Lucy Winkett: Tell us about The Great Passion [Books, 8 April]. What’s the kind of landscape that the book is in?
James Runcie: The landscape is Leipzig 1726 to 1727. One year. Bach is an enormous subject; and the St Matthew Passion is an enormous piece of music, arguably his greatest work.
I’ve been obsessed with Bach all my life, but trying to get it into a novel form was quite challenging. I had three goes at it, one told from the point of view of his wife, one told from the point of view of five different people. And, in the end, I thought, I can’t really do that. I have to tell it from something I’m a bit closer to — which is an 11-year-old boy who sings in the choir.
So, it starts with the idea: what was it like to sing Bach’s music for the first time? What’s it like to make a kind of fly-on-the-wall documentary in Leipzig? Essentially, the key drama is the 40 days of Lent as we build up to a first night.
LW: What is it about Bach that for you makes him such an extraordinary composer?
JR: Well, that is the key thing I’ve been wrestling with: why he has a unique combination of a kind of mathematical purity, yet lyrical grace. How can he be both serious and playful, simultaneously? How can he move from being something that might seem purely technical, to something extremely emotional? I don’t quite understand how he does it. Why is his music the music of such consolation in times of grief? For me, that is the nub of it. And I think, maybe, it’s because the more disordered our lives are, the more we turn to the order of Bach.
LW: And there’s a contradiction, perhaps, in the sense that Bach was a great improviser, and was really churning out these cantatas every Sunday in Leipzig, wasn’t he? He was really improvising, but, to our ears, it sounds complete. It sounds like it’s telling you something from the beginning to the end. Is that something that you hear as well?
JR: I like to think it is from the beginning to the end. But it’s also from before the beginning to after the end: it’s as if it’s always existed. And what he does is, he uses existing hymn tunes, existing melodies, and then he plays upon them, and improvises around them, as if he’s kind of squeezing all the juice out of a tune.
LW: What was the process that took you back to that rehearsal room [in Leipzig]?
JR: There are two key processes of research. One is what you might call academic research, though I’m not an academic. The Bach Reader is interesting, because it’s this book of primary texts or primary sources. And it’s not what you think it’s going to be, because they’re generally references for his pupils and complaints about not being paid enough, and lots of moaning about money, which all musicians, and particularly writers, do. So you get an idea of that.
And we know, through following the religious calendar, exactly what he was writing each week, because it is writing to a set text at a set time on a set day.
We know his process, and also the school timetable survives — the school rules survive. So, it’s quite straightforward to think about what kind of routine he lived by, what food he ate, what music you listen to, what texts he read.
What we don’t really know is what’s going on in his head. One of the first things I did was to talk to musicians and sit in on rehearsals, and this was absolutely crucial, to see the passages they found difficult.
I [wanted] to think of him as a working musician as well as a man of faith. I want to think about this man — not as pious, 62-year-old legendary musician, but a man becoming Bach. What was he like as a young, ambitious man? There are no portraits of him at 38.
And then I went to see [the violinist Adrian Chandler] conducting a dress rehearsal, on a Friday morning, when the first performance was that night. And it was very, very tense. And some of the musicians were late: a violinist and a cello player. He was very cross and said: “You know, you’re letting the side down for everybody, and this is appalling.” I could see both the temper and the fear in his eyes: the fear that this performance was going to be terrible.
Church TimesJames Runcie and Lucy Winkett in conversation last week
I certainly know the feeling [before an opening night] when you think this is going to be a complete catastrophe. Anyway, he resumed rehearsals, and eight bars in he says: “Stop, stop, stop. There are three rules. One, watch me. Two, watch me. Three, watch me.”
And I thought, blimey, that’s what Bach might have been like — that is exactly what it’d be like, not this kind of dreamy person waiting for God’s inspiration to strike. He’s a working musician, and using what he’s got. This is not some spiritual exercise. This is really ferocious musical thought, and he has to try and find the absolutely best expression for everything he’s trying to do. And to not dilute it with incompetence.
LW: Music clearly runs through the whole of your writing in this novel. But what are the other themes that you’re wanting to explore?
JR: Generally, I write, from Grantchester onwards, about faith, love, and death, really, with the occasional jokes, but there are less jokes in this. It’s a novel about what really, when all is said and done, matters. What our lives mean, and how do we make each moment count?
I still can’t articulate this properly. But [it’s] this idea that, as we might rehearse a piece of music, we rehearse our lives, we practise our lives, we perform various roles in our lives, where, you know, we’re different professionally than we are at home. We’re different with some friends than we are with others.
Who are we really? What is our essential self? What do we really care about? What really matters? What are the steps we take in our lives? What are the barriers, the wrong choices we made? And so it becomes a series of decisions.
Obviously, in 1727, in Leipzig, there was a lot more religious confidence. I’m not sure that faith was faith: I think it was more of a fact. What does that certainty give you? I’m out of my depth here in this bit of conversation, because I’m not a theologian, but I’m interested in . . . how we’re all trying to do our best. And so it’s about, how can we be better people? And how can we extract as much meaning from the brief days we have — how can we make them as rich and meaningful and as sacred as possible?
LW: There was one part in the book when Catharina talks to Stephen and she says: “Be bold with your life.” Is there a kind of carpe diem, a sense that you’re trying to get across there, maybe? And does the Matthew Passion help with that?
JR: Well, I think there’s a kind of extraordinary immediacy to [the Matthew Passion]. There’s no slack there, no boring bits. It’s just, “Listen to this.” It’s all attack, and then it’s grace. And then it’s beauty. And then it stops. But it has a lyricism that continues. And it’s all, “This is really important. Listen to this.”
And I wanted to think about what that meant, and how that was achieved. I mean, obviously in daily life, that can be exhausting, because you do still have to go to Sainsbury’s. But, you know, in between going to Sainsbury’s, what is life about? I don’t want to live a life where you miss things. I want to live a life where I have a sort of concentrated, ferocious interrogation of what it means to be alive.
LW: I suppose one of the things that I feel about Bach’s music is that we’re addressed as participants, not observers.
JR: Completely, and I think sometimes it’s as if our lives depend on how well we listen to this music, because [then] we really understand the nature of suffering and redemption, and the utter, harrowing grief of death, and the utter possible joy of redemption.
LW: So are there times when we can’t or shouldn’t listen to it?
JR: I was with somebody last night who said, I don’t think I can face it this Easter. Frankly, I’m not sure I can. And, actually, you do have to ration it. I was at this event [recently] where they thought, we’ll have a bit of St Matthew Passion as background music as you come on stage. This is not background music! Really, it’s like the richest thing. You can’t have it all the time.
LW: This might be a good moment to talk about silence as well, James, because that’s quite a theme of the of the book. The narrator says he never heard such silence as after that first performance. And you talk a lot about music coming from silence and going to silence. What’s your reflection on that?
JR: This book has a blank page at the beginning, which is silence, and a blank page at the end, which is silence. Silence frames our lives. It’s like a frame around a painting. And the last word of the St Matthew Passion is, of course, “rest”. And that obviously happens in a religious service: it ends and begins in silence. And it’s almost as if people are afraid of silence, like when you go out to lunch with somebody, and there’s a bit of a silence when you should be talking, but maybe silence is all right.
LW: Do you think we are afraid because we’re somehow afraid of the great silence? That our voices will, at some point fall silent at death?
JR: When my mother was dying, she took five days to die in a hospital. And I was there, and I literally didn’t know what to say half the time. And it was all right to be silent. And it was interesting, because three priests came, and they had automatic language because they had a prayer book, and they could do the prayers, and they could go away.
And I had a rather unchristian thought, which is that it’s all right for you, you just come in and say a word, and off you go; some of us have to stay a bit longer and work out how to improvise. And I realised that we don’t have much of a constructed language around death. And that is problematic.
JILLIAN EDELSTEINJames Runcie
We live in a culture, I think, that is embarrassed by death, and embarrassed about talking about death — whereas, for Bach, death was completely constant. His sister Johanna died at one, his brother Johannes died at six, his mother died when he was nine, his father died when he was ten, his first wife died when he was 35. And 11 out of his 20 children died before he did. So, death was familiar and daily and constant. Obviously, I’m talking in massive generalisations here, but I feel that only by confronting the fact of death can we work out how to live.
LW: Perhaps one of the things that you’re suggesting is that Bach’s music is monumental enough to hold the grief that is seismic and overwhelms us as human beings when someone we love dies, or when we confront the reality of our own death.
JR: Well, I think the thing about the St Matthew Passion is it’s both monumental and intimate. You can have these enormous choruses, full of sorrow and all that enormous rage. And then the kind of bare simplicity of “Truly, this was the Son of God”; so it moves between the monumental and the intimate. And that’s the most extraordinary thing.
LW: This is quite a “fleshy” novel, in the sense that it is about the fear leading up to the performance. And then the music, somehow, is ethereal, but you don’t leave us up there. You’re very keen that we make that connection between actual, real human beings’ then producing something which seems utterly godly.
JR: The mix of the earthly with the sublime is vitally important. When you’re looking at the heavens, that you look back down to earth is really important to me — that you work in these between these two spheres. I don’t think faith should be something removed from life. I think, for me, it’s messy and complicated and fluctuating, and I don’t think it’s easy. And it needs to be worked out and practised, just like music needs to be practised.
LW: A lot of a lot of musicians who perform sacred music will say that music is their religion. So they don’t need, themselves, to have a confessional faith to be able to perform this media, or to draw other people into the faith that they themselves don’t profess. How would you react to that?
JR: That’s completely out of my childhood, because my mother was a music teacher, and she said, where there’s God, there’s music; and where there’s sacred music, there’s God. And the other thing is that she was an obsessive music teacher, talking about her pupils all the time. And I thought, ah, Bach might be like that.
And I know quite a few musicians, and they’re obsessive, and they have to be: there’s no hiding place, they’re very exposed. But musicians find discipline and beauty in music. Music and practice can be a form of prayer.
LW: Could you say something about how you think an atheist might react to this work? What might they lose from the music?
JR: Well, I know plenty of atheists who love it. Because atheists do experience death and sorrow. And they do need lyricism and beauty. I think you can get a lot out of it, even if you don’t have faith, because it has such an extraordinary understanding of suffering. I think that it’s always in movement, it’s always changing between the big and the small.
And the musical arrangements are so vivid and varied. It’s not operatic, but it has a sort of quality of opera. There is loads in it for everyone, because the harmonies and the dissonances are so strong, and you do feel you’ve gone through something at the end of it, whether you’re a Christian or not.
LW: Is there anything that we haven’t kind of talked about that you would want us to know about what you’re trying to explore in this in this novel?
JR: Well, it’s a very complicated thing. I don’t want to go into detail about this, but my wife died while I was writing this novel, and it was completely catastrophic. I’d virtually finished it. But then, of course, you want to rewrite it, or tinker in the light of the practical experience, because the theory of grief is so different from the experience of grief. And even if you know the loss of a parent, or both parents, [that’s] very different to the loss of a wife.
So, you then have to factor that in, and think, well, what does that mean, and how does it affect this novel? And how much do I put in and how much do I not? So that makes it very personal. It’s the same as research: you do all this research, but you mustn’t show it too much. You have all this grief, but you mustn’t show it too much, because it’s not about you, it’s for the reader. And, therefore, it’s not some kind of therapy that someone’s paying you to do. It’s supposed to be a novel [and] pleasurable to read.
This is very difficult, as it may sound extremely arrogant, but you’re trying to turn your grief into an art form, into something else. You’re trying to make it manageable. And maybe that’s what the St Matthew Passion does. And maybe that’s what Bach was doing. Part of the idea of writing is to understand and make sense of the world; you don’t know what you think until you write it down.
In the end, I am telling a story and trying to make sense of a piece of music and a man and a legend, and trying to work out how he did it. And, obviously, the art of fiction should be about transportation, it should be about transformation, it should be about going into another world that enriches our own.
And that’s what music does, most of all, far more than fiction does: it gives you an extra dimension to life. Really, it can be spiritual, it can just be purely musical, but it makes life worth living. That’s the point.
This is an edited version of a special Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature event for Passiontide. Watch the full interview here or below.
The Great Passion by James Runcie is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99 (CT Bookshop £14.99). 978-1-4088-8551-2.