“Music can create these beautiful moments out of nothing. We can be sitting here and play a phrase and suddenly there’s beauty. Anyone who relates to music knows that feeling of being touched by a piece so deeply—and God, that’s such a privilege.”
from Piano Lessons: Music, Love & True Adventures by Noah Adams
Consider a time when I am (a young) 15 and living in Hamburg, Germany with my humble and brilliant sister, eleven years my elder. She has earned—and I mean won through lonely, hard work—the Deutscher Academischer Austausch Dienst (the DAAD—the “German” Marshall Scholarship)—for an academic year of study of Bach with an eminent German organist. She loves Baroque organs. Incredibly, Rose has asked our parents if I could drop out of school for a year (between 8th and 9th grades) and travel with her to Europe and—the incredible part—they have said yes. We are living alone in a German flat in the University District. It’s a gray, cold and uncomforting winter day in post-war (still) Hamburg, and I climb on the U-bahn train at the Dammtor station, ready to disembark downtown 14 minutes later within sight of St. Jakobi. My trusty black pea coat, black pants, grey scarf, wool beret and backpack suggest German university student. I am actually an intellectual, artistic and spiritual toddler in sore need of a bigger picture. And I am getting it.
I enter the cathedral. I am a small dot in an immense space. It smells old. I smell seven hundred years of old-ness. Cold stone steps lead me from the organ loft, my point-of-entry, alone, to the choir room. Each chipped stone riser leads up at an incline that is definitely not “code” back home in Oregon. A draft of cold and musty air blows up from the four-foot wide hole that is the dark spiral stairway I clamber onto and up up up—straight up—in passage to Rudy and the rest of the choir. I shove through a heavy wooden door that swings into a room the size of a pantry and then stumble—more of up!—to the abrupt next set of steps before approaching yet another door, this one made of chain mail-like material. Halfway to the top of the stairs, the wooden door I’ve just left behind shuts unexpectedly. I sit for a moment on the cold stone steps to the choir room and can hear the voices of many era, the articulation of harmonies which silence in me any inclination towards the superficial. I am listening to rehearsal of the St. Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach, that avuncular old Lutheran under whose tutelage I am becoming a new me. I continue my ascent and enter the rehearsal cove.
Rudy stands before the harpsichord and I slip into “my” place (wow, think of it!) in the upper anteroom where we rehearse twice a week. Rosie, who arrived an hour earlier, is across the circle with the sopranos. No one even notices me. They are aware of only music. I am learning my place in the world and the dynamic of choir practice in St. Jakobi is a good lesson.
Rudy gesticulates and re-orients first one section, then another, and keeps us completely in key and at tempo—with frequent recourse to the harpsichord and his energetic entreaty, exclaiming “Altos, muss folgende Zeile ein Minderverbrauch aktuellen Sound.” The combination of his choreographic conducting, the mellow timbre of the plucked harpsichord, the late winter afternoon light sifting through the gothic windows into our unheated room, the ancient holiness of the rehearsal space (yes, really ancient: the Arp Schnitger organ down in the sanctuary [somehow preserved during the war as an international treasure] was built in 1693 and St. Jakobi itself traces back to 1255!)—and, this—this—is the thing: the Bach itself! So simple-yet-complex and inexpressibly lovely. These many intellectual, artistic, social, religious and historical forces intersect, acting together for me as a crucible of personal change.
In Bach’s household, with his few surviving children, the re-married widower dug deep into human experience and spiritual reality. The Bach family called the St. Matthew his “great Passion” and in spite of his many masterpieces, the St. Matthew still reserves a special place in the repertoire. Bach creates a musical halo with recognizable refrains around Christ’s head throughout the work. The mathematics of the Bach, the almost pictorial symbolism of the combined cadences, the close harmonies in solo or full-on choral presentation, the interlaced instruments—harpsichord now, but in final performance with the Arp Schnitger, the rich and poignant strains of the oboes, flutes and stringed instruments weaving their way into, around, on top of and supporting from below the tender or strong human voices, along with the incomparable libretto everywhere whether in Mach Dich, mein Herze, rein or Erbame dich or any of the other 66 repeating orchestral elements (recitative, aria, interlude)—these combined—evoke in me respect for the conductor, the singers (Germans of all classes from Hamburg who love their local musician—J.S. Bach), the composer, the Scripture which he is exploring, the church which the broken-hearted and humiliated Germans rebuilt in the last 50 years after the devastation of the war, the struggle the Germans still have to become less rigid, my own ineptness as an American teenager caught up in the stupidity of an often ridiculous culture, the music which is, yes, so beautiful that I almost cry—all of these elements conjoin and make me realize that the St. Matthew Passion is an expression of purity and power which is irrevocably shaping who I am. It gathers me into its comforting and demanding measures.
Rudy calls me to attention conducting an upbeat to our next chorus—als wie ein Lamme—and we sing. And it starts to snow. I am swept away from the things of this world for a moment and simultaneously into the world with greater patience and love. Good art can do this, I realize, and I recognized that I will return for renewal of spirit, for the rest of my life, to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
Lovely piece
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