Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning

A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s “lyrical and haunting” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) reflection on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork.

As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn’t seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach’s music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next ...