...The day I read that when Bach died
he had eleven shirts at the laundry
was the day I began to hear him
enough to learn him. Jesus breathed
and sweated. Bach got his shirts dirty.
It wasn't the Passion of St. Matthew
or some hymn lifted through the diapason
that he went out on, but the chance note
of the young lover he had been, a G,
midrange, that I could learn to sing.

-W. A. Mathieu, "Bach Dying," in The Musical Life