The Great Passion

by James Runcie

Bloomsbury, £16.99, 272 pages

This sublime novel about the domestic and spiritual genesis behind Johann Sebastian Bach’s writing of his St Matthew Passion – first performed in Leipzig on Good Friday, 1727 – is every bit as brilliantly dramatic as Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus. I couldn’t put it down.

Both deal with young German musicians packed off by ambitious and overbearing musical fathers to improve their prospects. But while Shaffer used a controversial amount of dramatic license to mythologise the rivalry between the aging and jealous Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Mozart (his insufferable, louche, much younger genius nemesis) Runcie isn’t interested in mythologising Bach for box-office effect.

Instead, he pulls off a more difficult task. Runcie humanises Bach. We don’t see him up in his organ loft but rather as a family man writing music that transcends personal sorrow (the Passion was partly fuelled by his grief at the recent death of his three-year-old daughter Etta). Runcie tells the story of the Passion’s creation in a way that is so universal – his research is thorough but lightly powdered – that the reader almost becomes part of that congregation at the St Thomas Church in Leipzig who heard this new piece for the first time.

Through reed-tight dialogue and Balzac-like use of 18th-century social detail (such as the Leipziger Lerchen lark pies, baked with eggs and herbs and “only [the birds’] stomachs removed” which the Bach family has delivered in the frenzy of rehearsal week), Runcie creates an almost unbearably moving, life-affirming coming-of-age novel. The story is told by the narrator, Stefan Silbermann, the young son of a Freiberg organ maker who is sent to the harsh choir school at St Thomas’s by his father after losing his mother. He is taught by Bach and then taken into his household.

It opens with a melancholy prologue after Stefan, now aged 37, hears of the news of Bach’s death, some 23 years after the Passion was first performed, having long since moved back to his family town where he is unmarried and has taken over his family organ business. On hearing of his former music master’s death, he sets off for Leipzig to attend the funeral and we join him on his Leipzig Revisited journey back in time.

Almost from the prologue, the theme of family grief and how music – and giving one’s talents and energies to the service of God – can redeem the wounds of loss, spill out as central themes. Bach himself was an orphan and the 2020 loss of Runcie’s own wife (the director, producer and singer Marilyn Imrie) infuses his imagination. His next book, out in November, called Tell Me Good Things, is billed as a “love letter” to her memory in an effort to share what Dr Johnson called “moral instruction in the art of bearing calamities”.

This theme hangs over The Great Passion. Runcie makes Bach’s music become a metaphor for both the divine gift and struggle of life itself. Silbermann sings the treble part at the inaugural performance. As he recalls when looking back over 20 years later, “what the Passion did was to make us feel that it belonged to all of us here, here in Leipzig, for the first time… It had become our story.”

The theme of betrayal runs through the novel. Young Silbermann is treated badly at the Thomasschule; he is bullied by other boys, notably by a rival young tenor called Stolle, the son of a wealthy musician. His ivory-handled pocket knife is stolen and he is framed for the theft of a schoolmaster’s pocket watch. He is caned by the Lutheran rector (in a scene straight out of Tom Brown’s School Days), ends up running away, and then develops a pre-pubescent crush on Bach’s daughter Catharina, who gives him a glimpse of earthly heaven after a summer swim in a local river.

He kisses her, and they chase wild butterflies together (she kills them, seeing as much beauty in their pressed dead wings as in their short lives), but his feelings for Catharina go nowhere, not least after her father employs the services of a dandy librettist-poet tutor called Christian Friedrich Henrici. He was the librettist for many of Bach’s cantatas as well as for much of the St Matthew Passion. He uses the nom de plume Picander, and when he starts writing poems for Catharina, it drives young Silbermann mad with envy.

Picander, like others in Runcie’s cast, such as Bach’s rival composer Georg Telemann, were real historical figures and are drawn with an acute eye (although Telemann’s wife’s gambling debts are glossed over). The novel is like a room of mirrors: so many scenes from Silbermann’s own story reflect Christ’s journey during Passion Week. False accusations by the school pack, punishment for no crime, and the public execution of a prisoner while his mother stands by the scaffold all turn out to be literary metaphors for larger themes that are tackled by Bach himself in the Passion. These include life, fiction, language, music, grief, love, forgiveness, death and perhaps, most of all, a Lutheran concept of God’s grace and the “truth” of Scripture being more important than any loyalty to the pope in Rome.

Silbermann is reminded that Luther himself preached at the Thomaskirche (St Thomas’ Church) and that Catholics had made a “stinking midden out of God’s Church”. No papist indulgences or Vatican frippery.

“The congregation needed to guard itself against worldly vanity and the pope’s basilica in Rome… run by belching priests who invoked the saints and their own devices and desires rather than teach the promises of the risen Lord.”

The book itself is not anti-Catholic, as it is not about religious politics but about the journey of two creative musical souls: Silbermann and Bach himself at the height of his powers and in the depths of sorrow. It is worth remembering that Runcie’s ecumenically leaning father, Robert – who was Archbishop of Canterbury between 1979 and 1991 – hoped that Anglicans and Catholics would be reunited by 2000, and famously knelt beside Pope John Paul II in prayer at Canterbury Cathedral in 1982.

This is a philosophical novel that is not afraid to ask difficult theological questions about God’s justice and mercy, not the least when Bach’s daughter dies. What loving God can do such a thing? In grief, Bach is reminded at her funeral of the Christian paradox that “life is, in fact, death, and death is life, eternal life, after the sacrifices and promises of Christ.”

The narrative voice has echoes of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, whose young narrator has lost his father and tries out “spells” to tell the future, and the what-might-have-been love story of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, when a former butler and housekeeper meet each other again after many years, only to realise their chance of happiness has passed them by. Stefan has a similar fate.

The Great Passion is a deep fictional meditation on the same themes – prayer, pride, sin, grief, sorrow, pain, redemption, salvation – that make Bach’s sacred oratorio one of the greatest works of religious music. Runcie does justice to his ambitious theme and pulls off a mini-masterpiece of his own.

The post Bach’s divine gift brought to life appeared first on Catholic Herald.