Programs · Episode

Bach’s Passion

Aired: Thursday, March 22, 2018 @ 9:00 am
Hosted by Miles Hoffman

Bach wrote enormous quantities of profoundly moving sacred music, but the hallmark of Bach’s music, whether sacred or secular, is that it’s always passionate.

Full Episode:

A few more words today by Johann Sebastian Bach.  Bach wrote enormous quantities of profoundly moving sacred music, but the hallmark of Bach’s music, whether sacred or secular, is that it’s always passionate.  It is important to remember that the emotions or passions that find their expression in religion or religious music are in fact universal emotions. They’re variants in religious clothing, you might say, of the feelings that are common to all people: love, longing, fear, devotion, peace, expectation, comfort, joy, and so fourth.

One of Bach’s greatest masterpieces, for example, is the B-Minor Mass. It’s a Catholic Mass and Bach wasn’t Catholic, he was Lutheran.  What was he feeling as he wrote the Mass? They weren’t specifically his beliefs, so what beliefs was he expressing? For three centuries the B-Minor Mass has been profoundly moving even for people who have no religious beliefs.