The crowded Thanksgiving Service at St James, Kings Street, Sydney, for Charles Copeman, the mining executive who died aged 83 on 27 June, began with Bach’s ‘Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele’ — the organ prelude of which Mendelssohn said to Schumann: ‘If life were to deprive me of hope and faith, this single chorale would replenish me with them both.’