This weekend is remembrance Sunday. The grief overwhelms people. But there are many places and ways of consolation, as Marianne Ludwig told.
Bach’s musical monument
As the 35-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach returns after a multi-week business trip to his family in Köthen back, he learns that he has become a widower. About a week before, died his wife Maria Barbara suddenly, and was already at 7. July 1720 buried. Bach now has to provide alone for his four small children. A solace he finds in music. For his dead wife, Bach writes the “Chaconne in d minor.”
With the Chaconne, he puts his wife’s personal musical tomb. The music reveals something of his religious rings with this loss, his despair and his hope. With his music he has listened to a bridge built to that other world, of Maria Barbara for him.
Bach wrote the Chaconne in d minor: This key is considered to be particularly sad and gloomy. However, Bach is not in this key. In the middle part of the Chaconne, Bach alternates to D-major. With bright sounds and percussive rhythms of the violin overcomes everything Melancholy of the other two parts. So to speak, with drums and trumpets is celebrated resurrection. But Bach remains musically in the sky, but returns in the final part of the Chaconne again to earth: it ends as it began, namely, in d minor.
A nonsensical note at the end of hope
Anyone who has ever mourned a loved one, know this: In the sadness of other feelings mixed, negative and positive. The silence in the apartment is to Cry, but the image of the grandson of triggers at the same time a Smile. The anger is about the Partner, is no longer there, in addition to the gratitude for the time together. The relief that the Suffering of the Dying is coming to an end, not take away the memory of the moments of death. And maybe the nonsensical sham grows on the grave at the same time, the end of hope, that death has the last word.
Grief encompasses a whole bundle of feelings. They are often contradictory and mix with each other. The voltage, which arises from it, is often difficult to bear.
A Psalmbeter a lack of respect found for the following words: “My flesh and my heart hunger; the Rock of my heart and my inheritance to God in eternity.” (Ps. 73,26) Both stands abruptly and hard side by side: the body and the mind are powerless and in a free-fall. A Grieving often feels as if he would plunge into an abyss..
A saving Rock
But in the sadness, a truth that is greater than our life is mixed: In the fall of the saving Rock. To him I can cling to me in order to survive. He provides me with the necessary support, I pull myself up and back on solid ground under the feet can get. For the Psalmbeter this truth is an eternal law.
And Johann Sebastian Bach has been found in the Chaconne of the same comfort and shown.
Because in the melody Bach has incorporated an Easter song: “Christ lag in todesbanden/for our sin given/is purchased/and has done the life./We should be joyful/ praise God and be thankful/ and sing Hallelujah. Hallelujah.“
A musical tomb, which ends in a doxology, one Hallelujah?
The vibration of the human being Johann Sebastian Bach by the loss of his beloved wife, even the fact of death. But the nature of the loss; for Bach, death is not the end, but the goal of the earthly life. Behind the gate to another world, to which the Worshipper of the 73 opens. Psalm hopes: “The Rock of my heart and my inheritance to God in eternity.”