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Ich freue mich in dir BWV 133 / BC A 16
Third Day of Christmas, December 27, 1724
This cantata is part of Bach’s chorale cantata cycle. It was first heard in Leipzig on the third day of Christmas 1724. Underlying it is the four-strophe hymn of the same name by Caspar Ziegler, which appears with the subtitle von der Menschwerdung des Gottessohnes (of the son of God become human) in the collection Jesus oder zwanzig Elegien über die Geburt, Leiden und Auferstehen unsres Herrn und Heilandes Jesu Christi (Jesus or twenty elegies about the birth, suffering, and resurrection of our lord and savior Jesus Christ), which appeared in print for the first time in 1648. Ziegler was a learned theologian. Although having no prospect for a position as a pastor, at that time—the last year of the Thirty Years’ War—he lived in Leipzig, the city of his birth, and devoted his free time to poetry. The fruit of his passion for the Italian language appeared in 1653: his Bericht über der Arth und Eigenschaft eines Madrigals, einer schönen und zur Musik bequemsten Art Verse (Treatise on the nature and quality of the madrigal, a beautiful and most suitable kind of verse for music). This treatise, warmly received by Heinrich Schütz in particular, paved the way for the madrigalian style of writing and subsequently achieved the greatest significance for German church music. In the same year, 1653, Ziegler began a legal career, studied his newly chosen field first in Jena, and transferred after a time to the University of Wittenberg. Here he won a professorship, gained prominence and influence, and became friends with Abraham Calov, whose annotated Wittenberg Bible was particularly prized by Bach, who entered his own extensive handwritten commentary in his personal copy.It was not until the end of the seventeenth century, years after Ziegler’s death, that his hymn Ich freue mich in dir (I rejoice in you) found its way into hymn collections. From then on it became part of the standard group of Christmas hymns, if without any direct relationship to the third Christmas holiday and its Gospel reading. That the hymn found recognition so late may have to do with its original publication in an obscure place. It might also be ascribed to its child-like, naive tone, for which only a later generation would acquire a taste. Moreover, a certain uniformity of vocabulary is not to be ignored. This problem becomes manifest in view of the reworking procedure by which the sequence of strophes was reshaped to become cantata text. As usual, the unknown writer working for Bach left the first and last strophes untouched. Thus the cantata libretto begins with Ziegler’s first strophe, unaltered:
Ich freue mich in dir
Und heiße dich willkommen,
Mein liebes Jesulein!
Du hast dir vorgenommen,
Mein Brüderlein zu sein.
Ach wie ein süßer Ton!
Wie freundlich sieht er aus,
Der große Gottessohn!
I rejoice in you
And bid you welcome,
My dear little Jesus!
You have undertaken
To be my little brother.
Oh, what a sweet sound!
How friendly he appears,
The great son of God!
Similarly, the closing verse is maintained:
Wohlan so will ich
An dich, o Jesu, halten,
Und sollte gleich die Welt
In tausend Stücken spalten.
O Jesu, dir, nur dir,
Dir leb ich ganz allein!
Auf dich, allein auf dich,
Mein Jesu, schlaf ich ein.
Well, then I would
Cling to you, O Jesus,
And should now the world
Shatter in a thousand pieces,
O Jesus, for you, only for you,
For you I live quite alone!
In you, alone in you,
My Jesus, I fall asleep.
The two inner strophes do not strike a different tone; the second hymn strophe reads:
Gott senkt die Majestät,
Sein unbegreiflichs Wesen
In eines Menschenleib;
Nun muß die Welt genesen:
Der allerhöchste Gott
Spricht freundlich bei mir ein,
Wird gar ein kleines Kind
Und heißt mein Jesulein.
God sinks his majesty,
His incomprehensible being,
Into a human body;
Now must the world recover.
The Most High God
Speaks as a friend to me,
Becomes, in fact, a little child
And is called my little Jesus.
From this, the cantata poet crafted an aria and a recitative. His aria hews closely to its model:
Getrost! Es faßt ein heilger Leib
Des Höchsten unbegreiflichs Wesen.
Ich habe Gott—wie wohl ist mir geschehen!—
Von Angesicht zu Angesicht gesehen.
Ach! meine Seele muß genesen.
Take comfort! A holy body encloses
The incomprehensible being of the Most High.
I have seen God—how blessed am I—
From face to face,
O! my soul must recover.
In the ensuing recitative, however, the expected contrast is introduced right at the beginning. With an allusion to a verse in the third chapter of Moses, it reads:
Ein Adam mag sich voller Schrecken
Vor Gottes Angesicht
In Paradies verstecken!
Der allerhöchster Gott kehrt selber bei uns ein:
Und so entsetzet sich mein Herze nicht
Es kennet sein erbarmendes Gemüte.
Aus unermeßner Güte
Wird er ein kleines Kind
Und heißt mein Jesulein.
An Adam may, full of terror,
Before God’s countenance
In paradise take cover!
The Most High God himself lodges with us,
And so my heart does not take fright,
It knows his merciful nature.
Out of immeasurable goodness
He becomes a little child
And is called my little Jesus.
The poet uses the same procedure on the third strophe. He first adopts its mood and formulates an aria:
Wie lieblich klingt es in den Ohren,
Dies Wort: mein Jesus ist geboren,
Wie dringt es in das Herz hinein!
Wer Jesu Namen nicht versteht
Und wem es nicht durchs Herze geht,
Der muß ein harter Felsen sein.
How lovely it sounds in one’s ears,
This word: my Jesus is born,
How it pierces my heart!
Whoever Jesus’s name does not understand
And through whose heart it does not go,
He must be a stony crag.
However, the following recitative digs more powerfully into the strings once again and returns only then to Ziegler’s original wording:
Wohlan, des Todes Furcht und Schmerz
Erwägt nicht mein getröstet Herz.
Will er vom Himmel sich
Bis zu der Erde lenken,
So wird er auch an mich
In meiner Gruft gedenken.
Wer Jesum recht erkennt,
Der stirbt nicht, wenn er stirbt,
So bald er Jesum nennt.
Come then, the fear and pain of death
Considers not my comforted heart.
Would he from heaven
Unto the earth lean down,
So will he also
In my grave remember me.
Whoever Jesus rightly knows,
He dies not; if he dies,
As soon as he names Jesus.
Before beginning his composition of the text described here, Bach had a certain obstacle to overcome: he needed the tune fitting Ziegler’s strophes, apparently not widely circulated. We do not know how it became accessible to him. It can only be shown that he notated melody and text of the first strophe on a rather arbitrarily chosen spot: on several unused systems in the score for the six-part Sanctus in D Major BWV 232.1, a new composition clearly meant for performance on the first day of Christmas 1724, which would be found a quarter century later in slightly altered form in the Mass in B Minor BWV 232.
In the opening chorus of our cantata, the vocal part plays a relatively modest role. Four-fifths of the movement’s extent is claimed by the cheerful concertante instrumental texture under the leadership of the first violin, while the voices must content themselves with a simple four-part texture. Only the passages given in the text, “Ach, wie ein süßer Ton!” and “Der große Gottessohn!” are given a more extensive and intense treatment.
The first aria, for alto and two obbligato oboi d’amore, gains its impetus from the contrast between the ever present, thrice exclaimed “Getrost!” with its triumphant fanfare beginning and figural spinning out, and the mysterious, whispering stepwise “Wie wohl ist mir geschehen.” The second aria sets the “lieblich klingt” in the text to a graceful interweaving of soprano and strings, whereby the first violin creates a true concerto texture with the exchange of solo and tutti. The admonishing words of the middle section are differentiated from the friendly regions of the outer parts through a change to
8 meter, withdrawal of the middle voices, and intensified chromaticism. At the cantata’s close stands the simple four-part chorale movement on the rare melody, described earlier: O stilles Gotteslamm (O quiet lamb of God), of which there is no evidence again until 1738.