The German baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach (above) died tonight in 1750 after suffering a stroke. In his final week, he revised an organ piece he had first worked on years before, with the apt title, ‘When I am in the greatest distress’. He knew, though, that the melody was from an old hymn book, and had been sung to a different hymn, ‘Before your throne I now appear’, so he gave the revised piece this new title. It was with these thoughts that he died just after 8.15pm.
Before your throne I now appear,
O God, and bid you humbly,
Turn not your gracious face
From me, a poor sinner.
Hymn by Bodo von Hodenberg
Gudina Tumsa, Ethiopian theologian and leader of the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, disappeared tonight in 1979. He was seized after a Bible study in Addis Ababa by the secret police of the Derg communist regime, which had overthrown the government of Haile Selassie. Tumsa had refused to work for the regime, and when friends arranged for him and his family to be spirited to safety in Tanzania, he had responded: ‘Don’t tempt me! Here is my church and my congregation. How can I, as a church leader, leave my flock at this moment of trial?’ Years later, it was discovered that he had been murdered the same night. He is known as ‘the Ethiopian Bonhoeffer’.
‘As someone has said, when a person is called to follow Christ, that person is called to die. It means a redirection of the purpose of life that is death to one’s own wishes and personal desires, and finding the greatest satisfaction in living for and serving the one who died for us and was raised from death.’ Gudina Tumsa, ‘The Role of a Christian in a Given Society’
The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was born today in 1844, in Stratford, Essex. Caught between his passionate creativity as a poet, and his call to humility and self-denial as a Jesuit, he saw only a few of his poems published during his lifetime. He is now reckoned as one of the greatest poets in the English langauge.
Antonio Vivaldi, the Italian baroque composer, who deeply influenced the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, died on exactly the same day as Bach, but nine years earlier, today in 1741. In the final decade of his life, his music went out of fashion, leaving Vivaldi impoverished. He sold off his old manuscripts, which helped him raise enough money to move from Venice to Vienna, where he hoped to revive his fortunes at the court of Emperor Charles VI. But the Emperor died suddenly on a hunting trip, after eating death cap mushrooms (according to Voltaire), and Vivaldi had no Plan B. He died a few months later and was buried the same day in an unmarked grave in the Bürgerspital cemetery.
The Roman Emperor Theodosius II fell off his horse and died today in 450. The theological ramifications of this were enormous. Theodosius had been backing the bishops who believed that Jesus had one nature, a mixture of human and divine. His sister Pulcheria, who now took over, called the Council of Chalcedon and backed the opposing bishops, who said Jesus had both natures unmixed, and this became the permanent dogma of the Church.