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Tag Archives: faith

Music, Death, Grief: The Great Passion

23 Monday Jan 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1726, Anna Magdalena Bach, book review, Catharina Bach, coming-of-age story, death, eighteenth century, faith, Georg Philipp Telemann, grief, historical fiction, James Runcie, Johann Sebastian Bach, Leipzig, literary fiction, music

Review: The Great Passion, by James Runcie
Bloomsbury, 2022. 272 pp. $28

Bad enough that thirteen-year-old Stefan Silbermann’s mother has just died. His father, a well-known organ maker, insists that the boy spend a year at music school far from home, in Leipzig, as part of training in the family business.

The year is 1726, and eighteenth-century Leipzig seems a place where people take their Lutheranism neat, forever thinking about death, expecting to suffer, and—among the strictest believers—ready to condemn others for vivacity. Stefan’s school, run by clerics, fits this self-denying mold. But Stefan, though a grieving, serious child, has more to him. The rector seems to want to beat whatever that is out of him—and his classmates, who already pick on the new boy, seize their chance to persecute him even further.

But the saving grace to this school is its choral music director, or cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach. He hears Stefan’s soprano, as yet unbroken, and sweeps him into his house, where the boy must practice music constantly but also has the chance to escape his anxieties and grief a few hours at a time. The cantor, though a hard man to please, understands something of what the boy is going through, since he himself lost his beloved first wife several years before.

Elias Gottlob Haussmann’s portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, 1748 ( courtesy Bach-Archiv, Leipzig via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Also, since the cantor writes a cantata every week, to be performed at Sunday services, Stefan learns to sing music he believes too difficult for him, and to play keyboard better than he’d ever dreamed possible. The downside, of course, is that the school bullies resent him all the more for being the cantor’s favorite, especially since he’s displaced one of his chief tormentors in that role.

Bach’s legendary large family figures here, including his second wife, Anna Magdalena, as sweet and sensitive as her husband is brusque and self-centered. She becomes a kind of surrogate mother for Stefan, though he knows he’s not part of the family. More importantly, there’s seventeen-year-old Catharina, Bach’s daughter by his late wife, with whom Stefan strikes up a close friendship, not least because they each have a lost a mother. As you might expect, he comes to feel something more for her.

The Great Passion has much to say about mourning and faith, life and death, and music as a medium to express feelings about them—as well as the joy that seems so fleeting. Runcie, whose father was Archbishop of Canterbury, knows these themes inside out. I can’t help wonder too whether Stefan’s sadistic, competitive schoolmates derive from models in English public schools.

People have wondered for centuries how Bach managed to write so much music. This book gives a hint. The man never stops thinking about music, and he permits nobody at home to be idle. One child or other is always playing an instrument. They’re used to this constant practice, but Stefan isn’t; if he’s not singing or playing the clavichord, he’s copying scores for the cantor.

I like the characterizations, not just of the principals, but, for instance, of Georg Philipp Telemann, who makes Bach look like a humble wallflower. I also like the kind oboist who takes an interest in Stefan and tries to shield him from the school’s brutalities. The description of this man typifies the narrative style:

The man was as long and as thin as one of his instruments. The buttons and fastenings on his spinach-green coat and jacket were the keys on the barrel of his body, although he seemed to take better care of his oboes than he did of his own health. When he leaned forward to light his pipe, he was so slender he looked like a human candle that was about to set fire to itself.

From time to time, Runcie uses his sharp prose to comment pithily on the human condition. Bach loves to sound off in impromptu sermons, a habit Anna Magdalena warns him about, but which often contain nuggets of wisdom. Stefan laments the human habit of summing up others in a phrase and never seeing past that capsule description, therefore never knowing another person, really. And the oboist urges Stefan to “take the music as quickly as you dare. There’s no point in playing a piece if it only needs to be obeyed.” I think that’s also true of writing; master the words, don’t let them master you.

The dreary, death-obsessed, stiff-necked Leipzigers who make others miserable, probably because they are themselves, are properly off-putting but likely true to time and place. The musicians, who share the same religious beliefs yet strive to create beauty in God’s service, come across vividly. Though I know nothing about choral music and have different ideas about religious faith, I enjoyed The Great Passion very much and highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

Faith and Desire: The Beautiful Possible

03 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Amy Gottlieb, anticlimax, belief, Eastern religions, faith, historical fiction, Jewish characters, Judaism, Kristallnacht, literary fiction, observance, Tagore, twentieth century

Review: The Beautiful Possible, by Amy Gottlieb
Harper, 2016. 306 pp. $16

This thought-provoking, flawed novel does at least one thing very well: It makes you think about spiritual connections, even if (as in my case), you don’t have a spiritual bone in your body.

The story begins in Berlin, November 1938. Anyone familiar with that dateline immediately goes uh-oh, for it’s the time of Kristallnacht, “Night of the Broken Glass,” the infamous pogrom against Jews. Sure enough, Walter Westhaus loses his father and fiancée to murderous thugs; Walter escapes only by hiding under the bed.

By chance, he winds up in Bombay, where he studies at Rabindrath Tagore’s ashram. A shattered soul wrapped around a brilliant mind, Walter finishes out the war there, and in 1946, a religious scholar who admires him brings him to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Though he has no patience for the nuts and bolts of rabbinic study, Walter’s ability to find meaningful correspondences between Eastern and Jewish teachings sets open minds on fire. One mind not quite open enough belongs to Sol Kerem, a rabbinical student of whom everyone expects great things. At first, Sol seeks out Walter as someone with whom to study the sacred texts, only to reject him. However, Sol’s spirited fiancée, Rosalie, gets more than a little closer.

A mezuzah, which contains verses from the Torah, adorns the doorway of a Jewish home in Macedonia (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Pretoria Travel. Public domain; 2013).

A mezuzah, which contains verses from the Torah, adorns the doorway of a Jewish home in Macedonia (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Pretoria Travel. Public domain; 2013).

Rosalie, the novel’s only fully developed character, literally embodies the essential struggle of religious life. She’s the battleground where physical desire, belief, practice, and longing for opposed experiences twist her every which way. The retrospective prologue, voiced by her youngest child, Maya, now studying for the rabbinate herself, declares that Walter, Sol, and her mother have an unusual bond. Return to 1946, add Sol’s reluctant refusal to have premarital sex, and you can guess that Rosalie will have an affair with Walter, who understands physical passion but can’t give her anything else, being largely aimless and stuck in Kristallnacht.

Her lover is a homeless man, caught between worlds. He wears the wrong clothes in the wrong seasons. She wants to live in a house, a real house with two tables: one in the kitchen and one in the dining room. . . . She wants to build a family, create a link in the chain of generations. And she wants to do this with Sol, who is learned and sincere and who will teach her Talmud early in the morning before the children wake up.

This is a deep dilemma, which Gottlieb explores with skill. Where does desire figure in a religious life, and what does it truly mean? Are certain desires wrong because the Torah says so? These questions and others bedevil Rosalie constantly. As a reader, I have to reflect along with her, and though I come up with different answers, her story makes me think.

I also like that for once, here’s a novel in which Jewish characters exist in more than name. So many authors borrow Judaism only so that their characters face bigotry but are conveniently secular, in many ways living like anyone else, with scant thought for or tension over the identity for which they’re being persecuted. Not here. Gottlieb portrays observance like a second skin, not just to credibly re-create a belief system or lifestyle, but so that she can grapple with what an observant life means.

That said, The Beautiful Possible remains unsatisfying. Maya’s prologue nearly spells out that she’s Walter’s child, so you’re not surprised when Rosalie and Walter’s affair continues intermittently through the years. Since Sol also feels attracted to Walter, an impulse he reveals once and suppresses forever, potential conflicts are ready to explode in all directions. But both men, with Rosalie’s collusion, plant themselves firmly on their volcanoes and never budge. Sol seems like a stereotypical intellectual cleric, incapable of reaching his congregants, while Walter’s somehow able to sleep with any woman he fancies and write book after famous book, without caring much or even breaking a sweat.

I kept wanting the three main characters to duke things out, not leave themselves to Maya to decipher. I get that Gottlieb means to say that Rosalie’s dilemma about body, soul, belief, and observance is unresolvable, and that Maya’s rabbinical studies will force her to repeat the cycle. But to say that these conflicts are ongoing, and the issues too large to decide, isn’t new. And setting up a conflict that never occurs feels like trickery.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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