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Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen BWV 123 / BC A 28
Epiphany, January 6, 1725
This cantata was first performed on January 6, 1725, in Leipzig. As part of Bach’s chorale cantata annual cycle, it makes use of all strophes of a chorale, retaining the first and last as originally written and paraphrasing the others to be set as recitatives and arias. Ahasverus Fritsch was the author of the hymn Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen (Dearest Emmanuel, prince of the devout), first printed in the 1670s. Born in 1629 in Mücheln near Geiseltal, then in Saxony, now Anhalt-Saxony, Fritsch had experienced firsthand the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War in his childhood and youth. The description of those sufferings could just as easily fit events of the late twentieth century:When he was only two years of age, the horrors of war forced his parents to flee with him . . . just as his home town went up in flames, and four houses burned; they lost everything. Erratically, they fled from one place to another while surrounded by plundering, robbery, burning, and murder. Fritsch had to spend his youth wandering in forests and fields, hiding himself in a ruin at one moment, then in an excavated grave, then in cellars and bushes; as soon as he was discovered or hunger drove him from hiding, he was attacked by soldiers and robbed of his clothing, left with nothing more than his shirt in the winter, or savagely beaten. He fell into enemy hands no fewer than six times. At the age of fourteen, he lost his father, whose heart was broken by the interminable succession of fire, flight, starvation, tribulation, and misery.
In the midst of these deprivations, his mother made it possible for him to attend school in Halle; while suffering continuous need, he studied at the University of Jena. A position as tutor at the court of Rudolstadt was the beginning of a continuous ascent through the positions of court and judicial counselor, court clerk, chancellery director and president of the consistory, and finally the position of chancellor. His contact with the countesses Ludämilia Elisabeth and Ämilie Juliana influenced his religious poetry; Ludämilia Elisabeth’s two hundred Jesus hymns achieved recognition during her own lifetime. Fritsch’s wrestling with the expression of personal devoutness—even without unconditionally adopting the trappings of Pietism—can be seen against the background of church life during the Thirty Years’ War and its aftermath. It is only in this context that such exuberant formulations such as the title of the hymn collection make sense: “One hundred twenty-one new heavenly sweet Jesus hymns, in which the most exquisitely sweet powerful name of Jesus is found over seven hundred times, in deepest honor of our most worthy savior and redeemer, also the awakening of most holy devotion and joy of the soul, partly written, partly collected by Ahasverus Fritsch.”1 Passages in the associated foreword include examples such as this one: “All is vanity, all is misery and wretchedness. But our Jesus is everything in all. Jesus is the faithful soul’s sugar and milk, manna, milk and wine, cinnamon, cloves, and balsam. Blessed is he who feels this heavenly sweetness of Jesus powerfully in his soul.”2
The six strophes that underlie our cantata are marked by strongly accentuated personal piety. The title line takes up a keyword from the Gospel reading for Epiphany from Matthew 2, in which a quotation from the prophet Micah appears in connection with the description of the visit of the Wise Men from the Orient: “Und du Bethlehem in jüdischen Lande bist mitnichten die kleinste unter den Fürsten Juda’s; denn aus dir soll mir kommen der Herzog, der über mein Volk Israel ein Herr sei” (6; And you Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of you shall come a prince that shall rule my people Israel). There is clearly a world of difference between this text and the ecstatic verses of Ahasverus Fritsch.
Liebster Immanuel, Herzog der Frommen,
Du meiner Seele Heil, komm, komm nur bald!
Du hast mir, höchster Schatz, mein Herz genommen,
So ganz vor Liebe brennt und nach dir wallt.
Nichts kann auf Erden
Mir liebers werden,
Als wenn ich meinen Jesum stets behalt.
Beloved Emmanuel, prince of the devout,
You, my soul’s salvation, come, come but soon!
You, highest treasure, have taken my heart from me,
Which so entirely burns of love and beats for you.
Nothing on Earth can
Become dearer to me
Than if I always keep my Jesus.
With a vocabulary that seems to come from the Song of Songs, the second strophe continues:
Dein Nam ist zuckersüß, Honig im Munde
Holdselig, lieblich, frisch wie kühler Tau,
Der Feld und Blume netzt zur Morgenstunde:
Mein Jesus ist nur, dem ich vertrau.
Your name is sweet as sugar, honey in the mouth,
Charming, lovely, fresh as the cool dew
That moistens field and flower at the morning hour:
My Jesus is the only one whom I trust.
The unknown librettist working for Bach did not want to continue in that vein; instead, in the first recitative, he checks the enthusiasm in favor of a widened theological horizon:
Die Himmelsüßigkeit, der Auserwählten Lust
Erfüllt auf Erden schon mein Herz und Brust,
Wenn ich den Jesusnamen nenne
Und sein verborgnes Manna kenne:
Gleichwie der Tau ein dürres Land erquickt,
So ist mein Herz
Auch bei Gefahr und Schmerz
In Freudigkeit durch Jesu Kraft entzückt.
The heavenly sweetness, the delight of the chosen,
Fills already on Earth my heart and breast
When I call the name of Jesus
And know his hidden manna.
Just as the dew refreshes a dry landscape,
Thus my heart,
Even in danger and pain,
Is delighted in joy through Jesus’s power.
The librettist’s task was not only to adapt sections of seventeenth-century poetry to the language of the eighteenth and to make it suitable for use in contemporary musical forms but also now and again to create a connection to the Gospel readings of the period after Christmas and for Epiphany. The latter could hardly be expected of Fritsch’s hymn, for in hymnals of the period it appears under the neutral rubric of “Jesus Hymns” (Jesuslieder) without any particular connection to a specific point in the church year. The third strophe offered an opportunity for clarification:
Und ob das Kreuze mich gleich zeitlich plaget,
Wie es bei Christen oft pflegt zu geschehn;
Wenn meine Seele nur nach Jesu fraget,
So kann das Herze schon auf Rosen gehn,
Kein Ungewitter
Ist mir zu bitter,
Mit Jesu kann ichs fröhlich überstehn.
And if the cross here in this life torments me,
As it often happens to Christians,
If my soul only asks after Jesus,
Then can my heart go along the path of roses.
No thunderstorm
Is for me too bitter.
With Jesus I can happily endure it.
An aria text was drawn from this with an allusion to the flight of the Holy Family:
Auch die harte Kreutzesreise
Und die Tränen bittre Speise
Schreckt mich nicht.
Wenn die Ungewitter toben,
Sendet Jesus mir von oben Heil und Licht.
Even the painful journey of the cross
And the bitter meal of tears
Do not frighten me.
If storms thunder,
Jesus sends me, from above,
Salvation and light.
Strophe 4 of the hymn and the fourth movement of the cantata, a recitative, deal with the threat of hell, enemies and death, and salvation through Jesus. The scorn and persecution of the world, loneliness, and sadness but also the faithful company of Jesus are objects of the next movement. The last strophe of Ahasverus Fritsch’s hymn, adopted without change, deals with renunciation of the vanity of the world and complete submission to Jesus; it closes the sequence of ideas in the cantata libretto.
Bach’s composition is dominated, as usual, by its broad, well-developed opening movement, in which the chorale melody is presented by the soprano in large note values, while the other voices provide a motet-like contrapuntal accompaniment, and the whole is lent contour and coherence by a motivically unified instrumental texture. The
8 meter of the pastorale and the simple harmonies, with thirds and sixths predominant, give the movement a touch of tranquil inwardness. The first aria is sharply differentiated, as described by Arnold Schering:
The various vivid and powerful expressions (hard, cross, tears, bitter, horrify, thunderstorm) awakened in Bach just as much richness of musical expression and imagery. Weary and tortuous, in a bitter F-sharp minor, from the third bar on, the sharp oboes perform the thorny, chromatic theme, disturbing one another. Its complete expressive power is unleashed only with the entrance of the human voice, and the tritone F-sharp / B-sharp is connected with the word “hard” and the arrival at high A with “cross.” It is a nice touch when, in the postlude, the often-heard main theme does not appear in the upper voices but is instead given to the bass, and it is entirely in keeping with the Baroque style’s predilection for violent expression that the thunderstorm episode that follows suddenly storms four measures ahead into the Allegro.3
The second aria does not deliver a similar multitude of correspondences. Even so, the verse “Laß, o Welt, mich aus Verachtung / In betrübter Einsamkeit” (Out of contempt, O world, leave me / In distressed solitude) prompted the composer to give the voice, the bass, only a solo flute in accompaniment, thus illustrating the state of loneliness. The illustration of sadness through harmonic cloudiness was just as obvious a choice. With an effect common for the period—if rare in Bach’s cantatas—the closing chorale is lengthened. Not only the Stollen (the chorale’s opening section) is repeated here but also, exceptionally, the Abgesang (closing section) and, indeed, piano. The inward demeanor fits the closing verses well:
Mein ganzes Leben
Sei dir ergeben,
Bis man mich einsten legt ins Grab hinein.
May my entire life
Be surrendered to you
Till one day I am laid in the grave.
Footnotes
- “Einhundert Einundzwanzig Neue himmelsüße Jesuslieder, darinnen der hochteuresüße Kraft-Nahme Jesus über siebenhundertmal zu finden; zu schuldigster Ehreunsres hochverdienten Heylandes und Erlösers, auch Erweckung heiligster Andachtund Seelen-Freude theils abgefaßt, theils colligiret von Ahasvero Fritschio.”—Trans.↵
- “Alles ist Eitelkeit, alles ist Elend und Jammer. Aber unser Jesus ist alles in allem, Jesus ist der gläubigen Seelen eitel Zucker und Honig, Manna, Milch und Wein, Zimmer, Nelken und Balsam. Selig, der diese himmlische Jesus-Süße in seinem Geistkräftig empfindet.”—Trans.↵
- Schering (1950, 25–26).—Trans.↵