The Great Passion by James Runcie review: how tragedy inspired Bach’s masterpiece
“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.
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 documen-taries, 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, every-thing happens in a single year, 1726-27, in which Bach’s three-year-old daughter dies.
Sudden death was all too common. Maybe the pandemic gave us a clue to what it was like to live with mortality on a scale familiar to the 18th century. Bach lost both his parents before he was 10, and then his first wife. He eventually fathered 20 children – and buried 10. But the death of this particular little girl seems to have distilled all his experience of loss. According to Runcie’s novel, he poured it into the St Matthew Passion and his sorrow for that child powers the Passion’s extraordinary blend of human tragedy and the divine consolations of faith.
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.
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 is Runcie’s starting point for the Bach who will bring the Man of Sorrows to musical life in the St Matthew Passion. We meet a warm -family man, whose response to a bereaved child is to comfort him by universalising grief and turning to religion to do it.
Stefan blossoms in the busy musical atmosphere of Bach’s home, with four teenagers by Bach’s first wife and three small children by his second. The keyboard is constantly at work, and the new wife, the motherly young soprano Anna Magdalena, mothers Stefan, too. But then the little girl, Anna Magdalena’s first child, dies. She seems to have caught the fever from Stefan and he is sent back to board at school. He feels devastated, expelled from Eden, but continues working with Bach and as he copies out parts and rehearses, he watches the St Matthew Passion emerge. Eventually, he sings soprano solos in its first performance. 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.
The Great Passion is published by Bloomsbury at ￡16.99. To order your copy for ￡14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop. Ruth Padel’s latest books are Beethoven Variations and Daughters of the Labyrinth
