James Runcie on the beauty, sorrow and genius of Johann Sebastian Bach
The British novelist spoke with Eleanor Wachtel about his book, The Great Passion
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
The German composer Johann Sebastian Bach is regarded as one of the greatest of all time and his sacred oratorio, the St. Matthew Passion, a masterpiece.
But when Bach arrived in Leipzig, Germany — where he wrote the St. Matthew Passion in 1727 — he was best known as an organist, not a composer. He was the head of music at a boy's choir school in Leipzig, where he lived with his second wife, Anna Magdalena, and many children from his two marriages.
It's in this mix of demanding work and a lively household that James Runcie situates his novel, The Great Passion. Narrated by a fictional 13-year-old student, it imagines Bach over the course of a year as an ambitious, passionate musician and father, navigating grief and professional rivalries — through faith, love and the transcendence of music.
Runcie is also the author of the Grantchester Mysteries, which are the inspiration for the popular TV drama Grantchester. The central character — an Anglican priest turned amateur sleuth — was partly inspired by his father, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.
In honour of Bach's music that's emblematic of Easter, Writers & Company revisits Eleanor Wachtel's 2022 interview with Runcie about The Great Passion.
A constant presence
"Bach is not only the musical foundation to my life, but the spiritual foundation, the sacred foundation, all that's good about life. And I think there's something endlessly reassuring about his music. It is both able to convey some kind of mathematical purity but also deep passion.
"I don't know how he does it. My work is an investigation into how he somehow manages to be so rational and yet so emotional at the same time.
Bach was the very foundation of our family, both religiously and musically.
"It's almost as if his music was always with me because my mother was a piano teacher. She would be playing Bach before I could speak.
"My mother would play The Well-Tempered Clavier as a way of sort of limbering up most mornings. My father was a priest, and so Bach's music would be sung. My mother sang in the Bach choir — my sister still does. Obviously there's Mozart and Beethoven — and many, many other composers — but Bach was the very foundation of our family, both religiously and musically."
Like father, like son
"Growing up in a vicarage was quite weird, I have to say, but of course I didn't think it was weird. We lived in a little village, just a few hundred people, outside Oxford. Death came to the door. To me it became normal to have people's emotions very displayed in quite a raw way.
"It was a world where birth, love, death, the passage of time and the rituals of everyday life were very observed and very intense. There was quite a lot of music, love and death.
"There were expectations to behave well, yes, of course. Generally, clergy children get into terrible trouble because they either rebel very badly and go totally off the rails — or they're cowed and try to live up to their father's reputation. There's pressure to be good and, to use my father's phrase, 'not let the side down.' So you have to be as good as you can be. And there are moments when you think, 'Actually, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to rebel here.'
Clergy children get into terrible trouble because they either rebel very badly and go totally off the rails — or they're cowed and try to live up to their father's reputation.
"It makes you competitive because you see your father being well-loved and being a showman. There's a very thin line between the theatre and the clergy. There's a theatricality to preaching, making a speech, dressing up in costumes.
"So in a way, showbiz, which I laughably think I'm part of, is the secular version of being a priest, in the sense that you want to be at your best and bring out the best in other people."
A family orchestra
"For Bach, the secret to domestic harmony was musical harmony. He thought that everyone should play together. He wrote a famous letter about how he's got enough children to form both an instrumental and a vocal ensemble from his own family. As a father, we know he was dedicated; he was demanding and affectionate.
My way of imagining him is as this family man in a house in which it's very hard to be alone — apart from when you were in your study composing music.
"He wrote enormous recommendations for his children and we know that he was quite rivalrous with his most brilliant musical son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who went on to work with Frederick the Great.
"My way of imagining Bach is as this family man in a house in which it's very hard to be alone — apart from when you were in your study composing music."
Inspired by the clergy
"I wanted to do a series about post-war Britain with some kind of moral force behind it. I had the idea of a clergyman, rather than, let's say, a lawyer as in Rumpole of the Bailey, or a doctor as in Dr. Finlay's Casebook. So I created a character, Sydney Chambers, who is and is not my father.
"The 'is not' is that he's not a detective, and the 'is not' is also that he's partly me. He's actually quite a lot like me. He's married to a German woman who is not entirely unlike my wife. And they have a daughter who's not unlike my youngest daughter.
"In The Road to Grantchester, I wanted to think about the route to faith and how somebody is able to believe in the middle of war — in the middle of the Second World War.
"My grandfather on my mother's side stood up in the First World War and said, 'There is no God. There cannot be God to allow this.' Whereas my father [in the Second World War] thought, 'How can life be better than this? How can there be redemption? How can there be some kind of hope? How can we prevent this ever happening again?'"
Lasting legacy
"Bach seemed to belong to another era and it required a different sensibility — or for time to pass. Now people love Bach's music partly because it is so ordered and so beautiful. I sometimes think the more disordered our lives become, the more we long for the order of Bach. We long for a sense of structure, a sense of reassurance.
"It's as if his music has been created before we were born and will live on after we've died. There's a sort of feeling of eternity. There's a feeling it could go on forever. He's a great believer in variation — you have a theme and you vary it and you play upon it.
People love Bach's music partly because it is so ordered and so beautiful. I sometimes think the more disordered our lives become, the more we long for the order of Bach.
"It seems to be this inexhaustible variety, which is a simile for life itself — that you may live your life, but you can have endless variations upon it."
James Runcie's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
