Of the Harmony of Strings and the Dissonance of Souls: An Essay on Inner Peace

I sit at my desk, still filled with the echoes of this evening at the Matthäuskirche in Stuttgart. It was my second concert of this second International Bach Festival, which, following its brilliant premiere last year, has already become an indispensable anchor for our city.

One must truly consider the devotion shown by the musicians and the entire organizational team of the International Bach Academy. Whether here in their home of Stuttgart or on the Gaechinger Kantorei’s travels to the far corners of the world: what is achieved here through the utmost discipline and hard work is nothing less than the offering of one of the most precious spiritual enrichments available on this planet. It is the construction of order out of chaos, of beauty out of silence.

Yet, while we basked in the safety of this quality, the words of Kiya Tabassian, with whom I gladly exchanged words after the concert, echoed in my mind. He began by saying: "Persia is a very old civilization and needs freedom." A sentence that hovered like a memorial over the program "From Saxony to Persia." For while we celebrated the bridge between Bach and the Persian mystic Omar Khayyam, the world beyond our church walls is burning.

What kind of creatures are we, we humans? We are capable of erecting cathedrals of sound with infinite effort, while simultaneously destroying the physical foundations of our lives with technical coldness. Let us look at the naked, cruel figures of this March 2026: In Iran, we already count over 1,444 dead—some sources even speak of over 3,000, including nearly 1,300 civilians. A single strike in Minab extinguished 165 lives in a school... On the Israeli side, there have been 19 fatalities to date. Every single life lost is one life too many, and yet the question of the discrepancy forces itself upon us. Political science explains it to us soberly: it is the superiority of technology. Here, the "Iron Dome" through a complex, reliable defense organization; there, in many ways, chaos and vulnerability. We have learned to defend ourselves almost perfectly and to kill one another almost perfectly—but have we learned, after all the philosophy, religions, sports, and so on, have we learned to master ourselves?

Montaigne once wrote: "On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom." We carry our inner unrest within us and, naturally, project it outward. Is the war between Israel and Iran not another large-scale projection of those battles we fight within ourselves—the conflict between fear and trust, between the destructive impulse and the creative will?

The true tragedy lies in the fact that problems usually do not exist between us as humans, but within us. If the lust for destruction is a part of our nature, how can we tame it? The concert tonight was an answer: it was an exercise in resonance. It proved that the "freedom" Tabassian demanded for Persia is not only freedom from external chains, but the freedom for spiritual encounter.

Ultimately, I ask myself: what do I really know? Perhaps our human culture is only a thin veneer over an abyss. But as long as some people are willing to work as hard for beauty as the Bach Academy does, there remains the hope that we might eventually learn collectively to tune the strings within us so they are no longer drawn into a bow of war.