Excerpt from The Great Passion by James Runcie, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The education was better in Leipzig, he told me, and if I planned to join the family firm that made, serviced and repaired church organs then I should take any opportunity to study with a good teacher. 'You can't make an instrument if you don't know how to play it well,' he said.

I have few possessions remaining from those days: some trinkets belonging to my mother, my first Bible, a copy of Germania by Tacitus and a single butterfly, with copper-coloured wings and black markings pinned in a frame, a reminder of a walk by the river, long ago, with the first girl I loved.

Sometimes, when I go out into the fields, a cloud of butterflies starts up in front of me and I remember the summer before the time of the 'great Passion'. The days were as bright as gold. I say 'gold' because I cannot stand the colour yellow.

It was to do with my mother's last days. I had guessed that she was dying before anyone else did. Her skin changed from its usual buttermilk warmth to the sickly yellow of an autumn leaf. At the end, it was like a jaundiced wax that made me fearful of candles, their stiff dull sheen so close in hue to her face, her eyes as dark as wicks, her spirit spent.

I have hated certain types of that colour ever since; not so much the brightness of lemon or mimosa but the paleness of the first primrose, or the wheat in the fields before it ripens, or the parch-ment letter which brought the news of my old teacher's death. I dislike the colour so much that I won't have yellow flowers in the house, even in spring.

I looked out the scores I still sang; notebooks, pens, pencils, slates, music and memories. I even found the reference the Cantor had written for me when I left school:

The bearer, Mr Stefan Silbermann, has asked me, the under-signed, to give him a testimonial concerning on the one hand the deportment he has shown in this place and on the other the knowledge he possesses in Musicis.

Since, then, I can testify to much concerning him: that his conduct has been such as to give full satisfaction; and specifically that his knowledge in Musicis has made him a welcome guest everywhere, particularly since he has a good command of the organ and no less can well afford to make himself heard vocaliter. Equally he has been able to give creditable assistance in my church and other music. Therefore I have executed this testimonial with my own hand, and leave the rest to him to prove to you.

JOH. SEBAST. BACH
Capellmeister to the Prince of Saxe-Weissenfels
As well as the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen,
Director Chori Musices Lipsiensis and Cantor
At St Thomas's here,
Leipzig, April 12, 1727

My father laughed that I kept it. 'You hardly need that old scrap now. Not at your age.'

I am thirty-seven years old. I couldn't explain to him how changed my life would have been had I not studied with the Cantor and known him as I did; that I would have been a different boy and an altered man.

I made arrangements to leave for the funeral. The coachman was the son of the man who had taken me to Leipzig for the first time, twenty-four years previously. He had a face weathered by sun and wind, the same watchful smile, the same veined hands ready to tighten the reins.

'Will we make good time?' I asked.

'If we leave at dawn, we'll be there before nightfall,' he said. He would have made a good bass. 'There's plenty of light in the day.'

Light. I remembered the rector preaching in Leipzig when I was a boy. The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

I felt a strange fear in returning for the funeral; a sickness in the throat, anxiety in the chest; all the feelings I had known when I was first sent away to school all those years ago.

Excerpted from The Great Passion by James Runcie. Copyright © 2022 by James Runcie. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.