The recital we heard in the Thomaskirche, played by the great Dutch organist Jacques van Oortmerssen, began with works by Bach's pupils and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, but ended with one of Johann Sebastian's finest organ works, the G minor Prelude and Fugue. This brought home to us the infinite distance between the master and his apprentices. 

Leipzig is full of homages to Bach, who came as close to sainthood as Luther could allow. (In the Bach museum, there is even a little casket with relics found in the grave of the great man and his wife Anna Magdalena when they were exhumed.) The worst of these homages is the huge bronze statue erected in front of the Thomaskirche a century ago: pompous and imposing, it is a typical product of Imperial Germany. 

Under an ancient tree a few feet away, however, stands the modest yet much more elegant Bach monument of 1843 that was designed and paid for by Felix Mendelssohn, the man who did more than any other to revive Bach in the romantic era. The Nazis tried to erase Mendelssohn from the canon of German composers, but they did not dare to demolish this earliest of all monuments to Bach. Surmounted by a bust of the master, it is decorated by angels, one of whom is playing the organ. The memorial is, in its way, perfect; and it is also a poignant expression of the Jewish love of German culture, a love that, even as it did so much to enhance that culture, was destined to remain unrequited.