16. The Great Passion

The Great Passion. James Runcie. 2022. [March] 272 pages. [Source: Library]

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. 

Set in Leipzig, Germany, in 1727/28, The Great Passion is a historical novel about Johann Sebastian Bach's writing of St. Matthew's Passion. The protagonist is a young musician, Stefan Silbermann, who is studying under the Cantor (aka Bach). The book chronicles his time at school--for better or worse. He's mourning the loss of his mother and struggling to make friends with his classmates. But his time with Bach and his family help him make peace and find his voice.

I love, love, love, LOVE this novel. I love it because it is beautifully written. It is such an incredible read. Amazing narrative style. I do recommend listening to Bach's St. Matthew's passion--either in German or English. You can find it easily online to stream. (Several different recordings are found on Spotify.)

Quotes:

After everyone returned to work, I found that I could not concentrate. You assemble an instrument, I thought, just as you put together a life: the blocks of wood in the workshop were like fragments of memory; the sounding board echoed the conversations I had had in the past. I was like an old musician I had once seen sitting at a keyboard without touching it, trying to remember what he had once performed but unable to play any longer, his fingers arthritic, his memory failing.

Perhaps every death is a reminder of the first one we witness.

You will miss your mother. You might even miss me, if you can believe such a thing. But keep in mind that this is all for the best. We must be grateful for each blessing God gives us rather than nurse every injustice. Unhappiness is a form of ingratitude.

When you are older you will learn to expect disaster, but you don’t know much about sorrow when you are a child. If you did, then there would be no such thing as childhood. I lost my first wife and thought I would never recover, but life continues, often more quickly than we expect it to, and we learn to adjust to suffering. Still, I imagine there are times when you must feel forlorn. Do you know the piece Froberger wrote, Méditation sur ma mort future? The dance of life becomes the dance of death. You can practise a partita, or perform a prelude and fugue, but sometimes it’s good to study a lament.

I sometimes wonder how one’s life might sound in music.

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.

Neither was I, Monsieur Silbermann. My mother died when I was nine. I still think about her. It’s not a sin to mourn, but we cannot dwell on the past. Otherwise we ruin our future.’
‘Things were better for me when she was alive.’
‘Then we have to think of something else, or we go mad. But perhaps you are not prepared. And maybe that is why you are here, at this school? To make you ready to offer the world something other than your own sadness. We cannot be defined by our grief, otherwise it’s the only thing anyone will say about us. Do you understand that yet?'

I have always found it strange how so few facts define a life.

So, he expects you to get on with it. What do you make of the organ?’
‘I think—’
‘It’s terrible, isn’t it? We could do with a new one. The one at the university church is far superior. Have you heard it? I must show you. Perhaps I can benefit from your expertise?’
‘You will know far more than I do.’
‘But you have grown up with the organ, Monsieur Silbermann. It is in your blood. What is it your family say?’
‘There’s blood and skin in all our instruments.’
‘Exactly that. We give our lives to our music. There can be no half-measures. Remember that!’

'How do you get on with the Cantor?’ he asked.
‘It is hard to tell.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. He speaks in music. Always remember that about musicians. German is not their first language. Music is. That’s why it’s sometimes difficult to understand what we’re saying.’
‘I can follow him perfectly well,’ I said. ‘I only worry that I am not quick enough. He treats us as if we are professional musicians already.’
‘It’s only right that he has his standards. He and his wife were at court before. Goodness knows why they would ever want to come here, Monsieur Silbermann. It must be for the children. They get a proper education in Leipzig and he can get them into the university for free.’

I’ll tell you a secret, Monsieur Silbermann. Everyone, no matter who they are in life, feels alone. We are on our own and we are all afraid.’
‘You think that’s true?’
‘I know it is. We just have to accept it and live through it.’

Now that I am older, I notice that people my age often look back to times of cruelty and betrayal, remembering grudges, nursing grievances and thinking of the opportunities they missed: all the disappointments of their unlived life and the thoughts of what might have been. But perhaps it’s healthier to remember all the kindness. It gives us a far greater chance of happiness.

If a house has enough love, there is always space. It’s only when there’s no love that there’s no room.’

We cannot understand light without darkness, joy without pain, peace without war, love without hatred, beauty without ugliness or youth without age. We only know the best by experiencing the worst. We understand life because of death. We can only be reborn once we die.

You must love the Lord as boldly as you can,’ he told her. ‘Then you will have no fear. Remember Luther. “The smaller the love the greater the fear.”

I even wondered if it was too much to bear, to keep coming back to the loss, even in music, but one thing the Cantor taught me was that, as well as practising new pieces, I could apply our recent experience and understanding to the preludes and chorales I had played in the past. They were old acquaintances, he told me, friends who would never disappoint. I could revisit them and see them in the light of any greater maturity or wisdom I had acquired, and then add different interpretations and variations.

Our daily task is to remember that all of life is learning.

When we think of the behaviour of other people,’ he began, ‘we have to remember that almost everyone is frightened of something. It might be a confrontation that we are worried about, a piece of work, a continuing illness or the death of a friend, but we should keep in mind that if nothing lasts in this world then the very thing that we dread the most cannot last either. All things must pass. The moment we have feared approaches. It takes place. Then it becomes the past: and only a memory. So, rather than dreading the moment, perhaps we should look forward to the memory of it instead? We must learn to think beyond our fears. Perhaps you are too young to contemplate this, but one day, I promise, you will understand.’

We have to remember that the reverse is true. We are living as long as we are dying. We should not continue in dread. No one can thrive in the shadows.

Perhaps some people are more at home when they play music than they are when they live their life.

Apart from the context. When I go to church, there is such a sense of doom. Where is the joy of Christ’s redemption and the promise of eternal paradise?’
‘In my music!’
‘But do we hear it often enough? It may be announced with trumpets, but how can that joy be sustained? How can our time on earth be enjoyed as well as suffered? We have to attack it, celebrate it, give people something to aim for. We can’t just wear black and wait for death. Look at your rector. What kind of life is his?’
The Cantor did not answer the question directly but smiled, rather sadly, and answered, ‘Show me what you have in mind.’

If the joy provided by the birth of our Lord is infinite, then so must be the variations, Monsieur Silbermann! There is so much pain and misery in the world that people forget the joy: the sure and certain hope that our sorrows will one day end. Always remember that this is so much greater than the anxieties we face on earth!’

He struck out a few phrases on his own to show me what he meant. ‘It will be Lent soon enough, and we will be lost in the winds of winter; but Advent lasts just as long in the year, and its message is eternally optimistic.

The Virgin Mary feels the child inside her kick with life and her spirit lifts, more than she ever thought possible, more than anyone who has ever rejoiced before, and so the music kicks with life at the same time. You need to perform with your face shining. Your body must feel as light as air and all your troubles have ceased. Everything is redeemed, Monsieur Silbermann. Everything. So, you have to sing as if you can breathe without stopping to take in any air at all, because this is what eternal life will be like. We will breathe forever. Mary gives birth to a life without end. It’s the most astonishing thing, don’t you think?’

Singing, she insisted, was our way of escaping the world and rising above it, letting the words float on the air before coming back down to rest. The Magnificat had to persuade people to look at their lives entirely differently after it had been sung, just as the Annunciation was to change the Virgin Mary’s life, together with that of all mankind, forever.

Words and music can be dangerous in the wrong hands, Picander. People can be persuaded to think all manner of things. We must act responsibly.’ It wasn’t clear whether the Cantor was trying to tell Picander something or not, but ‘the great poet’ was not listening. I think he preferred to use the time other people spent talking to prepare what he was going to say next rather than take in what they were telling him.

Or you yourself might answer, “Yes, my hair may be gold as a guilder, but people always know where I am in a crowd.” We must be ready, Monsieur Silbermann. The sombre preachers are always telling us that we must prepare ourselves for death, but isn’t it equally important, nay, even more vital, to equip ourselves for life?’ He looked at me, waiting for a reply, but I knew this to be a rhetorical question. As far as he was concerned, Picander had had the last word and now considered himself free to go on his way.

But we must find a way, a language to describe it and give people comfort,’ Picander suggested. ‘Music can be a form of acknowledgement, of recognition: an acceptance of our helplessness … ’
‘Yes, yes … ’
‘ … and the beginning of a shared understanding?’
They began to imagine what it would be like if Stolle sang the funeral piece himself. The cantata would have to be from his point of view, they thought, or rather from a point of view they would have liked their friend to take in order to aid his recovery. Picander remembered the story of Simeon, from the Gospel According to St Luke. He was the old man of whom it had been prophesied that he would not die before he had seen the Messiah. And so, when he finally caught sight of Christ on the Feast of the Purification, he knew, at last, that he could end his life, and that he could face it with confidence in the hope of heaven, and that death had lost its terror.

But Anna Magdalena disagreed. Every death was different, she said. Grief was specific and precise. There was no general understanding of sorrow or loss, and anything they might say to Stolle, the words they used, the songs they sang, the advice they gave, could not take away how swiftly and painfully his wife had departed this life.

We concentrate on what the story means at the same time as telling it. We develop the themes of sacrifice, sorrow and loss, extracting all the pain and all the love so that, when it comes to the end, the congregation understands that there is nothing left to give. Nothing more can be said or sung.’
The Cantor stood by the fire as the wood took. ‘A work that is an act of faith in itself?’
‘We have to make them think that their lives depend on how well they listen. We have to present the hardest and most bitter sorrow anyone has ever known.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘We set the story in the present. What would the people of Leipzig say if Christ came to us today, and they saw him now, in the town square, or outside the city walls? Would they believe him? Would they follow him? Or would they still crucify him as they have just killed that prisoner we saw beheaded? What happened there was far more violent and prolonged than anything anyone had been expecting. The crowd was volatile, impatient and quick to condemn. Their inhumanity was frightening.

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.’
The Cantor let the idea take hold. ‘An opening exordium. A funeral tombeau. Write this down, Monsieur Silbermann. Two choirs. The Old and New Testament.’
‘The Daughters of Zion from the Song of Songs meet the new Christian believers,’ said Picander. ‘We use the chorus in the same way the Greeks did. They can choose to take part, or they can step aside. They act and they commentate. They express their pity, their anger, their fear and their sorrow.’

We include dialogue, soliloquy and prayer: Peter’s betrayal, and Mary at the foot of the cross, just like the prisoner’s mother at the execution. And the congregation become part of the story. They cannot escape their responsibility. They are made to think about their guilt and the nature of penitence and redemption. They have to know what it is to lose everything they hold dear.’
‘Monsieur Silbermann, are you taking this down?’ the Cantor asked. ‘We start with an invitation to mourn, to share in the drama rather than simply listen to it. We help the congregation understand the inevitability of loss and sorrow. Other people raise their questions in books and sermons. We answer them in music.’

We must remember Luther’s teaching: we are all beggars before the Lord.’
Picander suggested we took chapters twenty-six and twenty-seven of St Matthew’s Gospel as our text and structure the Passion around six main scenes to be performed on either side of the Good Friday sermon. Part One would concentrate on Christ’s anointing at Bethany, the Last Supper, and his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Part Two would tell the story of the trial, crucifixion and, finally, Jesus’s death and burial.

We sum up a life. We tell its story and we pay tribute. With Christ as our subject the music has to be more glorious than any written for a lord or a prince. For he is the ultimate prince, the Prince of Peace.’
‘And yet we murdered him,’ said Picander. ‘That is the tale we must tell.’

You have to understand, each and every one of you, how important it is: the committing of sin. We’re all guilty. Schuld. And Christ’s death is our redemption. You have to believe that nothing matters as much as this. The music has to be full of pain and love. You have to sing as if your own salvation depends on this very chorale. Again … ’

You must understand the drama. If you don’t live within it, if you don’t keep it in your heart and understand that this is about your life and your death and the possibility that all your hopes will end on this very day, then we cannot continue. You have to work hard and concentrate on every moment.

I know it’s challenging. Some people complain that Sebastian writes like a keyboard player. They say he forgets that you don’t have to breathe when you play an instrument, but they are wrong. At one point in this aria we have nineteen bars of singing and there’s only a quaver’s rest; but there is a pause, and it’s here that he stops and gathers us to the point of what he is saying to make it even more emphatic. The moment of recuperation gives you room to take in enough air to hit the phrase aus Liebe once again and make it even more beautiful and filled with longing. “For love. My saviour will die out of love.” This is the meaning of the Passion and you are the person to tell us, Monsieur Silbermann. No wonder you need to take a deep breath before you do so. A big breath before big news. Do you understand? Your breathing becomes part of the meaning. That’s what makes it exciting. It’s so much more than a practical matter. Let me show you.’

I know that it is hard for all of you,’ the Cantor replied, ‘but if I make the music easy then we are already defeated. Our sorrows will have conquered us. We must let people know that we are always more than our suffering. Remember the words of the prophet Isaiah. “He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to comfort all who mourn, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes.” That is what we are offering those who come to hear the Passion.

Remember the doubts you have had before your performances in the past and how you came through them; how happy you were with what you had accomplished, how glad you were when it was over and how much you looked forward to singing again? This is what we do. We face our terrors and we hope to triumph. Our faith will protect us. Our talent will see us through. “Beauty instead of ashes”.’

It’s hard when you have to keep living in this one.’ Gleditsch checked that his reed was aligned and let his fingers float up and down the keys, ready to warm up his oboe. Before he started playing he added one more thought. ‘I wonder, perhaps, if silence is a kind of home. We have it before we are born and after we have died. It is there before the music begins and after it has ended. We should always recognise its power before we interrupt it.’

The story was the one we all knew. But what the Passion did was to make us feel that it belonged to all of us, here in Leipzig, for the first time. It was not a theological lecture, or a piece of improving rhetoric, or even an account of an event in the history of Palestine. It had become our story. It was happening now, during this performance, in the present tense, and I could see, on the faces of the congregation below, that they recognised they could do nothing more important than listen because they had become part of it all.

When Jesus told his followers that one of them was going to betray him, the response, Lord, is it I?, came eleven times, one for each of the disciples apart from Judas. This was followed by a silence. And in this quiet came the terrible realisation that this wasn’t a question that only the disciples could ask. We had to ask it too: Lord, is it I? We were all, equally, responsible.

We were all guilty. First Judas betrayed Christ. Then Peter. Now it was our turn. We were all inadequate. We were all broken. And in that silence, we had to recognise the true horror of what had happened and acknowledge that we were complicit in the drama, simply by being the frail and flawed human beings that we are.

I looked down at the congregation below and tried to imagine each and every one of their lives: the magistrate who worried that he was losing his mind; the blind man who spouted nonsense that rhymed; the society lady with the expensive hat; the alcoholic wondering how long the service was going to last and when he could buy his next beer; the boy who had been David Stolle’s last victim of bullying and whose voice had just broken; the child who had become an orphan last month and was not sure if anyone was going to take him in or where he was going to live.

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible