How Bach’s Music Shaped My Life Between Creation and Destruction
- Mar 15
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 17
Written by Sophie Reyer, Author
Sophie Anna Reyer is an Austrian author of multiple theater pieces and publications. She was born in Vienna, Austria. Reyer discovered her various profound talents in the arts at a young age as a child prodigy.
A childhood encounter with the thunderous sound of an organ sparked a lifelong fascination with music, imagination, and the mysterious power of creation. Through memories, literature, and the music of Bach, this reflection explores the delicate balance between creation and destruction that shapes both art and the human soul.
The first sound that shook me
My deepest musical encounter as a child was with an organ. Back then, my grandmother worked as a housekeeper for a pastor who lived on a farm opposite her house with the three birches. She cooked for him, washed his clothes, led the church choir, and played the organ during mass.
When I was four, I was allowed to accompany her to the church. I marveled at the frescoes on the ceiling, which seemed far away and distant like the sky, and let my grandmother lift me onto the pew beside her. My feet, clad in shiny patent shoes, dangled helplessly into the void. The huge vaulted space amplified every sound many times over. I ducked my head. “Don’t touch the pedals,” my grandmother said.
And exactly the same thing happened as always when a curious child is told not to do something. I became even more curious. The subconscious knows no negation. Where a prohibition is spoken, it becomes a command. Even before the pastor, whom my brother and I always called “Gaia,” after the Celtic mother goddess, since we couldn’t pronounce “Pfarrer,” could begin his sermon, I wiggled, slid from my seat, and pressed the wooden pedalboard with my right foot.
At that moment, the entire room began to vibrate. I was startled. It thundered through every cell of my body, shaking me to the bone. My grandmother grabbed me and quickly pulled me back onto the pew. We looked into each other’s eyes. Her face widened in shock. Mine too. It took a moment for her to compose herself. Then she furrowed her brow and wagged her index finger in the air. As she turned away, I thought I saw a brief smile on her lips. It was then that my deep love for music began.
Literature that wouldn’t let me go
“Come, O Death, you brother of sleep,
Come and carry me away.
Loosen my ship’s rudder.
Bring me to a safe place.
Though some may fear you,
You can bring me joy,
For through you I enter
to the most beautiful little Jesus.”
This text is a leitmotif of the novel Brother of Sleep, which I read at the age of twelve. My mother hid the book from me because I couldn’t sleep after reading it. I remember the creaking of the cabinets in the big house, which kept me awake, and the images flickering behind my closed eyelids, destruction and love, love and destruction.
What I didn’t understand in adult texts and films drew me irresistibly, just as the abyss under the bridge over the tram tracks seemed to call to me. I sneaked into the kitchen at night, where I suspected the book was, found it, and read it to the end.
The protagonist in Brother of Sleep decides, out of love for Elsbeth, a woman he cannot have, to stop sleeping, an idea that fascinated me endlessly, as I also had great difficulty falling asleep as a child.
Bach and the architecture of connection and separation
The chorale “Come, O Death, You Brother of Sleep” by Bach continues to fascinate me. The four voices seem to melt together into one great voice that filled the entire space within me when I listened, and stretched far beyond it.
As a child, I wondered what the voice of God might sound like, and I came to the conviction that it must sound like my mother and father together when they laughed.
The first three lines of the chorale establish, through rhythm, a sense of separation and closure, “Come, O Death, you brother of sleep. Come, and carry me away.” This line repeats twice. At the end of the verse, however, the structure is broken, “For through you I enter to the most beautiful little Jesus.”
Thus, the chorale ends, from separation to connection. The two short sentences are rounded off by a long sentence with the same rhythm.
While the pulse of the text clearly moves from division toward unity, the music is more dynamic. It tells this movement as well, but in its own way. From the beginning, the minor key established in Bach’s voices is resolved into major. The oscillation between minor and major continues until the final sustained major chord. As long as humans live, they remain suspended in the ambivalence of sorrow and joy, exposed to it.
The ambivalence of life
This ambivalence has always been part of my life. As a four-year-old, my brother, a neighbor boy, and I killed insects. We caught bees and bumblebees in jars and filled them with water. I watched, mesmerized, as the stream tore their bodies apart, observing the little legs that still moved. “So beautiful,” said the neighbor boy. “I almost want to cry.”
A heavy feeling spread around my throat. I struggled to swallow, feeling it tug between my armpits and deep in my body. I felt powerful, just as powerful as the moment when I pressed the organ pedal down with my little foot. As if I were a small god.
What I had done was as wrong as it was fascinating. It was as if a whirlpool of guilt and force pulled me into my own inner abyss. I realized that I could be both, and already had been both, creator and destroyer.
The shadows of creation
In my life, I have created and shaped many things. Today, my literary work comprises over 170 books, theater pieces, radio plays, and compositions. Yet just as the drive to create pursues me, so too does the shadow of that drive, the urge to destroy.
It follows me wherever I go and whatever I do. If I exhaust myself too much in creation, it restores balance by forcing me to cut my painted images, tear my printed books, or delete poetry files containing thousands of pages.
Sometimes I envy the monks I watched working on mandalas. They sat bent over on the floor for days, placing grain by grain with tweezers, only to have the finished work blown away in a procession by the wind. It is as if death were always following me, reminding me that everything I create is temporary.
Walking on thin ice between death and eternity
Destroying what has been created brings a deep, dark freedom that makes space for the new. Just as the chorale “Brother of Sleep” oscillates between minor and major, between connection and separation, I too balance when I work creatively, between death and eternity, creation and destruction, and can fall at any moment. My life is a life on thin ice.
Read more from Sophie Reyer
Sophie Reyer, Author
Sophie Anna Reyer is an Austrian author of multiple theater pieces and publications. She was born in Vienna, Austria. Reyer discovered her various profound talents in the arts at a young age as a child prodigy. She is a writer of theater pieces (S. Fischer) and novels (Emons) and was shortlisted for the Austrian Book Award in 2019 and 2021.
