WHAT might it have been like to sing at the first performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion? Sometimes, a work of art emerges from asking a question that no one else has thought to ask. James Runcie’s novel is an extraordinary work of imagination.
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.
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.
Almost by accident, Bach, with the help of the librettist Picander, begins to compose a setting of the Passion based on Matthew 27 and 28. It would be unlike anything heard before: a musical version of the story which would compel congregations to engage with the death of Christ.
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.
After the first performance, everything has changed, and yet nothing has changed. Silberman returns home. The love of his life turns him down. Bach dies. No one seems permanently transfigured by the experience. And yet the Lutheran paradox of grace overwhelming sin is exemplified by the narrative, and, in its mysterious way, the Passion effects what it proclaims. Brilliant Holy Week reading.
The Revd Angela Tilby is a Canon Emeritus of Christ Church, Oxford.
The Great Passion
James Runcie
Bloomsbury £16.99
(978-1-4088-8551-2)
Church Times Bookshop £14.99