Alle Menschen müssen sterben, BWV 643

Last Thursday, my great friend and last (both in terms of the last I had and will have) racing "partner", Bob Urban, passed away from pancreatic cancer in Clatskanie, Oregon.

Bob was originally from Brooklyn, and was a really tough guy when he was young. He found Jesus, and while he was always a tough guy, he was kind, caring, compassionate and honest. Not a bad string of adjectives to describe someone...

He spent most of his adult life in Florida, and had only moved to Oregon a few years ago.

THANK YOU, Bob - for everything...

This hymn for the dying originated in 1652, with the anonymous melody dating from 1687. Bach gives it the simple treatment, presenting the chorale in the top voice (which I double with the lower octave on the repeat of the first stanza to change the colour) over an ever-present rhythmic motive. The latter is often seen to be the ‘joy motive’ in Bach, which is why this chorale prelude is sometimes heard in a rather quick tempo. I don’t see it that way. Death was certainly, in Bach’s Lutheran creed, a welcome relief from the burdens of life on earth, and the gate to eternal life, but surely it is a more contemplative joy that is being expressed here. The false relation between the C sharp and the C natural in the last bar cannot be heard properly in too fast a tempo. So much of Bach’s greatest music was written on the theme of death: after all, he was no stranger to it, having lost both his parents by the age of ten, his first wife while he was away from home, and eleven of his twenty children. This short prelude captures, in just a few lines, his faith, his joy, and, above all, his musical perfection.