The Great Passion: James Runcie

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But as an exploration of spirituality, musical inspiration, and coming of age, The Great Passion is remarkable. The portrait of Bach himself is masterly: quick-tempered but kind and deserving of the love that his family has for him, a love that continues likewise to mature in Stefan’s memory after the composer’s death. As I listened to the singers and read the music, I understood the challenges of performing the music, so eloquently described in the novel.

The Great Passion by James Runcie | Waterstones

After reading the novel, I listened to the St Matthew Passion on Youtube, following with the choral music score my husband used when he sang it in college. Runcie’s description of the familiar music being rehearsed and performed for the first time is extraordinary. 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? I was in the Choral Arts Society when they sang the Bach B Minor Mass on the stage of the Academy of Music with the Philadelphia Orchestra. When a tragedy strikes the Bach’s family, Stefan witnesses someone else’s grief and the solace of religion and music.This is a delightful novel, also one which reveals a Germany foreign or, I would think, unknown to most of us. But when the school's cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, takes notice of his new pupil's beautiful singing voice and draws him from the choir to be a soloist, Stefan's life is permanently changed. For perhaps we can only appreciate what it is to be alive by recognising what it means when that life is removed from us.

The Great Passion by James Runcie - Publishers Weekly The Great Passion by James Runcie - Publishers Weekly

There was food scarcity, witch-burning and horrendous, torturous executions encouraging mob violence, and there was a reactive, overarching belief that life was suffering, but somehow a reward in heaven would recompense this. The Great Passion' is a tribute to Bach, clad in the touching story of a grieving, bullied boy, who finds refuge in the composer's home.Suddenly he changes from the bewigged figure of legend to a man in his forties, as I am now, tired after a long day's work.

The Great Passion: : James Runcie: Bloomsbury Publishing

In 1750, Stefan, now in his late thirties, learns of the death of the Cantor, which leads him to reminisce about the year he spent as a student of the St Thomas Church in his early teens. Despite Stefan’s awestruck respect for his mentor, we are still shown Sebastian’s very human characteristics. 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.The other, to be unfeeling enough to send his son to St Thomas’s choir school in Leipzig immediately after the boy’s mother dies. James Robert Runcie is a British novelist, documentary filmmaker, television producer and playwright. Thirteen-year-old Stefan Silbermann’s mother has recently died, and his father decides to send him to boarding school in Leipzig. The protagonist is a young musician, Stefan Silbermann, who is studying under the Cantor (aka Bach).

The Great Passion by James Runcie | Waterstones The Great Passion by James Runcie | Waterstones

A shy red-headed boy, bullied and unhappy, he runs away, the school being as harsh and vicious as any we are familiar with in a Dickens novel. I assume I'm like many people in thinking of Bach primarily as a composer in the abstract, a man who produced music and about whom I know little else.Despite his father's insistence that he try not to think of his mother too much, Stefan is haunted by her absence, and, to make matters worse, he's bullied by his new classmates. When Jesus told his followers that one of them was going to betray him, the response, Lord, is it I? BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The Great Passion shows—without a trace of glibness—how timeless art grows out of 'fragile, flawed and human' lives shadowed by fear, guilt and grief.