A congregation in Leipzig, Germany, heard the St John Passion of JS Bach for the first time today in 1724, a Good Friday. Four days before the performance, Bach was forced to change venue to the St Nicholas Church (above), but managed to get the church’s defective harpsichord repaired in time. The Passion retells the story of Jesus’ suffering and death in John’s Gospel in dramatic musical form, and was innovative at the time. It is reckoned to be one of Bach’s greatest musical works.
It is the birthday of the poet William Wordsworth, born today in 1770 in Cockermouth, a town in England’s Lake District. He was baptised a year later when his sister Dorothy was born, and the two of them remained close the whole of their lives.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended…
William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
The painter El Greco died today in 1614 in Toledo, Spain. A native of Crete, and originally a painter of icons, he moved to Rome and then to Spain in his 30s, where he settled and was always known as ‘the Greek’ (‘El Greco’). His dramatic, visionary art, in which the spiritual world is frequently made visible, was regarded as eccentric and even mad in his own time, but has been appreciated and influential since the beginning of the 20th century.
Today in 1779, Revd James Hackman, the Vicar of Wireton, shot Martha Ray, the celebrated singer and the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, in Covent Garden. He had quit the army and taken holy orders to woo her, and when that failed, decided to kill her instead.
Revd Teddy Boston, known affectionately as ‘the fat clergyman’, opened a railway which he had built in the garden of his rectory in Cadeby, Leicestershire, today in 1963. The centrepiece was Pixie, a steam engine Boston had restored, which was soon followed by ‘the Terror’, an engine he rescued from a scrapyard in Shropshire. Unsurprisingly, Boston was a good friend of another railway reverend, Wilbert Awdry, creator of Thomas the Tank Engine.
It is St Francis Xavier’s birthday. One of the original Jesuits and the greatest missionary of his age, he was born in Navarre (now the Basque region of Spain) in 1506. He sailed from Lisbon for Goa, in southwest India, on the same day in 1541, his 35th birthday.
Edward Oldcorne was hung, drawn and quartered today in 1606 for suspected involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, and for being a Jesuit priest. He had been a schoolfriend of Guy Fawkes, and when the plot was discovered, hid in a priest hole at Hindlip Hall while the house was repeatedly searched, only giving himself up after eight days. He was beatified in 1929.
Image: Simon Jenkins