The Great Passion: James Runcie

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Knowledgeable readers will appreciate the author’s extensive use of music history and technical detail balanced with notes of poetic imagery, such as a flute line 'skipping and quicksilver. The Great Passion is a finely crafted mystery of life itself and how one can be transformed through grief, music and love. A shy red-headed boy, bullied and unhappy, he runs away, the school being as harsh and vicious as any we are familiar with in a Dickens novel.

The Great Passion: : James Runcie: Bloomsbury Publishing The Great Passion: : James Runcie: Bloomsbury Publishing

On the evidence of these books, I would never have expected anything on the scale and magnificence of The Great Passion…This is a delightful novel, also one which reveals a Germany foreign or, I would think, unknown to most of us.Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. As I read this deeply affecting and affective novel I was comforted, I was moved, my heart leapt with joy, tears often streamed down my cheeks and I cherished my faith, my loves and the entirety of my life experiences. Faithful and faith-less agree that Bach’s layered blend of musical storytelling, commentary and reflection, as the final acts of Jesus’ life move from betrayal to crucifixion to entombment, can, Mr.

The Great Passion: : James Runcie: Bloomsbury Publishing

But as an exploration of spirituality, musical inspiration, and coming of age, The Great Passion is remarkable. S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Yet, in spite of a few minor wobbles, it succeeds thanks to its avoidance of cloudy rapture and to a bracing focus on the sweat and tears that drove Bach’s peerless 'attempt to understand what it means to live and what it is to die.Silbermann is often bullied at school and through a variety of circumstances, ends up living in Bach's household.

The Great Passion | CBC Books The Great Passion | CBC Books

But James Runcie’s new novel explores the place where Bach’s music was born in rather more earthly terms. Almost by accident, Bach, with the help of the librettist Picander, begins to compose a setting of the Passion based on Matthew 27 and 28.It offers a glimpse into a world more faithful and attentive than our own, but not alien to us: 'we listen to music as survivors,' the great Cantor says.