The Significance of Bach

The fourth answer seems to me to lie in the basic theme of Bach's life's work. This theme, the Christian message of faith, hope, and love, has in many ways become distant from us today. But can we and do we want to isolate ourselves from the spiritual,historical dimension of the Christian West, and exclude ourselves from this continuum of growing human consciousness? There exists a variety of widely differing thoughts on this question. But it is certainly true that for many people today, the Christian dimension of Bach's work is neither viewed with uninvolved disinterest nor merely accepted as something one must put up with as an inevitable concomitant to good music. On the contrary, this spiritual core to Bach's works seems to be the starting point of a searching for direction in the contemplation of the basic problems of humanity that seem neither rational nor emotionally tangible.

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