Just some thoughts now that we have had time to digest the Bach feast. I listened to, and enjoyed, quite a lot of it (and so it seems did our little one who slept much better during those ten days than before or since). The highlight for me was the arrival on Christmas Eve of the B minor Mass - and I have been trying to work out why. I know far too little of the complete works to know where this features in the 'great works' stakes, but I have a suspicion that more than anything else it was the language of the Mass that did it for me. Notwithstanding the fact that my German is far better than my Latin and that I listen to a fair amount of sung German as a matter of course, the B minor setting just seemed right. However, it is also true to say that I understand - in the sense of knowing what's going on - far more of the Latin Mass than the same in German purely through familiarity, and cannot un-hear the church-ness of it. So, to anyone who has no experience of, or at least no particular associations with, the Mass [I]in context[/I] do you find anything inherently musical in the Latin text itself? Did you object to the overwhelming Christianity of the whole thing (as some who e-mailed the beeb appear to?) To the Bachians - did Bach write [I]differently[/I] for Latin and German or is it Catholic compared to Lutheran? (Though as I understand it the Latin settings were still used in the Lutheran Church.) Oh, and a Happy New Year (based on the err, - Roman calender)