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Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen BWV 11 / BC D 9
Ascension Day, May 15, 1738
The Ascension Oratorio BWV 11 of 1735 belongs to a trilogy of impressive compositions for the high feasts of the church calendar.1Among its sister works, the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248, which originated a few months earlier, consists of a series of six cantatas for the feast days from Christmas through Epiphany. It coheres through tonal and architectonic relationships and in particular through the biblical accounts from Luke 2 and Matthew 2. On the other hand, the other sibling work, for Easter, ten years older, initially consisted only of a single, one-part, festive cantata (BWV 249.3); it received the designation Easter Oratorio only upon being reperformed in 1738 (BWV 249.4).2 In contrast to the Christmas Oratorio, the work for Easter contains no original evangelist narrative but only rhymed paraphrases. With the Ascension Oratorio, the situation is different yet again. Here, in the traditional manner, a tenor serves as narrator, who presents the account divided into four parts:[Lukas 24:50–51]Der Herr Jesus hub seine Hände auf und segnete seine Jünger, und es geschah, da er sie segnete, schied er von ihnen. [Apostelgeschichte 1:9]Und ward aufgehoben zusehends und fuhr auf gen Himmel, eine Wolke nahm ihn weg vor ihren Augen, [Markus 16:19]und er sitzet zur rechten Hand Gottes. [Apostelgeschichte 1:10]Und da sie ihm nachsahen gen Himmel fahren, siehe, da stunden bei ihnen zwei Männer in weißen Kleidern, [11]welche auch sagten: Ihr Männer von Galiläa, was stehet ihr und sehet gen Himmel? Dieser Jesus, welcher von euch ist aufgenommen gen Himmel, wird kommen, wie ihr ihn gesehen habt gen Himmel fahren. [Lukas 24:52]Sie aber beteten ihn an, [Apostelgeschichte 1:12]wandten um gen Jerusalem von dem Berge, der da heißet der Ölberg, welcher ist nahe bei Jerusalem und liegt einen Sabbater-Weg davon, [Lukas 24:52]und sie kehreten wieder gen Jerusalem mit großer Freude.
[Luke 24:51]The Lord Jesus lifted his hands and blessed his disciples, and it happened, that as he blessed them, he departed from them. [Acts 1:9]And was lifted as they were looking and traveled up to heaven; a cloud took him away before their eyes, [Mark 16:19]and he sits at the right hand of God. [Acts 1:10]And as they watched him travel to heaven, behold, there stood two men beside them in white clothing, [11]who also said: You men of Galilee, why do you stand and look toward heaven? This Jesus, who was taken from you to heaven, will come, as you have seen him travel to heaven. [Luke 24:52]They however prayed to him, [Acts 1:12]and returned to Jerusalem from the mountain called the Mount of Olives, which is near Jerusalem and lies a sabbath-day journey away, [Luke 24:52]and they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.
Nevertheless, this text has long posed a riddle for Bach scholarship because although all its components are found in the New Testament, it was not clear who might have assembled and altered the sections from Luke 24, Mark 16, and Acts 1 in different ways. We are indebted to the Leipzig theologian Martin Petzoldt for pointing out the so-called Evangelien-Harmonie (Harmony of the Gospels) of Johann Bugenhagen, a contemporary and colleague of Martin Luther. In Bach’s day these Evangelien-Harmonie were to be found in nearly every hymnal, although reduced in most cases to the Passion story and without the section on the Ascension of Christ. Furthermore, the version set to music by Bach has several minor abbreviations and rearrangements compared to Bugenhagen’s version, as well as reformulations, mostly in agreement with the original Gospel text.
There are two chorales in Bach’s Ascension Oratorio: in the middle of the work, following the Evangelist’s text “eine Wolke nahm ihn weg vor ihren Augen, und er sitzet zur rechten Hand Gottes” (a cloud took him away before their eyes, and he sits at the right hand of God), the fourth strophe from Johann Rist’s 1641 hymn Du Lebens-Fürst, Herr Jesu Christ (You prince of life, Lord Jesus Christ):
Nun lieget alles unter dir,
Dich selbst nur ausgenommen.
Now all lies beneath you,
You yourself alone excepted.
The entire work concludes with the seventh strophe from Gottfried Wilhelm Sacer’s 1697 hymn Gott fähret auf gen Himmel (God goes up to heaven), whose text begins:
Wenn soll es doch geschehen,
Wenn kömmt die liebe Zeit,
Daß ich ihn werde sehen
In seiner Herrlichkeit?
When shall it come about,
When might the dear time come,
When I will see him
In his glory?
Regarding free poetry, the Ascension Oratorio contains two each of recitatives and arias, as well as the opening chorus. The chorus consists of six verses, of which the first three seem superior to the others linguistically and in content:
Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen,
Preiset ihn in seinen Ehren,
Rühmet ihn in seiner Pracht.
Laud God in his kingdoms,
Praise him in his honors,
Extol him in his splendor.
Then the continuation:
Sucht sein Lob recht zu vergleichen,
Wenn ihr mit gesamten Chören
Ihm ein Lied zu Ehren macht!
Seek to justly compare his praise
When you, with entire choirs,
Make a hymn to honor him!
Next to the powerful sequence “laud,” “praise,” “extol,” the effects of “comparing” praise and the “making” of a hymn seem unnatural and weakened.
The explanation for this is found in the background of Bach’s composition. Shortly after 1900 the French Bach specialist André Pirro pointed to a text that could fit perfectly beneath the music of the opening movement of the Ascension Oratorio. The verses are by Johann Heinrich Winckler, at the time a teacher at the St. Thomas School and later a professor at the University of Leipzig, where he encountered the young student Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The occasion for Winckler’s poetic activity was the consecration of the renovated St. Thomas School in 1732. The festival music for the occasion consisted of a two-part cantata libretto by Winckler; Johann Sebastian Bach was expressly named as the work’s composer.3 The song of praise for the school, the authorities, the aristocracy, and the creator of all things begins with these lines:
Froher Tag, verlangte Stunden,
Nun hat unsre Lust gefunden,
Was sie fest und ruhig macht.
Hier steht unser Schulgebäude,
Hier erblicket Aug und Freude
Kunst und Ordnung, Zier und Pracht.
Happy day, hoped-for hours,
Now our delight has discovered
What will make it secure and serene.
Here stands our school building,
Here beholds eye and pleasure,
Art and order, ornament and splendor.
A year later, Bach incorporated this movement along with all the recitatives and arias into a congratulatory cantata for the name day of the Saxon prince elector.4 Two years later and with a third text, the opening chorus found its way into the Ascension Oratorio.
Only relatively recently has Bach scholarship addressed the question of whether other movements in this work, in particular the two arias, might have older origins. In 1950 the Berlin theologian and supreme Bach expert Friedrich Smend successfully demonstrated that Johann Christoph Gottsched’s text for the “Serenade auf des Herrn geheimen Kriegsraths von Hohenthal Vermählung in Leipzig, 1725” (Serenade for the wedding of Lord Privy Councillor of War von Hohenthal in Leipzig, 1725) must have been composed by Bach and that, ten years later, two of its arias were incorporated in the Ascension Oratorio.5
Lord Privy Councillor of War von Hohenthal was the Leipzig merchantlord Peter Hohmann the Younger, later ennobled, who in November 1725 married Christiana Sybilla Mencke, daughter of University of Leipzig professor Johann Burkhard Mencke. Gottsched, then twenty-five years old, lived in the Menckes’ house; Menke fostered the young scholar in many ways. The text for Gottsched’s serenade is a conversation between the personifications of Nature, Virtue, and Modesty. Nature’s aria, “Entfernet euch, ihr kalten Herzen, entfernet euch, ich bin euch feind” (Remove yourselves, you frigid hearts, remove yourselves, I am your foe) became, in the Ascension Oratorio, “Ach bleibe doch, mein liebstes Leben, ach fliehe nicht so bald von mir” (Ah, but stay, my dearest life, ah, do not flee so soon from me). The aria for Modesty, “Unschuld, Kleinod reiner Seelen, schmücke mich durch deine Pracht” (Innocence, jewel of pure souls, adorn me with your splendor) was refashioned to become “Jesu, deine Gnadenblicke, kann ich doch beständig sehn” ( Jesus, your glances of grace I can indeed see constantly).
Like its sister work for Christmas, the Ascension Oratorio combines original movements along with those that have been adopted or revised. Joy, pride, and confidence characterize the cheerfully concerted opening chorus with its undemanding choral component, catchy fanfare motives and scales,and, in particular, the bouncing Lombard syncopations. Following a brief evangelist narrative, a recitative for bass sensitively laments the departure of Jesus. With the motivic unity of the accompanying flutes and the vocal motifs that anticipate the following aria, it recalls the compositional methods of the St. Matthew Passion. The farewell aria, “Ach bleibe doch, mein liebstes Leben,” for alto and the sonorous accompanying unison violins, goes back to a wedding serenade, in which its cutting dissonances must have sounded exceptional. In 1749 Bach incorporated a shorter version, revised in crucial ways, into the closing portion of his Mass in B Minor BWV 232 as the Agnus Dei. A brief evangelist’s recitative and a simple four-part chorale close the first part of the oratorio.
The second part begins with the account of the appearance of the “two men in white clothing” and their announcement. The announcement itself is sung in two-part counterpoint, a strict canon at the fifth that symbolizes integrity of the statement, on the one hand, and its unassailability, on the other. The second aria, set for soprano, flutes, one oboe, and strings, omits the normally obligatory bass foundation in what is known as “bassetto effect,” a procedure that for Bach is almost always meant symbolically. It can mean very different things: innocence, purity, clarity, incomprehensibility; however, it may simply be a feature of a serenade movement. In the wedding cantata, the luminosity of the upper voices symbolized innocent purity; in the oratorio, the effect has more of the quality of hovering, of being heaven-directed, as it were. For the concluding chorale, Bach unites the chorus and the entire festival orchestra. In doing so, the composer embedded a chorale in B minor into an orchestral movement in D major—a feat he had managed with great success in the last movement of the sixth cantata of his Christmas Oratorio.
Footnotes
- Peter Wollny has identified the copyist previously known as Anonymous Vj, scribe of the continuo part in BWV 11, as Johann Wilhelm Machts, who arrived as a student at St. Thomas School only two weeks before Ascension 1735. This identification, together with a detailed analysis of the score, led Wollny to conclude that the first performance more likely took place on May 15, Ascension 1738. See Wollny (2016, 83–89).—Trans.↵
- J. W. Machts, the scribe mentioned in note 1, also participated in preparing the sources for the Easter Oratorio BWV 249.4; Wollny (2016, 91) proposes April 6, 1738, as the date of its first performance.—Trans.↵
- Froher Tag, verlangte Stunden BWV 1162.↵
- Frohes Volk, vergnügte Sachsen BWV 1158. ↵
- Smend (1950).↵