Book Review: The Great Passion
The Great Passion by James Runcie (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022)
The Great Passion of this book’s title, as you might have guessed from the image above, has more to do with music than with romance. To be specific, it’s Bach’s immortal St. Matthew Passion, written in 1727. In this elegaic new novel, we see the period leading up to the writing, and the writing itself, through the eyes of young choirboy and organist Stefan Silbermann.
Having lost his beloved mother, been sent away to school, and become the target of vicious bullies, 13-year-old Stefan is in a bad way, until the school cantor and his family take pity on him and welcome him into their circle. The cantor, of course, is Johann Sebastian Bach himself. And being in his circle means being put to work, helping to prepare and perform new compositions under a rigorous taskmaster.
But it also means being surrounded by the warmth of a family again. And both new relationships and new music have a part to play in Stefan’s gradual healing. He finds a motherly presence in Anna Magdalena Bach, the composer’s second wife, and a first love in Catharina, the family’s oldest daughter.
Nearly everyone around Stefan has known grief like his own, or experiences it during the course of the story. The Cantor himself (as Stefan generally refers to him) has lost his first wife and more than one child. He pushes through pain, and rallies others to push through it, by concentrating fiercely on faith and music, which for him are fundamentally intertwined.
Runcie has such a knack for writing about Bach’s music that one feels he must have been there to hear Bach play it. And he immerses readers in the world of 18th-century Leipzig, with all its excitements, triumphs, privations, and restrictions. It’s a world that’s austere and yet saturated with meaning, with wonder, even with joy, despite the terrible losses suffered by so many of the characters.
Much of this is due to the sheer stubbornness of Bach, as he drives everyone around him up to and beyond their breaking point in the service of God and of music. It doesn’t sound therapeutic, I know. And yet, for all its faults, his approach does something to help those around him transcend their griefs, transcend their very selves, and become new. As Stefan looks back on the experience of singing a solo in the Passion, he recounts:
I remembered my mother and my grief and it seemed that all the suffering of the world was now being taken up in this music and lifted on to Christ’s shoulders; and that, after this, I would feel exhausted but inspired, cleansed of sin and grief, purified, elevated and released from pain. … I felt I was giving away all the love in the world. It was contained within me and I had to let my voice pour it out.
I admit I was a little amused by the extreme chattiness of nearly all the characters, who tended to talk to each other in paragraphs. Bach’s family members, on occasion, accuse him of constantly sermonizing, but he’s not the only one who does it. I’m always complaining about fictional characters who go around making speeches instead of having normal conversations, so you’d think it would have annoyed me. But darned if Runcie didn’t make it work, somehow. It’s my first time reading him (though I understand he’s quite prolific, having written the Grantchester mysteries among other things), but he appears to be one of those rare writers who’s good enough to get away with breaking a few rules.
(But for all you aspiring novelists out there, do NOT try this at home.)
I read the first part of The Great Passion thinking that I had discovered a nice summer read for all of us fans of historical fiction. I finished it realizing that I had found something much deeper than that.
Book Links:
The Great Passion on Amazon
The Great Passion on Bookshop
Other Links:
I have a short piece in the new book Learning the Good Life, edited by Jessica Hooten Wilson and Jacob Stratman, introducing readers to Dorothy L. Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
I also have a new piece at the Plough website, “Would Jesus Shame Single Christian Women?”