— A personal interpretation
<aside> 🎻 Before you begin, you may want to listen to Yo-Yo Ma's latest studio recording of this piece, or watch Eva Lymenstull's performance on an original Baroque cello.
</aside>
Remember those sleepless nights?
The regret. The despair. The memories that pain you every time you think of them but can't let go.
The rumination, followed by more regret, despair, and memories that hold you captive.
It's not the sharp kind of pain. It's dull and slow, the worse kind. The kind that tortures you inch by inch. The kind that makes you wonder if you will ever find joy in your life.
Allegedly Bach wrote this suite after the death of his first wife.
D minor, a key known for some of the saddest, moodiest, and most tragic-sounding pieces of music, seems to be a suitable choice.
It opens with the D minor chord and lingers on the dominant A—like a random question that pops into your mind but determines to stay. Before you can finish this thought, another one emerges, and then another. You are already deep in your thoughts in no time, as your emotion heightens to the E—more than an octave higher than where you started. Then a reverse D minor chord in Bar 4 sinks in, you have nowhere to run but to face your grief.
Just like that, the night of torture begins.
It is what it is, you tell yourself, don't go there. Your first effort of trying to let go of the thoughts starts in Bar 5, with the first arpeggio of the series that starts on a B-flat.
It doesn't last very long.
As soon as the thoughts quiet down at the end of Bar 5, they came right back with another rise, followed by a meandering rumination in Bar 6.
Although this time, you starts to doubt if it would help as the starting point lowers to A.
You are stronger than this, you tried to shake the thoughts out of your mind.
Expectedly, the thoughts haunt back with the same meandering patterns.
Out of desperation, you tried yet again however starting even lower on G. It gets worse. Not only do the thoughts rush back, the rumination also lasts longer, and goes to more unruled places. This goes on for 3 bars—three times longer than previously.