovely reflection on life, love, loss, and the beauty found in both music and silence.I was a choral singer. I began singing alto in Third Grade, and continued through high school choirs and college and community choirs. I was in the Choral Arts Society when they sang the Bach B Minor Mass on the stage of the Academy of Music with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Reading the line “we were no longer individual singers or instrumentalists, our identities, hopes and fears had been subsumed into something greater than ourselves,” I recognized the feeling I had about choral singing. This is as beautifully composed as the music it refers to, and although the time period it is set in is nearly 300 years ago, there is so much that hasn’t changed. The school-boy bullying of a new student, the heartbreak of loss, unrequited love. A striving for the beauty in this world, and the desire to hold onto that beauty. The way that an opinion of a person is often based on one impression, or one flaw - as though we don’t all have flaws.

Although I found the content of the novel interesting, I struggled with its style. Dialogue-heavy, it initially conveyed an appropriate sense of rushed urgency, but became tedious to read as it persisted and, I felt, served to dimish character development. I could also imagine that, like myself, many readers might struggle to make sense of many of the Latin phrases and German song titles that are not always translated, or inadequately so. The Passion has two parts, and Runcie tells us the sermon was given between them. In the first part, the choir speaks of the guilt we all share, asking “Is it I” who betrayed Jesus, clamoring for Jesus to be punished for challenging the religious leaders. The music is dramatic. In our American culture we are overindulgent, have a generally sloppy work ethic, and a comfortable, entertaining life. We eat too much, drink too much, and complain about anything difficult about our lives. The horrendous things in our American culture are hidden away (executions, Guantanamo, the outrageous abuse of families trying to immigrate to the U.S., racism, child abuse, misogyny) and so en masse we are not challenged with the painful inequities that the people of Leipzig had to endure in the 18th century. We simply just switch the channel, and all is good. We live in a bubble of opulence. We concentrate on what the story means at the same time as telling it. We develop the themes of sacrifice, sorrow and loss, extracting all the pain and all the love so that, when it comes to the end, the congregation understands that there is nothing left to give. Nothing more can be said or sung.’

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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. Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Bloomsbury USA for an e-copy of this novel. I am providing my honest review. This will be released March 2022. In The Great Passion, James Runcie makes up for this historical vacuum with a bold imagining of the months leading up to the first performance of Bach’s masterpiece. Runcie’s narrator is Stefan Silbermann, a scion of the (real-life) German organ-building family. In 1750, Stefan, now in his late thirties, learns of the death of the Cantor, which leads him to reminisce about the year he spent as a student of the St Thomas Church in his early teens. At the time, still grieving following the death of his mother, bullied by the other schoolboys for his red hair, yet showing great promise as a singer and organist, Stefan is taken in by the cantor and his wife Anna Magdalena, and practically becomes a member of the Bach household. He witnesses at first hand the composer at his work, and unwittingly contributes to the creation of what would become known as the St Matthew Passion. Bach’s family takes Stefan under their wing. They show him love which he knew from his mother, but was missing from his father. No matter how crowded Bach’s house is, there is always room for love and showing kindness and charity. The love of Bach’s family shines throughout this story. As I read this deeply affecting and affective novel I was comforted, I was moved, my heart leapt with joy, tears often streamed down my cheeks and I cherished my faith, my loves and the entirety of my life experiences. This is a book that resonated deeply with my own soul strings and a novel that I will forever cherish.