JS Bach’s 18th-century guide to Leipzig

Leipzig is not an easy city to love. Looking out from the observation deck of the Panorama Tower, there is no sustained aesthetic vision or pleasing architectural silhouette. It’s an atonal mishmash of buildings, a testament to centuries of destruction and erasure, rebuilding and renewal. There are sights to be seen and pleasures to be had, but most of them are not immediately apparent.

This is not a town of coherence but of juxtapositions, whether you are seeking the cream-cake baroque splendours of Nikolaikirche (St Nicholas church), the fin de siècle elegance of the Gründerzeit mansions, the circular social housing blocks of The Rundling, or the flashy modernism of the BMW plant. And despite its reinvention as the hipster’s “new Berlin”, it’s hard to discern any spirit of place, because nothing feels settled or complete. It’s as if Leipzig is still recovering from its own history: that it has always been a work in progress. All cities are in a state of flux but Leipzig, in particular, seems to be in search of an identity. I decided to look for it in the music of one of its greatest sons.

Johann Sebastian Bach came to work in Leipzig in 1723 at the age of 38 and lived here for the rest of his life. He was the cantor, or choirmaster, at the church of St Thomas, and even his physical body has a place in the city’s cycle of destruction and reconstruction.

During the Allied bombing of 1943, the cemetery and church where he had been laid to rest were annihilated. His bones were recovered from the rubble and taken on a cart through the town and solemnly reburied in a brand new vault, in the nave of St Thomas’s church. It was topped by an unpolished brass with only his name, ending with the four letters B-A-C-H, the same letters he had taken as the notes (in German musical nomenclature) to begin his final and unfinished Art of Fugue .

Standing at the grave, I remembered the austerity of a theme that plays on his name and builds so effortlessly from simplicity to playful complexity. There was a posy of iris, crocus and rosemary at my feet, and I thought about the strange junction between transience and mortality and how nature could be simultaneously fleeting and eternal. I looked up to the organ loft where Bach had composed and conducted 300 years ago and realised that most of his music was performed by players who were out of sight. The congregation was not meant to be looking at them as concert artists but as anonymous guides to prayer and meditation. Everything Bach wrote was for the glory of God and dedicated to him at the end of each manuscript: Soli Deo Gloria.

There is Lutheran stolidity in this barnlike late Gothic hall-church. Wood, stone, glass. Pulpit, altar, cross. The ribbed red vaulting that rises from the whitewashed walls is like a series of arteries pumping the blood of Christ through the building. I sat on a hard wooden chair, near an old man praying with gnarled hands that could have come straight out of a Dürer engraving, and waited for evensong as a young verger swept away the dust of the day. The choristers from the Thomanerchor sang a motet, “Jesu meine Freude”, Jesus my Joy, from 1723 and believed to have been composed for the funeral of the wife of the Leipzig postmaster. It had purity and serenity and I tried to imagine what it might have been like to hear Bach’s music both for the first time and for every single week of the 27 years that he was here; to have a certain routine, the anchor of churchgoing, the knowledge of place.

Looking up into the clerestory and the galleries, I noticed a second organ, and it was clear that when Bach decided to write the St Matthew Passion for two choirs and two orchestras, he was writing antiphonal music for this exact location; that not only would the choirs sing into the spaces high above us, but that the acoustics would be so fundamental that the building itself would become another instrument. The architecture was part of the music.

Luther preached here, Mozart played the organ, Wagner was baptised in the font. The building talks across time. Perhaps there really is such a thing as acoustic memory and sermons in stones. Leaving it to go back out into modern life, I wanted to stay within its ancient rhythms and hold on to the feeling of being part of that steady world of words and music where daily anxiety is lost in the eternal.

I went north-east to the market square and the Altes Rathaus, the Old Town Hall, a grand Saxon Renaissance building with a baroque clock tower and a 93-metre long front. This is a museum of city history, filled with solid well-polished furniture, maps and models, containing a gallery of old town dignitaries, superintendents and town councillors; the kind of men Bach raged against when he felt he wasn’t being given enough money or attention, all ruffs and collars, sharp beards and opinionated bad breath.

Just off the town square is the Mädler Passage, a shopping arcade that traces its history to the 16th century and is home to the cavernous Auerbach’s Cellar, the restaurant where Mephistopheles took Dr Faustus drinking in Goethe’s 1808 play. Here you can eat the famed Leipziger Allerlei, a melange of peas, white asparagus, cabbage and morels with a boiled cauliflower at the centre and served with walnut-sized bread dumplings. This, they will tell you, is the kind of food Bach ate, best enjoyed with crayfish in the five or so asparagus weeks from May to June, when they peel a ton and a half of the vegetable and serve it on 8,000 plates.

Then there is coffee. “Coffee, I have to have coffee, and, if someone wants to pamper me, ah, then bring me coffee as a gift!” sings Lieschen in the “Coffee Cantata”. In this sprightly mini-operetta, a humdrum father (literally, for that is his name, Schlendrian) unsuccessfully tries to convert his daughter’s love of caffeine into the search for a husband. It’s a secular composition, written by Bach in 1734, intended to amuse the regulars at Zimmerman’s coffee house. This building was demolished in 1943 (another victim of the Allied air raid), and a further 18th-century haunt, Café Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum, is temporarily closed, but there are coffee houses throughout the city that offer warmth from the winter cold and shady terraces in the summer. I combined a visit to the Nikolaikirche, with its pristine cream and green and gold baroque decorative glories, with a stop-off at Café Riquet where they serve coffee along with the local Leipziger Lerche pastries.

These too have been reconstructed. They are now made with almond and marzipan and cherry jam rather than follow the original savoury recipe. That consisted of songbirds, pan-fried in schmaltz with diced apples, ginger, pepper, and sugar. Leipzig larks became so popular as a delicacy that more than 400,000 of them were sold in the year 1720 alone. Lerchenfrauen — lark women — were a common sight, peddling their wares out of baskets in Leipzig’s Salzgässchen Street. Only when the city’s population of larks were wiped out was the delicacy replaced by the sweet pastry; the jam at the centre being a modest memory of a lark’s heart.

I walked further north, just out of the city centre to the forest and river and thought of the natural melodies and rhythm of birdsong; and how larks recognise each other by their song and trill even when they are on the wing. Magpie-larks, or peewits, can even sing duets to protect their territory; each partner produces one note a second, but half a second apart, so that humans find it difficult to tell that there are two birds singing rather than one.

I stopped for a pint of gose, a sour wheat beer which Bach drank heartily (a surviving bar bill shows him averaging four pints a day). Gose has a particular salty coriander flavour that, depending on your point of view, is either an acquired taste or a revolting blend of last night’s dregs and the washing-up bowl. It’s said to be aphrodisiac, especially when taken with a dash of cherry liqueur (the “Frauenfreundlicher” or “women’s friend”) but perhaps people only agree to the sex as an excuse to stop drinking it. Established in 1899, Gosenschenke Ohne Bedenken, at Meckenstrasse 5, is the only gose inn still at its original address. I drank it with wild boar, red cabbage and dumplings and thought of the joyful “Quodlibet”, a version of an old drinking song that ends the Goldberg Variations.

The building where Bach lived and worked no longer exists, but it must have been filled with music: with hymns, lullabies and old folk tunes about the lark and the raven, the maid and the river, the false soldier, the lonely swan. They would be practised, sung, repeated, played upon, converted, reworked and made new, just like the workings of the city itself.

And because it was music that had to be at the centre of any time spent in Leipzig, I was determined to hear the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. I went into their concert hall, the Gewandhaus, named because the original building was used by garment merchants, and watched them rehearsing the St Matthew Passion, playing with consideration and understanding, agreeing the tempo and the breathing spaces so that they could perform with confidence and freedom. I noticed the hall’s motto on the organ, taken from Seneca, Res severa verum gaudium — translated alternately as “true joy is a serious thing” and “seriousness is a true joy”. I closed my eyes and listened to music that was a dance of both sorrow and beauty, appreciating its endless patterns, its certainty and security. It contained the steadfast hope that life will continue whatever we do with it, despite war, loss and devastation, and the knowledge that music provides the solace, meaning and consolation that no other art form can — the soul of a city.

James Runcie’s novel about Bach, ‘The Great Passion’, is published by Bloomsbury

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