The Fifth Evangelist
A reminder of my note from 2 April last year.
I think of something Elisabeth-Paule Labat once wrote: ‘there is more music in a single one of Schumann’s Kreisleriana or Kinderszenen than in an entire opera by Massenet, in a brief Bach chorale charged with mysticism than in the complete organ works, in themselves not uninteresting, of Pachelbel.’
The concentration of music, intelligence, and pathos contained in Bach’s Passions is miraculous. I have no other word for it. Jeremy Begbie has spoken of Bach’s music as ‘resonant witness‘. Justly, the Leipzig Master is known as the Fifth Evangelist.
If you want to go deeper into what we’re in the middle of on Holy Saturday, listen to this.
