"Intet nytt under solen", Bach er og har vært inspirasjonskilde for svært mange skapende mennesker - uavhengig av kunstform og sjanger. Albert Schweitzer mente alt fører til Bach, i forståelsen at Bach var et vendepunkt som alt pekte frem mot før, og alt i ettertid pekte tilbake til. 

Peter Sellars er en amerikansk teaterregissør, kjent for sine unike samtidsoppsetninger av klassiske og moderne operaer og skuespill. Sellars er professor ved University of California, Los Angeles, hvor han underviser i kunst som sosial handling og kunst som moralsk handling.

Bach wrote the music for us to place everything we hope and care about into the vessel of this music (St. Matthew Passion).

- Peter Sellars

Sir Simon Rattle was in no doubt: the performance of the St Matthew Passion which he realised together with the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Rundfunkchor Berlin in 2010 was for him "the single most important thing we ever did here". Critics around the world agreed. They praised the outstanding musical interpretation of the soloists, choir and orchestra and the semi-staged production by director Peter Sellars. But although he brings powerful images to the stage, dramatic effects are by no means the focus. "It's not theatre," according to Sellars, "it's a prayer, a meditation." Making this tangible is the real aim of this haunting performance.

 "It's not theatre, it's a prayer, a meditation." 

- Peter Sellars about the performance of St Matthew Passion in Berlin

The Polar Music Prize 2014 was awarded to Peter Sellars from Pittsburgh, USA. 

The director Peter Sellars is a living definition of what the Polar Music Prize is all about: highlighting the music and presenting it in a new context. With his controversial productions of opera and theatre, Peter Sellars has depicted everything from war and famine to religion and globalisation. Sellars has set Mozart in the luxury of Trump Tower and in the drug trade of Spanish Harlem, turned Nixon's visit to China into opera and set Kafka's obsession with home cleanliness to music. Peter Sellars shows us that classical music is not about dusty sheet music and metronomic precision, but that classical music, with its violent power and complexity, has fundamentally always been and will continue to be a way of reflecting and depicting the world.

We're all on Earth to be creative, to change things, to make powerful transformations in our lives and the world around us.

- Peter Sellars, LA Times (May 2013)