The Great Passion: James Runcie

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Beautiful exploration of grief and love as a young boy gifted with an extraordinary singing voice, deeply feels the loss of his mother. He sees the world without his mother “so much more raw, exposed and frightening, with so much less protection and solace from the fearful enormities of what lay ahead.” He misses his mother’s vivacity, a taste for adventure and surprise. But under the tutelage of Bach, he learns to be resilient. Bach’s family was enormous, and his genius is large-scale, too. In every genre, his melodies are driven by an unerring sense of the moment when some harmonic shift or new rhythmic pattern transforms everything into a kind of heartbreak that is also, inexplicably, consoling. 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. For his portrait of the great composer, he has chosen three refining filters. First, we see Bach only through the eyes of a young boy. Second, the plot concerns the making of only one of his many masterpieces. Finally, every­thing happens in a single year, 1726-27, in which Bach’s three-year-old daughter dies. As you read my review I encourage you to listen to excerpts from Bach's St. Matthew's Passion. Here are some excerpts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxNQl...

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. But where Runcie really triumphs is in his depiction of music. Writing about music is notoriously difficult – “like dancing about architecture”, to use a much-bandied phrase. Yet, in language which largely eschews technical terms, Runcie still manages to describe several of Bach’s works uncannily well, not least the Great Passion of the title. He also expresses the excitement of a first performance, the tension of the musicians, the expectations of the audience and that sense of satisfaction and release following a successful concert which performers know very well.But if you avoid grief, you will not experience what it means to be human. We can only appreciate what it is to be alive by recognizing what it means when that life is removed from us. OUR WOUNDS GIVE LIFE ITS RICHNESS. First sentence: 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 a 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 unexpected bewilderment will last. 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. 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 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.”

This book is a coming-of-age story, but it is also a love song to Bach and to the Passion chorale. It moved a little slow for me, but I think those with a passion for music – particularly choral and organ music – would love this book. It contains a lot of nerdy detail about how organs are built and played and how music is sung; a lot of that went right over my head, but music nerds will appreciate it. The year is 1727. Thirteen-year-old Stefan Silbermann’s mother has recently died, and his father decides to send him to boarding school in Leipzig. At school, the other boys bully Stefan for his red hair. Immediately, a knife that his father gave him is stolen. Another boy named Stolle is especially unkind. 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. This wise, refreshing novel takes us to the heart of Bach’s life and work. James Runcie’s expert imagination makes his picture of Leipzig specific and convincing, and behind the music’s echo lies a touching human story. It offers a glimpse into a world more faithful and attentive than our own, but not alien to us: "we listen to music as survivors," the great Cantor says This Bach is no saint. His superhuman work ethic and determination to push himself - and others - beyond the frontiers of what seems possible make him difficult to live with at times. Patience is not one of his virtues. Yet rather than dwell on the human cost of Bach's achievement, as another author might have chosen to do, Runcie instead shows him as an inspirational figure, pushing his performers beyond what they thought were the limits of their abilities, exhorting them to share his vision and in doing so, to grasp their full potential.

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What he has achieved is to draw together a major musical creation and its celebrated composer with a carefully crafted setting in Leipzig in 1726-7. ‘The Great Passion’, what we know as ’the St Matthew Passion’, Johann Sebastian Bach’s great offering to the world is depicted amidst a complex storyline which involves a young man from an organ-building family, with some musical understanding, being introduced to the challenging context of a school, of which Bach is the Cantor. 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.’ 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 Like the St Matthew Passion, this is a novel filled not just with loss and lamentation but with transcendent joy. Runcie’s prose sings. Soli Deo gloria! Saga Magazine

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.

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

I loved this book. Runcie’s description of the familiar music being rehearsed and performed for the first time is extraordinary 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. What I think this book does so well is explore the connection between grief and music. Stefan is grieving his mother’s death. Bach, his sister-in-law, and his older four children are grieving Maria Barbara’s death. Later in the story, Bach’s young child from his marriage with Anna Magdalena dies of fever. There is another musical family in town that loses its wife and mother. Death was such a constant part of life for so many years of history. Until COVID, we moderns have largely been insulated from the kind of relentless grief that people in Bach’s day experienced. And yet grief is universal. Every human is touched by it multiple times throughout life. I read about the author on Wikipedia and he lost his wife in 2020. Art and music and story are powerful mediums for expressing and exploring grief and this book fleshes out the connections between these in many ways. Too many to name. 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… I loved this book. Runcie’s description of the familiar music being rehearsed and performed for the first time is extraordinary. It is as though the characters are caught on camera with barely an inkling of the significance of what they are doing, no real idea that this music will live for ever, though they know that it is novel and powerful: “We open in E minor, the key of lamentation. Two orchestras as well as the choirs. . . remember, gentlemen, we open with a dance rhythm. E minor. 12/8 time. . . ‘Come you daughters . . .’” As I “watched” the first rehearsal, I found myself in tears, the opening chorus soaring in my head.

The story begins with an 11-year-old narrator, Stefan, who has been suddenly bereaved himself. Stefan’s father is a historical figure. Musical-instrument-maker Gottfried Silbermann, an important figure in the history of the piano, had a genuine connection to Bach, who criticised one of his pianos. When Silbermann altered it, Bach was the first to play it in a concert. But in Runcie’s novel, Gottfried has only two functions. One, to be a famous builder of organs, rather than pianos. The other, to be unfeeling enough to send his son to St Thomas’s choir school in Leipzig immediately after the boy’s mother dies. 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.This is a beautifully written, wise, humorous and very deep book on both the frailties and strength of the human spirit during 18th century Germany. We meet silly pastors and even sillier opera singers. We meet not only JS Bach but his second wife and children. We are amused by Telemann and Picander. Most of all we fall in love with Stefan and his struggles as he masters not only difficult vocal lines but his grief, his heart and how all this brings him closer to nature, to love, and to God. 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. Set 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.