Review

Culture

Music

1 July 2023

9 min read

Bach’s boundless abundance: the making of a musical genius

Jeremy Begbie explores the significance of faith to Bach's musical vision

Jeremy Begbie

Jeremy Begbie is a theologian and musician. He is a research professor of theology at Duke Divinity School, and founder of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts.

A painting of a 18th century man who wears a wig, white neckerchief and dark collarless coat.

A portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach by E.G Haussmann, 1746.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What makes a genius different? I used to think a genius was someone who excelled at everything. With an IQ of around 150, whatever a genius does will be brilliant.

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. The German composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is a good example.

In all sorts of ways, Bach was unexceptional. He didn’t lead an especially dramatic life. He was a working musician, with a stint as a court musician, and much longer stints as a church music director, latterly in Leipzig. In this respect, there were many like him at the time.

He travelled very little. Socially, he was fairly conventional and conformist for his day, certainly not the sort to rock any political boats. He produced a huge quantity of music, certainly, but then so did many of his contemporaries. He was a Lutheran Christian. That is, he belonged to a wing of Christianity that followed the teachings of Martin Luther, the reformer who ignited the Protestant Reformation. And as a Luthern he was devout, but not exceptionally so for this time. He knew his Bible well, but so did hundreds of others in his day.

He wasn’t a great writer of words. Like many musicians, he could be grumpy. 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 was not particularly well known during his lifetime, certainly not an international celebrity.

In short, if we had met him socially, I doubt if we would have found it a memorable experience.

And 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. Nothing was the same after Bach. 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.

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. This is not to say he is always preaching at you. He does proclaim, certainly, but the musical sounds he generates do not generally send “messages”. Rather, they help you feel what it’s like to live in this world—and understand the world—as a Christian.

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.

Right from the start, you do not simply hear about or observe the drama; you are taken inside it. In the opening scene Jesus trudges on the via dolorosa to his crucifixion. String basses and cellos pound away on one note in a faltering, dragging rhythm; other instruments tug away from each other in fierce dissonance. All this is in a dark minor key. We are made to feel in our bodies the slow, lumbering, doom-laden march of this man to his execution. But that is not all. On top of this, two choirs enter, singing to each other: the one asks puzzled questions (who is this?) and the other replies by unfolding the meaning of this strange procession: the condemned man is carrying the weight of the world’s human guilt. But that is not all. Over this, a third choir enters (usually a boy choir in today’s performances). These are the singers of the heavenly Jerusalem, far above the action, intoning an ancient hymn (“Lamb of God...”). Fittingly, they sing in a secure rhythm, and in a positive (major) key. Here God is winning back, healing his broken world, our world. Bach piles all these layers on top of each other so we hear them all at once—something only music can pull off (it is impossible with words alone). We trudge with Jesus as he identifies with us at our worst, yet at the same time we are surrounded by an eternal assurance that here God is doing his climactic work.

Listen to St Matthew Passion

Another especially pointed example of Bach’s “inside” view comes when Bach tackles one the most famous scenes in Matthew’s story. Peter, supposedly Jesus’ most loyal follower, has just publicly denied he ever knew him. And this despite pledges of unswerving loyalty. He retches inside as his beloved leader is led away to his trial and death. A tenor soloist sings Matthew’s simple sentence: “And Peter went out and wept bitterly.” That is about as terse as you can get. But Bach strings these words out over a tortured, tormented melody—close to the sound of a person wailing with grief. When we reach the word “out” (as in “Peter went out”), Bach has the tenor sing a top B, the highest note he sings in the entire work. A musical “going out” is linked to a physical and metaphorical “going out”. And all this happens over the most anguished, dissonant, harsh harmony. It’s painful to listen to—which is, of course, the point. Again, Bach is not depicting something at a distance. He doesn’t even want us to feel sorry for Peter, for this is not about someone else. It’s about us. He wants us to us to feel something on the inside: that we have betrayed the One who more than anyone else has been prepared to die for us.

Listen to Peter's story

Two glimpses of a Christian mind in action. But just as remarkable is what Bach can do without any words at all. He gave birth to hundreds of instrumental pieces, and he seems to have believed these were just as important as his vocal works. That’s because he believed musical notes—melodies, chords, motifs, riffs, harmonies—carried their own power to help us sense what it feels like to live in a world brought into being by the Christian God.

From the most unpromising motifs, the most unremarkable clusters of notes, he can weave music of astounding richness.

A lot of Bach’s music for instruments comes alive when heard in this light. It is as if we are being invited to listen to a cosmos in sound. A towering example is his famous Chaconne from the Partita in D minor for solo violin. Most scholars recognise that more than any other musician before or since, Bach knows how to get the most out of the least. From utterly unpromising motifs, unremarkable clusters of notes, he can weave sounds of astounding richness. In this piece he weaves fifteen minutes of music from a simple four-bar chord pattern, a seemingly endless series of variations of every mood and colour. The impression is of an infinity of possibilities, a boundless abundance. Even when he does eventually draw things to a close, as many scholars have noted, we are left with the impression this could have gone on ad infinitum.

Listen to Chaconne, played by Itzhak Perlman

Very much the same applies to the even longer Goldberg Variations for keyboard, whose breathtaking overflow is evoked well in words from the distinguished Bach scholar, John Butt:

“There is something utterly radical in the way that Bach’s uncompromising exploration of musical possibility opens up potentials that seem to multiply as soon as the music begins. By the joining up of the links in a seemingly closed universe of musical mechanism, a sense of infinity seems unwittingly to be evoked.”

Bach is, in effect, giving us a musical imagination of something basic to Christian faith: that we live in a world in which the Creator God is constantly at work, drawing a potentially infinite number of options out of even the most unpromising material: which of course, we should take to include ourselves—ordinary, frail, and stumbling human beings.

Not only that, Bach invites us to hear the interweaving of radical consistency and radical openness. Listen to a minute or two of the Chaconne and press pause at almost any point; it’s very hard to predict what will happen next, even if you know the style well. And yet what does happen makes perfect sense. In other words, it sounds as if it’s being improvised. This is why jazz musicians are so intrigued by Bach’s music. There is nothing deterministic about it: we are not inside a machine, or something that must unfold in the way it does. And yet it is anything but arbitrary or absurd-sounding. Bach seems to have sensed what many contemporary physicists will confirm: we don’t live a fixed universe in which the future is simply the unwinding of the past, and yet the world has a regularity to it, a dependability—it makes sense. In Bach’s imagination—as in the Bible itself—God is not arbitrary or fickle. God is the improvisor, we might say: faithful and surprising at the same time.

Finally, we mention one other striking feature of Bach’s sound world that is hard to miss: the way it can encompass extreme joy and extreme pain. Bach was no stranger to grief and death. Both his parents died before he was ten years old. He fathered twenty children, but seven of those died immediately after birth or in infancy. He was out of town when his first wife, Maria Barbara, died; he was never able to say his farewells.

To hear Bach at his most dissonant, taking us to the very edge of coherence, listen to Variation 25 from the Goldberg Variations (used in Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 film “The Silence”).

Listen to Variation 25

We do not know if he was thinking of the crucifixion of Jesus here (he openly tackled this theme elsewhere in music of extraordinary sorrow) but in this piece he plumbs such dark depths it is hard to believe there is no connection at all. For Lutherans, the death of Jesus was the very centre of God’s engagement with the world, the point where God identified most intensely with us in our darkest depths.

And yet, even in pieces of this kind, as Bach scholars have often noted, and as we hinted above, Bach will often “overreach”, spill out of the parameters he sets for himself. The ecstasy you will hear in the "Et Resurrexit " of the Mass in B Minor is a good example: where the raising of the crucified Jesus from the dead is translated into music that might well be called hyper-energetic. Again, Bach doesn’t allow us to observe and contemplate things from a safe distance. He is trying to catch us up into a life that by its very nature is uncontainable. As with so much of Bach's music, dance is the fundamental dynamic here: it is hard to keep still when surrounded by the cascading momentum. With a twinkle in his eye, he adds an orchestral postlude that by the conventions of his time was wholly unnecessary, gratuitous, excessive—a fitting testimony to the superabundant character of what he believed happened on Easter Day. In the midst of a society surrounded by the brute physical reality of death, including the deaths of members of his own family, Bach carries us into an overspill of energy that pulls against the downward, contracting “running down” of the physical world, evoking a “running up”—in his imagination, the life of the resurrection body to come.

Listen to the Et Resurrexit

Interview

Culture

Education

Justice

S&U interviews

17 February 2025

8 min read

How justice shaped a world of rights

Historian John Coffey talks about his contribution to a new book: Justice & Rights.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A statue of a woman holding a spear in one hand a lightening bolt in the others that reads: 'Droits de l'homme'.

A French statute celebrating Human Rights.

DDP on Unsplash.

In our networked world old problems, and new ideas to solve them, flash across our minds and screens. It can be a hectic and dis-orientating feeling that occurs when we try to make sense of it all. Whether it's the global order changing or yet another injustice occurring.

Seeking insights on all this means crossing boundaries, and that’s what over 160 scholars do by sharing with each other. The members of the Global Faculty Initiative (GFI), drawn from all faculties usual in great universities, integrate faith and scholarship through dialogues. They examine the themes of justice, order, flourishing and beauty - mixing subject matter expertise in everything from physics to public policy.

The GFI has just published the results of one such dialogue in a book Justice and Rights. Among the contributors is Professor John Coffey. His work explores the history of religion and the big ideas like justice and rights. Recently he talked with GFI coordinator Bethan Willis, on its Justice podcast series. Here’s an extract of the discussion that looks at the ‘genealogy of rights.’

Bethan Willis So, shifting focus now to the question of rights, particularly. So, you talk in your Brief about the genealogy of rights, and in his Theology Brief, Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a case for placing rights at the centre of our understanding of justice, but that's obviously not an uncontested move. And some people would see a focus on rights as problematic, and part of the debate about the legitimacy or the value of rights can sometimes centre around the question of where rights actually come from. So which period in history, which philosophy and vision of human life and justice gives rise to this language. So can you tell us a little bit about that kind of trajectory that you've set out in your Brief , the different points at which people might identify rights as coming to the fore and why that happens and the various interests at play in these discussions of where rights come from?

John Coffey So it can be very confusing if you read the scholarship on this subject because if you listen to someone like Samuel Moyne, he will argue that the human rights revolution of the 1970s really invents human rights or maybe grudgingly the 1940s and the conservative statesmen who created the UN declaration of human rights in that period. Others, of course, would root it in the enlightenment. And I guess this is a classic answer. It's the enlightenment and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which is really at the heart of the story of rights. But then early modernists and medievalists pushback, they see natural rights language, the idea of individual subjective rights that one has simply on the basis of one's humanity. These are distinct from legal rights, but they're individual natural rights that they would see this concept emerging in the Middle Ages with canon lawyers and Juris and so on, and then being embraced by various 17th, 16th, 17th century groups up to Locke.

And I think there are different things going on here. One, of course, is that there are turf wars between historians in different periods who want to draw attention to their period as being really seminal in various ways. People have talked about the revenge of the medievalists, the early modernists and the Renaissance specialists who made so much emphasis on this being a radical break from the dark mediaeval past that mediaevalists have always been keen to push back against that and to point to the mediaeval roots of a lot of modern concepts. But I think there's also more going on here. I think in some ways it's part of a bigger argument about political and to some extent economic liberalism as well, because rights language has been so important for liberals, whether they're talking about politics or talking about economics. So, you have an example of rival genealogies being used for political purposes, if you like, to both problematize and legitimize, right?

BW Your work is focused on the contributions that religious groups have made to politics and ideas. And you particularly reference the Levellers in the 17th century and the abolitionists at the turn of the 18th, 19th century. Can you tell us a bit about the contribution that Christians may have made to the development of rights and particularly to the rights of freedom of conscious thought and belief in particular?

JC Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to emphasize this because there's also been a long tradition of suspicion of rights language among Christians, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I mean, this has obviously been true in the Catholic church in the 19th century where there was deep suspicion of liberalism and the individualism associated with it and rights language was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by many traditionalist Catholics. But it's also true in Protestant circles as well, among some high Anglicans. But you could see it in the Dutch Calvinist tradition, they founded an anti-revolutionary party after the French Revolution, which is very critical of the political language which emerges from that event. So, it's interesting to see how historians and intellectual historians in recent decades have recovered what you might call the theological origins of rights talk. And that's true of people like Brian Tierney writing about the mediaeval era and showing the kind of seminal influence of various mediaeval theorists of natural law, but also natural rights.

And certainly, when you get to the period I'm most familiar with from the 17th century onwards, groups like the Levellers are not just talking about native rights or legal rights that they have as Freeborn Englishmen. They're also talking about universal natural human rights that individuals have on the basis of their humanity. And it's in that period in the 17th century that people begin really for the first time to talk about freedom of religion as a natural right. I mean, you don't see that in the Middle Ages. It's a development that emerges within particularly radical Protestantism in the 17th century. Though interestingly, it's also tied to the idea of duties. So because we have a duty to worship God according to our conscience, consciences must be left free and the individual must have a natural right to worship God according to their conscience, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to please God if they just follow the dictates of the state or the state church that they wouldn't be able to worship in a way that's pleasing to God. So, it is interesting the way the argument works. It's theistic grounded in a sense, but it applies not just to Christians, it applies to other kinds of religious worship, to Jews, to Muslims, to heathens and so on.

And you can see more widely a theological grounding for rights in figures like Locke. And that's encapsulated, obviously famously in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drafted in 1776, that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’. So, this idea that we have certain rights that we cannot transfer over to the state, that we can alienate them over to the state, they're inalienable, and we have a solemn responsibility before God to protect them. So yeah, I mean, it's certainly by the 18th century, this rights language is absolutely flourishing within Protestant circles, and you can see it being taken up quite significantly in the abolitionist movement in the 1780s, though people are also shying away from it in the 1790s because of the French Revolution and Tom Payne's rights of man and so on. But if you read 19th century American religious abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglas or William Lloyd Garrison or others, they're using the language of natural rights, pretty insistently.

BC And it's often to articulate the kind of victim's perspective, isn't it, to defend the weak against the mighty and to say there's a bigger kind of justice that is beyond the state or the law. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit about how that works?

JC Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right, and it's one reason why we should be wary about just tossing, tossing rights language out as some kind of secular poisoning of the, well, a, it does have some deep roots in Christian thought, but it also, rights language is also designed as one of the weapons of the weak, if you like. It's a way to defend those whose claims are often ignored and to assert their human dignity. So, it's why it gets taken up so much by religious minorities, by those who are pushing for widening the vote and suffrage maybe to all men, maybe eventually to women. The anti-slavery movement is using it, and of course, by the 20th century, the Civil Rights movement.

BC But as you said, Wilberforce himself doesn't really use this language much, partly because the arenas he's speaking in and partly because of these associations with the French Revolution. Is that right?

JC Yeah, and if you look in the 1790s, it's interesting because it's from that period really the language of left and right starts to emerge, and those on the right are very much concerned about law and order. They look across at France and they see disorder and the guillotine and regicide and Civil War and the exile of Catholic priests and so on, and it's extremely alarming for them. So, the emphasis very much shown law and order, and they become extremely alarmed by the way that rights language has been used to undermine order. So, it's classically articulated at that divide between Edmund Burke on the one side and Tom Payne on the other. What's interesting in the British context, is you'll find sort of devout Protestant Christians on both sides of that. So, Wilberforce would be very much on Burke's side in this argument, but the founder of the London corresponding society in the 1790s, a man called Thomas Hardy, he's actually a devout Scottish Calvinist, and he's absolutely on board with this rights language. And so different religious groups will be divided over this.

Follow the rest of John and Bethan's conversation on the GFI podcast.

John Coffey on Justice.