The walk I admire most began in the autumn of 1705.

Johann Sebastian Bach, aged twenty, walked hundreds of kilometres from Arnstadt to Lübeck, to hear Dieterich Buxtehude play.

Questioned on his return, he said he had gone “to comprehend one thing and another about his art.”

Ambition is admiration that starts walking.

Whose work have you admired enough to go and see for yourself?

Going deeper

Before a great body of work there is often a long walk toward someone else’s.

In the autumn of 1705, Johann Sebastian Bach was twenty and the organist of the New Church in Arnstadt. Far to the north, in Lübeck, Dieterich Buxtehude played at St Mary’s, where his evening concerts, the Abendmusiken, had made him famous far beyond the city. Bach set out on foot. Accounts of the distance vary with the route, but all of them run to hundreds of kilometres. When the church authorities in Arnstadt asked him about the journey afterwards, he gave his reason in a single line: he had gone to comprehend one thing and another about his art.

The phrase is modest, almost dry. What it describes is not. Admiration, for most people, stays a feeling. For a few it becomes a direction. Whoever walks toward the work they admire is choosing to be changed by it, and accepting in advance that they will come home different.

The same pattern runs through the lives of great makers. Painters travel to stand in front of one canvas. Scientists cross oceans to spend a season in one laboratory. Writers copy out the pages of authors they love, to feel the sentences from the inside. The visible ambition, the ambition to make, grows out of a quieter one: the ambition to understand someone else’s best work completely.

There is generosity in it too. To admire fully is to take another person’s achievement seriously enough to cross a country for it. Buxtehude is remembered today as one of the composers who inspired the young Bach, and the music Bach went on to write has carried that journey forward for more than three centuries.

Great careers rarely begin with a plan. Many begin with music someone could not stop thinking about, and the decision to go and hear it.

Sources

Gresham College: Walking to Fame, Bach’s Visit to Buxtehude · St Marien Lübeck: Dieterich Buxtehude · BBC Music Magazine: Buxtehude, the Danish composer who inspired Bach