I find the weird sounds that opera singers make — singing — to be creepy, but even I find Bach’s St. John Passion moving. Of course, it helps not to be able to understand the words since it places the blame for the whole Messiah-killing nastiness on the shoulders of a Jewish mob and Jewish law.

There’s a wonderful episode of Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source that explores this question from scholarly and musical points of view, always sympathetically, and with transcendently beautiful passages from the work itself.

Categories: culture dw