This is a brilliant book, which can be enjoyed by people who are neither musical nor religious, although it helps to be both.

That’s all we know about Stefan until twenty-three years later, when he returns to Leipzig for the Cantor’s funeral and meets Anna Magdalena and Catharina again. Imagine hearing it for the first time! Soon afterwards, Stefan’s year at the school is over and he returns home, leaving Bach’s daughter Catharina, with whom he’s in love. When it ends, there is silence in the church no one has ever heard anything like it. In those days, women were allowed to sing opera but not church music, so the lead women’s roles were performed by boy sopranos like Stefan. The music is difficult but the Cantor says it has to be, that all the musicians must be stretched by it. For instance, there’s a description of a botched public execution which seems gratuitous at first, until you see the parallels with the suffering of Christ and the theme of ‘blut’ which infuses the Passion. I was slightly disappointed that we didn’t get to the Passion until about two thirds of the way through the book but without what went before, we wouldn’t understand the writing of it so well. Bach’s work ethic was extraordinary and the descriptions of the menage, of the stern Lutheran faith of the people of Leipzig and daily life in the city are totally empathetic. The Cantor helps him with his singing and organ playing and he learns the great man’s theories: work, work, work get the fingering right and all else follows breathe in the right places praise God always in all that you play and sing. For a while, he moves into the Bach household: crowded and a place of constant music making. He becomes the principal soprano at the church, a cause of jealousy and more bullying. He has to go back but by a stroke of luck his voice and musicality have been noticed by the Cantor, as he always calls J S Bach. The school is awful and he's bullied so unmercifully that he runs away. When his mother dies, he is sent away to school in Leipzig, to study music. The story is told from the point of view of a boy, Stefan Silbermann, who comes from a famous family of organ makers. I consider the Passion to be the greatest musical work ever written (hardly an original view, I know), so I got stuck in.

This book was recommended by cornflower and as it deals with the writing of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, I was keen to read it.

The Fish In Room No. 11 by Heather Dyer