"If you're in this hospital and have this virus: It kills everything!" If you immediately think of Corona when you hear this lustful deep sigh from a Swiss Bach Festival visitor, you're fortunately wrong.
Only Johann Sebastian Bach and his families, the small and the large, who come together at the Leipzig Festival are highly infectious here.
The smaller, although quite extensive by today's standards: Bach with his diversely branched, also music-making ancestors, sons and other exemplary and corresponding professional colleagues.
The big one: everyone who feels connected to Bach's world of sound and spirit and who is not only happily infected, but who, after two years clouded by the pandemic, can finally live out this intoxicating disease again as a self-confessed community in the authentic place.
Choirs, colleges and associations from Japan to Paraguay, most of them named after Bach, have come to sing in cantatas, church services and motets: 31 including the local scene.
Ticket orders have so far come from 51 countries.
"We are family" - this year's motto of the festival, which runs until June 19, has a good chance of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is also often the case at other festival locations that art guests who have traveled to the city add the yeast to the urban dough.
But you will have to search a long time to experience such an intensive (and hitherto weather-friendly) permeation of normal urban life with the festivities, as it does not take place here in Leipzig in a delimited district, but from Bach's main churches St. Thomas and St. Nikolai floods into the urban space.
The Thomaskirchhof, with the monument to the composer and the adjacent restaurants, becomes an art marketplace that is visited from all sides and used as a meeting place;
Again and again musicians cross paths with their groups of instruments, artists and visitors often meet in the same cafés and beer gardens, and if you prefer to travel back in time,
Two hundred meters further on you can see the tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson rehearsing the technique for his spectacular solo St. John Passion, with which he thrilled streaming audiences around the world two years ago in an empty St. Thomas Church due to the pandemic, now on the big market stage, as a kind of advance announcement and a free gift for passers-by in a hurry: spontaneous applause here, certainly also from many who otherwise did not have the Bach Festival on their agenda.
The performance itself, in which the singer is only accompanied by a percussionist and a keyboard artist, then shows the audience the astonishing combination of quiet bodily pleasures and devotional, as it were timeless emotion;
the front rows have simply settled down on the market square pavement,