Leipzig, Good Friday, 1729
Johann Sebastian Bach performed his St. Matthew Passion at the Thomaskirche today. A three-hour work for double choir and double orchestra. I sat in the back of the nave and did not move for the entire duration and when it ended I could not immediately stand.
I have heard much music. I have sat with Monteverdi in Venice. I was in Prague for Don Giovanni. But what happens in the Thomaskirche when Bach is conducting his own work is something for which I have not yet found the right category. It is not beautiful in the way that Raphael’s painting is beautiful. It is structural in a way that emotion usually is not, and yet it carries more emotional information than music that aims directly at feeling.
The counterpoint. Two complete musical worlds running simultaneously, answering each other, disagreeing, reconciling, neither ever fully subsumed by the other. I have been watching the world long enough to recognize when a formal structure is also a statement about how existence works. This is that.
I did not introduce myself afterward. Bach was surrounded by musicians and church officials and small children who appeared to be his. He is forty-four years old, grey-haired, built like a man who carries the weight of his own music in his body. He looked content in a way that very few people who produce work of this order look content. Usually the work costs them something visible. With Bach it costs something I cannot locate from the outside. I will come back. I have come back three times already.