We are made to feel in our bodies the slow, lumbering, doom-laden march of this man to his execution. String basses and cellos pound away on one note in a faltering, dragging rhythm other instruments tug away from each other in fierce dissonance. In the opening scene Jesus trudges on the via dolorosa to his crucifixion. Right from the start, you do not simply hear about or observe the drama you are taken inside it. Take for example his mammoth masterpiece that tells the story of the suffering and death of Jesus as told by Matthew in the New Testament: the St Matthew Passion. Rather, they help you feel what it’s like to live in this world-and understand the world-as a Christian. He does proclaim, certainly, but the musical sounds he generates do not generally send “messages”. This is not to say he is always preaching at you. So in what does Bach excel? Why is he the most revered musician in history? People answer this in different ways, but for me, it comes down to something very simple: he turns the Christian life into sound to a degree no one before or after has come close to matching. Over the last 300 years, there is hardly a single musician who has not been impacted by him in one way or another, even if they might not know it. In short, if we had met him socially, I doubt if we would have found it a memorable experience.Īnd yet he changed the face of Western music, not simply “classical” music but every musical style from concert to folk, jazz to bebop, early pop (Lennon and McCartney were huge fans) to hard rock. He was not particularly well known during his lifetime, certainly not an international celebrity. He didn’t suffer fools gladly and was a hard taskmaster: he hated it when people tried to get out of doing hard work. He knew his Bible well, but so did hundreds of others in his day. And as a Luthern he was devout, but not exceptionally so for this time. That is, he belonged to a wing of Christianity that followed the teachings of Martin Luther, the reformer who ignited the Protestant Reformation. He produced a huge quantity of music, certainly, but then so did many of his contemporaries. Socially, he was fairly conventional and conformist for his day, certainly not the sort to rock any political boats. In this respect, there were many like him at the time. He was a working musician, with a stint as a court musician, and much longer stints as a church music director, latterly in Leipzig. He didn’t lead an especially dramatic life. In all sorts of ways, Bach was unexceptional. The German composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is a good example. In fact, most of the people we call geniuses excel at just one main thing, and it’s how they excel at it that makes them different.
With an IQ of around 150, whatever a genius does will be brilliant. What makes a genius different? I used to think a genius was someone who excelled at everything.
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