Have I really achieved what I set out to do in this study of Bach's Passions? Is this anything more than a reasonably thorough – if sometimes perverse – study of these works, adorned with various cultural metaphors (ones that, many might believe, are surely more ephemeral than Bach's music)? I have certainly tried to use a very wide range of historical, philosophical and theoretical sources, although anyone familiar with this sort of literature will realize that most of the figures with whom I have engaged come more from the mainstream of thought on modernity than from its sensationalist borders. If it still seems that I should rather have produced a more systematic guide to the Passions, somehow revealing ‘the truth’ of Bach's genius, I would certainly have failed in my enterprise, on virtually every level. For the attitude I have been adopting would tend to stress that concepts such as ‘a systematic guide’, or of a form of universal, transcendent, truth lying in art, are themselves historically conditioned. The value of this music lies, I claim, not in any universal revelation it might offer (such a notion is perfectly understandable as a form of belief, but not necessarily as scholarship), but in the way it can imply a powerful dynamic relating to the modern condition. While much about this music has proved to be valuable throughout many eras within this broader condition (its highest point of appreciation being perhaps in the nineteenth century, which was in some ways the zenith of modernity), I suggest it is particularly significant in embodying the way many movements in modernity have interacted with forms of thought surviving from pre-modern practices.