By Nigel Guthrie, Priest Vicar
I’ve just finished reading ‘The Great Passion’ by James Runcie (pub. Bloomsbury 2022) and can recommend it. Runcie is best known as an author for his ‘Granchester Mysteries’ series. I remember his father, Robert, who was Bishop of St Albans, my home diocese, before he became Archbishop of Canterbury.
This well researched and moving novel tells the story behind the composition of J S Bach’s St Matthew Passion from the point of view of one of his choristers, Stefan Silberman. Silberman is the son of the well-known organ builder of Bach’s time who, after the death of his mother, is sent to be a chorister at Leipzig. He is bullied at the school there and then looked after for a while in Bach’s own home, under the care of Bach’s second wife Anna Magdalena. He grows to be immensely appreciative of the care, nurture, companionship and musical challenge given by the Bachs.
Johann Sebastian is portrayed sympathetically, but not with too much reverence, as a devout, hard-working musician who is devoted to God, his art and his family. He produced his first great setting of the Passion, according to St John, in 1724, his first year as Cantor at Leipzig. Then three years later came the larger scale Passion according to St Matthew. It is scored for two choirs and two orchestras and is nearly three hours long, which is why it is performed less. When we consider that there would have been a lengthy sermon (perhaps up to an hour) between the sections of the Passions we can appreciate that it would have been a heavy day for the Good Friday churchgoers of Leipzig!
Bach himself had lost both of parents by the age of ten and then was bereaved of his first wife, Maria Barbara, after thirteen years of marriage as well as losing many children in infancy from both marriages. Runcie imagines how the losses experienced by the Cantor himself, and those around him, added emotional weight to the spiritual depth of the passion story. He shows how the Passion gathers up the sorrows and losses of the whole community and sees them being held by Jesus on the cross, in the intense personal spirituality of Lutheranism at that time. And, finally the whole community is taken up in the offering of the Passion on Good Friday. The farewell which the chorus bids to Jesus (at the end of both Passion settings) was part of their own preparation to say farewell to this world.
As life expectancy has improved and as many of us get to middle age before experiencing major losses, the immediacy of preparing for death seems less urgent than in some past ages. But the Passion reminds us that it is something we must all do as part of our Christian journey.
We are so fortunate that our Cathedral Choir will be performing the (more manageable, if less epic!) St John Passion on Palm Sunday again this year. I am very sorry that I will miss it as Tina and I are giving a recital at a church in Somerset at the same time. But I hope that many of you will be able to enter into the Passion, through that performance, walk with Jesus in his trials and sufferings, and experience the consolation which God’s presence brings through the incomparable music of the Leipzig Cantor.