The Secret of Bach

Why does the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, more than three centuries after it was written, continue to be regarded as an unsurpassed summit? Why do artists and musicians from such widely different backgrounds and worlds return again and again to words such as “pure,” “heavenly,” “sacred,” and “Divine” when describing it?

Part One | The Secret of Bach

The Bach Family: A Historical Phenomenon

The Bach family is, without question, the greatest, most active, and most influential musical dynasty known in the history of classical music. It is difficult to name another family that produced so many composers, performers, and professional musicians over so many generations — and at such a level. Some fifty members of the Bach family worked as professional musicians over the course of roughly two centuries; at least twenty were composers with substantial bodies of work. Several were regarded as leading musical figures even before Johann Sebastian Bach was born.

That fact alone suggests more than the personal success of an individual talent — which, of course, is itself in the hands of Heaven. It is as though a higher inspiration descended into the world and came to rest upon an entire human “tribe.” Yet the singular figure within that family — the one upon whom, had we been privileged to meet him, we might perhaps have pronounced the blessing “Who has given of His wisdom to flesh and blood” — was Johann Sebastian Bach.

At the age of twenty, Bach walked more than four hundred kilometres from Arnstadt to Lübeck to meet the composer Dieterich Buxtehude and learn from him techniques of composition—but also something of the spirit: how music touches Heaven. The young Bach’s journey was an extraordinary undertaking, a rare expression of an inner drive and a sense of musical mission that recognised no boundaries.

Even Bach’s name contains a beautiful hint of the nature of his art: in German, Bach means a brook—a fitting image for the supreme master of the flow of musical motion, and one that seems to echo the name of Yuval, the father of music in the first millennium of Creation.[1]

The Composer of the Millennium

Johann Sebastian Bach (5445–5510; 1685–1750) is exceptional not only for the spiritual, poetic, and formal depth of his work, but, at the most immediate level, for the astonishing scale and variety of his output. Before one enters the intricacies of his fugues, harmonies, and polyphonic structures, one plain and remarkable fact stands before us: Bach wrote hundreds upon hundreds of works for nearly every musical medium available in his time—orchestra, chamber ensembles, choirs, organ, and a wide range of instruments—alongside pedagogical works for the training of musicians, all with an almost superhuman daily devotion.

Compared with composers of his own generation and of those before and after him — Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart among them — Bach stands apart not only in quality but in the sheer force of his creative abundance. He gave the world a body of music unmatched in complexity, scope, and completeness.[2]

But quantity is not the secret.

Many performers, composers, and listeners sense that Bach possesses something found in no other composer. Even when a work is simple, there is “something higher” within it. What, exactly, is that something?

Music with a Taste of Heaven

Bach’s music is not merely beautiful music — it is an experience of the soul.

Bach understood music as the service of the heart. Even in an instrumental work without words, one can feel prayer, pain, longing, and hope: prayer without words.

Bach’s harmony is a world unto itself. Some progressions stop the heart; even simple chords, moving within a delicate weave of voices, suddenly sound like gateways to hidden worlds. It is difficult to find another composer who can reach the innermost chambers of the heart and of beauty with such clarity.

This is a perfect union of intellect and soul. Bach constructs music like a mathematician and a philosopher, yet the listener does not think, “How clever”; the listener feels, “How true.” A fugue that is emotion. A sonata that is an inner world. Even a small musical exercise sounds like a chapter from the story of Creation.

Composing—for the Glory of God Alone

In musical instructions transmitted in Bach’s name to his pupils, we read: “The sole aim and final reason of all music should be nothing else but the glory of God and the refreshment of the spirit.” The statement goes on to say, with striking severity, that when this purpose is not kept in view, there is no true music, but only “devilish bawling and droning.”[3]

This statement rests upon the fundamental conviction that “Everything the Holy One, blessed be He, created in His world, He created solely for His glory.”[6] Bach’s formulation declares unequivocally that “all music” in the world was created for His glory alone.

Bach signed many works with the initials S.D.G.—Soli Deo Gloria, Latin for “To God alone be the glory.” Latin was then the prestigious international language. The word “alone” is the heart of the phrase. It echoes the recognition that “there is none else besides Him”: the notes and harmonies, the gift and the labour, are not ends in themselves; all become part of the service of God.

Especially significant is the signature at the end of the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier. After twenty-four preludes and twenty-four fugues—instrumental works without any religious context—Bach wrote S.D.G. in his own hand.

Before the signature appears the word Fine—The End. It is, of course, a technical indication that the work is complete; and yet it is difficult to stand before the manuscript without sensing the symbolism of the image: after a monumental achievement of order, calculation, and counterpoint, three letters remain at the end: S.D.G.—to God alone be the glory. Like the Chasid who, at the end of a long annual reckoning, wrote: “Grand total: there is none else besides Him.”

Bach was not merely a man of faith. He lived and breathed faith. He composed faith.

For clarity: Bach’s faith was in the Creator and Sovereign of the world, Maker of Heaven and Earth, who watches over His creatures. Although this was a faith involving “association,” which, according to the Torah, falls short of the complete and absolute unity of God, several halachic authorities nevertheless hold that this form of belief was not forbidden to the descendants of Noah.[6] Moreover, Maimonides wrote that the spread of these beliefs forms part of the world’s preparation for faith in true Divine unity.[7]

In sharp contrast to the spirit of denial and estrangement from Godliness that spread through the generations after him, Bach was a “devotee” of faith — a man of spiritual attachment and reverence for Heaven.

Bach’s Inspiration—from the Music of the Levites

Among the annotations Bach left in his own hand in his personal Bible are several extraordinary references to music—and specifically to King David, the Levites, and the music of the Temple. These notes open a rare window onto the biblical source of Bach’s inspiration for conceiving music as a bridge between human order and Divine order.

A. In chapter 25 of I Chronicles, King David is described as establishing the Levites’ musical order: the sons of Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun, “who prophesied with lyres, harps, and cymbals.” It was beside this very chapter that Bach wrote in the margin of his Bible:

“This chapter is the true foundation of all sacred music.”

Indeed, the chapter presents an extraordinary picture of musical professionalism and spiritual devotion bound together. The Levites’ service is organised as a formal musical institution: at its head stand those “trained in song”—the masters of music—alongside their pupils; the musicians are divided into watches and instrumental ensembles, all within a carefully ordered hierarchy (see Shirat HaLeviim, p. 204). Yet this entire professional system is defined as part of “the service of the house of God,” and its purpose is “to give thanks and praise to the Lord.” More than this, the music itself is linked here with prophecy: the Levites are described as “prophesying” through their playing, and the teachings of the Sages explain that through music they attained prophetic inspiration through music (see Shirat HaLeviim, p. 228).

This, then, is the “foundation” Bach finds in the chapter: music at its highest level unites supreme professionalism with a spiritual purpose—meticulous musical order transformed in its entirety into the service of God.

B.

At the close of I Chronicles 28, when David entrusts Solomon with the plan of the Temple and the order of its service—“and behold, the divisions of the priests and the Levites for all the service of the house of God”—Bach adds another note in the margin:

“A splendid proof, among other things, that music too was instituted by the spirit of God through David.”

Bach’s words were apparently based on the verses immediately preceding this passage. After David details for Solomon the design of the Temple and its vessels, he concludes: “All this, in writing, by the hand of the Lord upon me, He gave me understanding”—the entire work of the Temple and the order of its service were transmitted to him by God (see Shirat HaLeviim, p. 249).

Bach sees here a principle that includes music as well: it is not merely an ornament to the Temple service, nor merely a means directed toward that service; the musical order of the Temple itself was established by David in accordance with a Divine order.

C.

The third annotation concerns the very moment when the music of the Temple reaches its climax. In II Chronicles 5:12–13, at the dedication of the Temple, the Levite singers—Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun—are described with cymbals, harps, and lyres, accompanied by one hundred and twenty priests sounding trumpets. When the trumpeters and singers are heard “as one, to make one sound” in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, the House is filled with a cloud—a revelation of the glory of God.

Above this passage, the edition before Bach bore the heading “How the glory of the Lord appeared after the beautiful music.” Bach underlined in red the words “the beautiful music” in particular, and beside the verse added in his own hand:

“In devotional music, God is always present with His grace.”

These three annotations cast Bach’s world in a distinctive light. The music of the Temple in Jerusalem appears to him as the archetype of music at its highest level: music whose order is founded in the spirit of God, whose purpose is the service of God, and which itself becomes a dwelling place for the Divine Presence.

Perhaps this helps us understand more deeply why, for Bach, precise counterpoint, mathematical structure, and formal discipline do not stand in opposition to spiritual devotion. On the contrary: order itself becomes a vessel for holiness. Just as the music of the Levites was an ordered, carefully structured, and exacting service whose purpose was the indwelling of the Divine Presence, so too in Bach’s world the highest musical craftsmanship does not end in beauty; it seeks to become a vessel for something beyond itself.

Music That Stitches Heaven to Earth

Beneath the intricate notes, the mathematical fugues, and the exacting structures, Bach seeks more than aesthetic perfection. He seeks the spark. The soul. The Divine Presence behind the sounds.

His music was not born to entertain. It was born of deep faith, and it returns the listener — even without the listener intending it — to a sense of awe, yearning, and belonging to something beyond.

Bach stitches Heaven to Earth with a musical thread that is fine, exact, and eternal.

Every note is a stitch. Every work, an invisible bridge. He joins body to soul, the tangible to the infinite, what can be heard to what can only be felt.

And the more deeply we come to understand Bach, the more clearly we begin to discern what is missing after him. Beauty will continue to flower, harmonies will grow more refined, and sound more exquisite—yet the feeling left in the heart will be different.

Something has indeed disappeared.

Part Two | Between Bach and Mozart: As Faith Recedes into the Background

As we pass from Bach’s generation to the next, something exalted seems to dissolve and retreat from between the notes. The seam between Bach and Mozart — between spirit and form, between sanctity and aesthetics — marks a shift not only in musical style, but in consciousness itself.

Mozart — Sublime Beauty, but “Without the Soul”?

Mozart possesses an almost inconceivable musical perfection: every note sits in its place, the proportions are exact, nothing is excessive and nothing is lacking. He possesses a rare translucence: the music flows like a river of light, effortless, almost like nature itself. And he possesses genius of intuition — the sense that the work was not constructed from without, but flowed from within him already whole.

Yet amid all this beauty, some listeners feel the absence of an inward cry — the wound, the higher impulse that calls out to Heaven. Not because Mozart has no soul, but because his soul speaks another language.

Mozart was a man of faith; yet he was already a son of the Enlightenment. Faith is still present, but it is no longer the sole axis around which the work revolves. In Bach it is the heart of the ark; in Mozart it becomes part of the air, the light, the setting.

In Bach, every fugue is woven like a sacred curtain, every modulation an ascent upon Jacob’s ladder. He plays in order to serve God. In Mozart, every movement seems written to delight, refine, and uplift the spirit — but not necessarily to summon it toward Heaven.

Bach	Mozart
Prayer	Joy
Praise and the song of the soul	The perfection of Creation
A broken heart	A tender heart
Spirituality in action	Flowing beauty
A sanctuary	A palace filled with light

 

Glimmers of Faith in Mozart

In a letter to his father dated 4 April 1787, written after learning that his father was ill, Mozart reflected that death, when considered truly, is the ultimate purpose of life, and that he had learned to see it as “the key to our true happiness.” He thanked God for granting him the opportunity to know death in this light.[8]

These are not the words of a man without faith. They express a faith both simple and profound, and an acceptance of life and death within a Divine order. Yet here too the difference is clear: in Mozart, faith hovers like light above the music; in Bach, it builds the music from within.

Perhaps Mozart wrote the song of innocence before the rupture. Beethoven would bring pain, fracture, and the cry into music; Schubert would bring despair and longing; Mahler would struggle before an empty expanse. Mozart plays as though the world were still whole—and perhaps this is why he does not overwhelm us with tears, but with a delicate smile.

If Bach is a servant of God playing in spiritual attachment, Mozart is a child playing in a crystal palace—pure, luminous, and whole. And as you listen, you know: this too comes from Above.

The Mozart Effect — Beauty That Brings Order to the Soul

The term “Mozart effect” arose from an experiment in which listening to the Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K.448, produced a short-lived improvement in performance on a spatial-reasoning task.[9] It was not an experiment in music therapy, nor did it prove that Mozart “makes people smarter.” Yet it is striking that Mozart’s name, of all names, became a symbol for music that puts something in the mind into order.

The effect associated with his music requires no mystical explanation. It contains order, clarity, balance, and symmetry — qualities in which mind and soul can rest. This is music that illuminates the intellect; it may speak less directly to the broken heart, but it gives that heart room to breathe.

Pure beauty, too, can heal. It need not wound or weep in order to connect a person with the sublime. Sometimes the soul does not need a cry; it needs a beautiful place in which to rest.

In this sense, Mozart may be the last composer before the great rupture whose music preserves so natural a power of balance. This is not the conclusion of the scientific experiment, but a musical and psychological perception: Mozart’s clarity does not burden the soul; it restores its sense of order.

Part Three | After Mozart: What Was Lost

From the Temple to Man

As the spiritual and religious age of music recedes, the personal and artistic age gains strength. The centre of gravity shifts from music created “for the glory of God” to music as an expression of the human self — its personality, pain, freedom, and self-realisation.

One of the great turning points in this process is the French Revolution, which sought to uproot faith from the public sphere and sever humanity from religion.[10] The intention is not to generalise about the inner world of every composer, but to point to a cultural trend: art is no longer directed toward a purpose above man; the “I”—with its autonomy, experience, and self-expression—becomes an end in itself and moves to centre stage.

In the Baroque period, the composer works within a consciousness of an order greater than himself. He does not see himself merely as an “independent creator,” but also as a servant and an instrument. In Bach, this consciousness reaches its summit: music for the glory of God alone.

In the Classical period, the movement from sanctity to aesthetics begins. Culture gradually frees itself from religious institutions, though it is not yet severed from them. In Mozart, a pure faith remains — but it is a spiritual echo in the air, not the pillar of fire.

Beethoven — Man Takes the Place of God

Beethoven (1770–1827) was born into the world of the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the ideal of man as hero. He embodies the “new man” emerging from the old order: a man of freedom, struggle, heroism, and self-expression.

Early in his career, Beethoven saw Napoleon as a symbol of human liberty and intended his Third Symphony for him. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor, Beethoven struck his name from the title page so violently that he damaged the paper.[11] The moment captures his world: man searches for a hero, is disillusioned by him — and then places the human struggle itself at the centre.

In Beethoven, music is no longer primarily the service of a purpose above humanity; it becomes the arena in which humanity itself is revealed. An entire symphony becomes a journey of the soul: fate, battle, descent, overcoming, victory. Music no longer merely turns toward Heaven — it bears upon its shoulders the human being who seeks to become a hero.

From this point onward, the search for the self gathers force. In Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms we hear love, pain, death, soul, and memory; even when the composer believes in God, the artistic dialogue is no longer addressed to Him with the same directness. Mahler, Wagner, and Debussy offer mysticism and experiences of the sublime, but often without a clear address. In Mahler especially, the search for God sounds not like simple faith, but like a cry rising out of an inner void.

The line of rupture can therefore be drawn between Mozart and Beethoven. In Mozart, faith is still present; in Beethoven, it becomes an idea, a longing, a struggle — and at times music itself assumes its place. The world passes from “music directed toward God” to “music as God.”

Composer	Music as an Image
Bach	A sanctuary
Mozart	Beauty
Beethoven	A hero
Mahler	A man weeping beneath empty heavens

 

From a History Lesson—to Music Therapy

This transformation is not merely a chapter in music history. It also changes what music does to the soul.

Not all great music is necessarily healing music. At times, the deeper a work is, the deeper the pain it carries; and not every soul, at every hour, needs an encounter with an “open wound.” Some music allows us to meet pain. Other music helps us move beyond it.

Beethoven brings struggle, fracture, and a cry for redemption into music. Each symphony may sound like the story of a hero fighting between darkness and light. This can be uplifting, but it can also be demanding and heavy, especially in the late works.

Schubert wrote music of tenderness and delicacy, but often also of brokenness, solitude, and pain. In songs such as Der Leiermann and Gute Nacht, beauty does not conceal despair; at times it sharpens it. Mahler builds immense orchestras and vast harmonic worlds, yet within them the question resounds: Why? What is the meaning of existence? There are eruptions in his music — and there is emptiness.

Music can meet an emotional state in two simple movements. The first is matching: meeting a person where he or she is; a sorrowful person hears sorrowful music and feels that someone understands the pain. The second is guiding: choosing music that does not merely mirror the state, but gradually leads the soul toward a place more balanced, open, and filled with light.

Profound Romantic music can be exceptionally suited to the first movement. It gives pain a voice, but it does not always give pain a way out. Here lies the difference between tragic beauty and purifying beauty: in Bach, even lament can sound pure, almost like Kaddish; in Schubert, lament may sometimes embrace depression instead of releasing it.

The simple test is this: what happens to the soul after listening? If a sense of lightness, hope, or expansion remains, the music has refined you. If heaviness remains, perhaps this was not the right music for that moment. For a sensitive soul, prolonged listening to sorrowful and dramatic music may deepen the weight; music that is clear and ordered may allow the soul to breathe and regain its inner form.

For those seeking healing, it may sometimes be better to let Bach lift them upward than to let Schubert embrace them in tears.

Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven—the Portrait Already Tells the Story

Even before a single note is heard, the portraits of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven convey three different presences. A portrait cannot replace listening, but at times it gathers into one instant what the music reveals over the course of an hour.

Bach	Mozart	Beethoven
A noble, inward gaze	An open gaze	A pained, penetrating gaze
Inner devotion	An inward smile	Tense features
Faith and transcendence	Light and ease	Force and storm
A servant of God	A child of light	A hero in darkness

 

Bach appears noble and inwardly gathered, as one who stands before something greater than himself. Mozart conveys simplicity, charm, and refinement; his music seems to flow naturally, almost without struggle. Beethoven carries tension, force, and storm in his portraits. His life—deafness, solitude, crises, and unfulfilled loves—is etched into his gaze. For him, art is a battle for truth, not an ornament.

Bach seems to say, “Listen—and rise.” Mozart says, “Listen to me, delight, and rest.” Beethoven says, “Listen to me, confront, and awaken.” All three are true, and all three are profound—but each addresses a different place in the soul.

Who is filled with faith, who with beauty, and who with fire?

Bach: A Universal Musical Message

In light of all this, Bach—an emblem of music at its summit—bears an overarching message that touches the very foundation of art.

Artists, composers, and listeners, including those who do not believe, are moved by Bach because through him they hear what the soul has always sought: meaning. Faith. A bond with the sublime.

The greatest music is music that reminds us that we are not alone; that Someone is listening, Someone before whom and toward whom we play.

This is not merely a “religious message.”

It is a musical, human, and universal insight.

And in Bach we can hear the fulfilment of the Zohar’s prophecy:[12] in the sixth millennium the gates of wisdom are opened, and the musical wisdom of the nations of the world also bursts forth and ascends—as part of the world’s preparation for redemption, “to perfect the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty.”

Perhaps this is the secret of the “composer of the sixth millennium”: not merely to bring music to its summit, but to return the summit of human creativity to its Divine source.

“For then I will transform the peoples to a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord and serve Him with one accord.”[13]

 

Notes

1. This association was brought to my attention by Dr Yuval Rabin, an internationally renowned organist and Bach specialist. The German word Bach means a brook—Hebrew yuval, as in “he shall spread out his roots by the river” (Jeremiah 17:8) and “streams of water” (Isaiah 30:25; 44:4). It also recalls the first Yuval, “the father of all who play the lyre and pipe” (Genesis 4:21), whose name is associated with the leading forth of melody; see the discourses of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Ethalech—Liozna, p. 72. On Bach as the master of musical movement, see Ernst Kurth, Foundations of Linear Counterpoint, who notes that soon after Bach, classical music lost something of the “energy” that propels musical motion. It is also worth noting that the letters B–A–C–H form a four-note musical figure with which Bach signed his final work, and, according to some, other works as well.

2. Telemann alone appears to have surpassed Bach in the number of works he composed; yet in the power of musical form, harmony, and polyphony, Bach’s primacy remains unchallenged.

3. Pirkei Avot 6:11.

5. Deuteronomy 4:35.

6. See Rema, Orach Chaim 156; and, at greater length, “A Halachic Inquiry into the Organ of a Non-Jew” (Hebrew), where further sources are cited.

7. Maimonides, conclusion of Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings and Their Wars and the King Messiah, in the uncensored text.

8. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, letter to Leopold Mozart, Vienna, 4 April 1787 (Bauer–Deutsch 1044).

9. Frances H. Rauscher, Gordon L. Shaw, and Katherine N. Ky, “Music and Spatial Task Performance,” Nature 365 (1993), p. 611.

10. See the discourse for Parashat Vayeshev 5752 (1991), section 5, where the sources are cited.

11. Autograph manuscript of the Third Symphony, Op. 55, Beethoven-Haus Bonn. Napoleon’s erased name remains visible on the title page.

12. See Likkutei Sichot, vol. 15, Noach, discourse 2, where the sources are cited; and Music in the Light of Chasidic Thought, introduction, p. 16.

13. Zephaniah 3:9.

Author’s Note

Words written to me by Drora Bruck were among the first impulses that led to “The Secret of Bach.” Bruck, a distinguished recorder artist, served on the jury of an international recorder competition in which I took part in 1999. In the semifinal round, I performed Bach’s Sonata, BWV 1030. Twenty years later, in 2019, she wrote to me:

“Of course I remember your playing in the competition, even though twenty years have passed. You played a Bach sonata — and to this day I remember the extraordinary tempo you chose, and the way you shaped the phrases: it sounded as though you were praying through those sounds. I found myself thinking that there was a profound spiritual connection through which you had entered Bach’s music. Bach himself was, as you surely know, a deeply religious man — and I felt that something in your own connection, as a religious and spiritual person, met the spirituality in Bach’s music in a way that cannot be explained in words.”