Another composer who is likely to have been awaited by readers of a blog with this title is the great J Sebastian Bach, mountain of the North German musical landscape and foundation stone of much teaching of music theory. Ash Wednesday gives me an excuse to return to a set work from my A Level Music studies (I won’t reveal quite how long ago that was…), the cantata Ich Elender Mesch BWV 48. It wasn’t written for Ash Wednesday – indeed, by tradition much of Lent is music-less in Church settings – but for the 19^th Sunday after Trinity, occurring in early October 1723. Its focus is the reading of the day from Romans Chapter 7, which gives the penitential link.

The first movement of the cantata sets the text ‘Ich elender Mensch, wer wird mich erlösen vom Leibe dieses Todes’ which we can translate as ‘Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?’ so I hope we can see the propriety of reflecting on the piece for the start of Lent.

The music rather emphasises the wretchedness, with a minor key and a pattern of descending pairs of quavers imitating sobbing; the vocal lines implore salvation by arching upwards, but nevertheless dwell rather in the unhappy current state. So, a first theological question is whether the reality of sin and the necessity of repentance necessarily imply misery? While the fact that we never live up to our own expectations – let alone those of others, let alone those of God – is not itself something to delight in, the good news of Christ is that sin is not to be borne by us. Indeed St Paul follows the very lament set immediately with a thanks to God through Christ. The process of repentance involves a repudiation of what we have done wrong, and a level of revulsion towards it, but not necessarily the sustained brooding upon it that is reflected in the music.

Moreover, it is not entirely clear that what St Paul meant by ταλαίπωρος is completely overlapping with the semantic range of the German elend or the English wretched. While both of those do imply misery, the Greek is composed of τάλαντον (a weight) and πεῖρα (a trial). To bear the weight of a trial is inevitably hard work, and something one might wish to avoid, but it is a task to be undertaken for a while rather than a state of mind to identify oneself with. It is no trial to spend time listening to Bach, however, and the cantata, while I remain unconvinced by the pain implied in its word painting, is certainly spiritual solace for our first steps into this season of preparation/discipline/discipleship/catechesis/penitence/constancy/fasting/loving/hoping/watching…