David Lang

So how does that work?

I love Bach, but I'm not Christian.

So there's a limit to how close I can get to the true emotion of what those pieces are really aiming for.

And I went to the St.

Matthew Passion, which I love, and I thought, you know, what gives the Passion format its power?

It's people looking at the suffering of Jesus and then saying to themselves, maybe noticing that suffering could make me a better person if noticing that suffering could change my life.

I could be a better person.

We could live in a better world.

So I took Hans Christian Andersen's story of the little match girl, the poor girl who is trying to sell matches on a cold street and dies freezing to death and goes to heaven.

And I intercut that with the crowd scenes from the Bach St.

Matthew Passion, where the crowd is responding to the suffering of Jesus Christ.

So I took Jesus out, and I put the little match girl in, and I didn't really know what was going to happen.

I thought maybe this is an experiment which will be completely blasphemous, and people will be throwing bricks through my windows and things like this.

And instead you won a Pulitzer Prize for it.

Yeah, I took it really seriously.

I was surprised and very happy that it meant something to people, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.

And after that...

I had immediately a lot of requests to write other vocal music, which I'd never really thought of before.

And when I started doing it, I decided that I really loved it, that it really was a huge part of something that I'd been missing.

I don't really know what took me so long.