Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March O.S. 21 March 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival, he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time. Wikipedia, Bach
He buried his wife and watched 10 of his 20 children die. Then he sat down and wrote some of the most beautiful music humanity has ever heard.
In 1720, Johann Sebastian Bach returned home from a trip to find his wife Maria Barbara dead and already buried.
She was 35 years old. They'd been married for thirteen years. She'd given him seven children. And while he was away working, she had died suddenly—possibly from a stroke or illness—and been buried before anyone could reach him to tell him.
He came home to an empty house and children who'd already said goodbye to their mother without him.
The grief must have been unbearable.
But grief was something Bach knew intimately. Of his twenty children—seven with Maria Barbara, thirteen with his second wife Anna Magdalena—ten died in infancy or early childhood.
Ten children. Imagine burying ten of your own children.
In the 18th century, child mortality was common. Families expected to lose children. But expecting it doesn't make it hurt less. Knowing other families suffer the same losses doesn't ease the pain of standing over your own child's grave.
Four daughters. Six sons. Each one a life barely begun, extinguished before they could grow, before they could become whoever they might have been.
Each one a piece of Bach's heart buried in the ground.
How does a person survive that? How do you wake up the next morning and continue living when half your children are dead and your wife is gone?
For most people, that kind of loss would be paralyzing. Devastating. The end of joy, the end of creativity, the end of any ability to see beauty in the world.
Bach did something different.
He composed.
Not simple music. Not forgettable tunes to pass the time. Some of the most profound, complex, emotionally devastating and transcendently beautiful music ever created by human hands.
The Brandenburg Concertos. The Goldberg Variations. The Mass in B Minor. The Cello Suites. The St. Matthew Passion. The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Music that, three hundred years later, still makes people weep. Still gives them chills. Still feels like touching something eternal.
How? How did a man drowning in grief create works of such beauty?
The answer is written on the manuscripts themselves.
At the beginning of his compositions, Bach often inscribed two letters: J.J.
Jesu Juva. "Jesus, help."
At the end, three more letters: S.D.G.
Soli Deo Gloria. "Glory to God alone."
Every piece of music—from the simplest chorale to the most complex fugue—was bracketed by prayer. A plea for help at the start. An offering of glory at the finish.
For Bach, music wasn't entertainment. It wasn't about fame or impressing wealthy patrons or securing better employment (though he needed all those things to feed his large family).
Music was theology. It was worship. It was a conversation between his broken, grieving soul and the God he believed held all things together even when they felt like they were falling apart.
When Bach sat at his keyboard after burying another child, after returning to find his wife already in the ground, after enduring loss that would shatter most people—he didn't stop believing in beauty. He didn't stop believing in order. He didn't stop believing that meaning could be wrung from suffering.
He wrote "Jesu Juva" at the top of the page and began to compose.
Bach was a devout Lutheran living in a time when faith was woven into every aspect of daily life. But his faith wasn't abstract theology—it was intensely personal, forged in the furnace of real suffering.
Listen to the St. Matthew Passion—his musical setting of Christ's crucifixion. It's devastating. The pain is palpable. The anguish is real. This isn't distant, intellectual meditation on suffering. This is a man who knows what loss feels like, channeling all of it into music that expresses the agony of watching someone you love die.
But it doesn't end in despair. It ends in resurrection. In hope. In the belief that death isn't the final word.
That's what sustained Bach. Not denial of pain, but faith that pain wasn't meaningless. That suffering could be transformed into something that glorified God and moved human hearts.
His contemporaries didn't always appreciate what he was doing. Some thought his music was too complex, too intellectual, too dense. Why so many notes? Why such elaborate counterpoint? Couldn't he write something simpler, more accessible?
But Bach wasn't trying to write simple. He was trying to write true—music that matched the complexity of faith, the intricacy of creation, the profound mystery of a God who allows suffering but also offers comfort.
Every fugue with its multiple voices weaving together was a reflection of divine order. Every cantata was a sermon in music. Every chorale was a prayer.
"Soli Deo Gloria." Glory to God alone.
Not glory to Bach's genius—though he was a genius. Not glory to the court that employed him or the church that commissioned his work. Glory to God alone.
This was a man who'd lost half his children, buried his first wife, worked grueling jobs for insufficient pay, dealt with difficult employers and political intrigue, struggled with failing eyesight in his later years, and died relatively unknown and underappreciated.
And his response to all of it was: make beautiful things and give God the glory.
After Bach died in 1750, his music was largely forgotten for decades. His sons were more famous than he was. People considered him old-fashioned, too baroque, too complicated for the emerging classical style.
It took nearly a century for the world to rediscover what he'd created.
In 1829, a young composer named Felix Mendelssohn conducted a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion—the first performance since Bach's death. The audience was stunned. How had this masterpiece been forgotten?
The "Bach Revival" began. Musicians and scholars started studying his works, publishing his manuscripts, performing his compositions. They realized what they'd lost—what they'd almost let disappear forever.
Today, Bach is considered one of the greatest composers who ever lived. His music is performed daily around the world. Scientists have sent his compositions into space on the Voyager spacecraft as examples of human achievement. His works are studied, analyzed, revered.
But more than that—his music still does what it was meant to do. It still moves people. Still brings comfort. Still feels like prayer.
When you listen to the Cello Suites, you don't just hear technical mastery. You hear a soul wrestling with beauty and pain. When you listen to the Mass in B Minor, you don't just hear notes—you hear faith made audible.
You hear a man who lost almost everything, asking God for help, and then offering everything he created back as glory.
Jesu Juva. Lord, help me begin.
Soli Deo Gloria. All glory belongs to You.
Three hundred years later, Johann Sebastian Bach's prayer continues. Every time his music is performed, every time someone hears it and feels their heart stirred, every time beauty breaks through suffering—it's still happening.
A grieving father sitting at a keyboard, writing "Jesus, help" at the top of a page, pouring his broken heart into notes and measures, and ending with "Glory to God alone."
He buried his wife. He buried ten of his twenty children. He endured poverty, loss, grief, and obscurity.
And he created music that still, centuries later, reminds us that beauty can emerge from suffering. That faith can survive devastating loss. That meaning can be made from pain.
That even in the darkest moments, when everything feels broken, a human being can still create something eternal.
Jesu Juva. Soli Deo Gloria.
Lord, help. Glory to God alone. [anon]
Hughes
schools on the hill of Sion—'out of Sion hath God appeared in perfect beauty.' So long as this principle was recognised in musical academies, there were composers of the highest class; devoid of it, the highest order of compositions disappeared." "Power over music does not depend solely on the mere agreement of 'how to do it.' The student in song will never learn the perfection of beauty except from the preparation of the heart. To make a real musician, there must be a sense of the ever-presence of the Creator of all beauty. The boy-musician must begin his day with prayer, and end it with praise. This made Handel, Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. Music is neither dram nor sweetmeat, neither sensual nor intellectual. It is made so now; but in this order of music there is neither joy nor love, thankfulness nor reverence." [Harmonies of Tones and Colours, Fragments from Dr. Gauntlett's Last Note-book, page 51]