This tag was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Angela Watters.
Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen BWV 13 / BC A 34
Second Sunday after Epiphany
There are more than two hundred cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, not counting many others that have not survived. Even so, his production in no way rivals that of several of his contemporaries in either number or scope. Johann Friedrich Fasch in Zerbst, Christoph Graupner in Darmstadt, and above all Georg Philipp Telemann in Eisenach, Frankfurt, and Hamburg: each one by himself surpassed Bach’s contribution to the cantata genre many times over. Neither musical performance nor research could exhaust such a multitude, and further discoveries are possible at any time.An exploratory expedition into the vocal works of Christoph Graupner has been completed, albeit in stages. Over fourteen hundred of Graupner’s cantata compositions have survived. He is remembered as one of the most successful among Bach’s rivals in the competition for the Leipzig cantorate in 1722 and 1723. After several refusals and missteps, the Leipzig town council unanimously chose Graupner. They expected him to arrive in Leipzig at Easter 1723 but were forced to accept yet another written refusal. This left the path open for the royal court music director of Anhalt-Köthen, and Leipzig finally had the conditions in place for a new chapter in global music history to be written.
The connections between Bach and Graupner are by no means restricted to the biographical. In 1919 the Darmstadt musicologist Friedrich Noack was able to show that there were connections in the composition of cantatas as well. He found that the libretto of the recently discovered Bach cantata Mein Herz schwimmt im Blut BWV 199 (My heart swims in blood) was also composed by Christoph Graupner. This prompted the question whether Bach owned Graupner’s cantata or whether both composers made use of an as-yet-unknown collection of texts. The issue was definitively resolved in 1970, when Elisabeth Noack, younger sister of the scholar just mentioned, came across a long-missing volume of texts in Darmstadt with the title Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer (Church offering pleasing to God), by Georg Christian Lehms.1
It was then easily established not only that Graupner had set the fifty texts in this collection but also that Johann Sebastian Bach had also drawn upon it frequently. In contrast to Graupner, who set Lehms’s texts within a fairly short period of time—Pentecost 1711 to late autumn of the following year—Bach went back to the text cycle much later. According to our present knowledge, Bach set only two cantatas from the cycle soon after it appeared in 1711. Nevertheless, Bach, at that time still court organist and chamber musician at Weimar, must have acquired the entire collection soon after it was printed and held on to it, even when his activity as court music director in Köthen gave him little reason to be involved with church music. In 1723 he brought the volume with him to Leipzig, and in 1725 and 1726 he composed eight more cantatas from Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer.
Of these eight Leipzig cantatas, six appeared in short order around the turn of 1725–26, beginning with the first day of Christmas and ending with the second Sunday after Epiphany. Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen BWV 13 (My sighs, my tears) is the last work in this series. Even its title suggests that it concerns the inexhaustible theme of mourning, consolation, and hope. Although Lehms begins immediately with an aria on “Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen können nicht zu zählen sein” (My sighs, my tears, cannot be counted) and does not leave this thought in the verses that follow, he gives no hint about what the keywords refer to: “Seufzer” (sighs), “Tränen” (tears), “Wehmut” (sadness), “Jammer” (crying), “Pein” (pain), “Tod” (death). The Gospel reading for the second Sunday after Epiphany, the story of the wedding in Cana, in John 2, seems to bear little relation to the text. But comparison to the poetry by other writers shows that an utterance of Jesus, rather casually inserted in the fourth verse (“Meine Stunde ist noch nicht gekommen” [My hour is not yet come]), is the crucial link.
Clearer points of connection are found in that Sunday’s Epistle, the second part of the Christian Rules of Living, from Romans 12. Verse 12 reads: “Seid fröhlich in Hoffnung, geduldig in Trübsal, haltet an in Gebet” (Be joyful in hope, patient in tribulation, and constant in prayer), and in verse 16: “Freuet euch mit den Fröhlichen und weinet mit den Weinenden” (Rejoice with the joyous and weep with those that mourn). Both the free poetry of the cantata’s first part (an aria and recitative) and the third movement of the cantata text (a strophe from Johannes Heermann’s chorale Zion klagt mit Angst und Schmerzen [Zion laments with anxiety and pain]) refer to these two passages. The chorale strophe reads:
It bears mentioning that Heermann’s chorale is not assigned to the second Sunday after Epiphany in contemporary hymn collections; one suspects the librettist included it because of his sense that it fit well in the flow of ideas. In particular, “Vergebliches Suchen” (searching in vain) and “Trostlose Traurigkeit” (inconsolable sadness), as addressed by the chorale strophe, characterize the recitative texts that frame the strophe. The first is relatively measured:Der Gott, der mir hat versprochen
Seinen Beistand jederzeit
Der läßt sich vergebens suchen
Jetzt in meiner Traurigkeit.
The God, who has promised me
His assistance at all times,
He lets himself be sought in vain
Now in my sadness.
Mein liebster Gott läßt mich
Annoch vergebens rufen
Und mir in meinem Weinen
Noch keinen Trost erscheinen.
My dearest God allows me
To call his name in vain
And to me in my weeping
Still lets no comfort appear.
The second intensifies to truly drastic Baroque vividness: increasing sadness, a tear-filled “Jammerkrug” (crock of grief), and a depressing, sorrow-filled “Kummernacht” (night of heartache) culminate in the line “Drum sing ich lauter Jammerlieder” (And so I sing songs full of woe). Only now can consolation be expected: “Gott kann den Wermutsaft / Gar leicht in Freudenwein verkehren” (God can turn wormwood sap / Very easily to wine of joy). With this metaphor the poet draws a connection to the transformation of water into wine that stands at the heart of the Gospel reading. In the closing aria, the poet demonstrates the metaphor’s practical function:
Ächzen und erbärmlich Weinen
Hilft der Sorgen Krankheit nicht.
Aber wer gen Himmel siehet
Und sich da um Trost bemühet,
Dem kann leicht ein Freudenlicht
In der Trauerbrust erscheinen.
Moaning and piteous weeping
Do not help the illness of care.
But whoever looks to heaven
And seeks consolation there,
To him can easily a light of joy
Appear in the breast of sorrow.
Here again we find a predilection for juxtapositions, typical for this author as well as his contemporaries, even if alien to modern sensibilities.
Bach’s composition shows that whatever misgivings he may have had with respect to the drastic extremes of this text did not stand in the way of his decision to set it to music. On the contrary: the Lehms text, with its many keywords, offered an entirely practicable basis for a rich and powerfully expressive musical realization. Since the theme—mourning and consolation, simply put—seems rather narrowly defined, it was incumbent upon Bach to develop its various facets and nuances.
The first movement, a tenor aria, is devoted to a rather subdued sorrow in spite of a vocabulary bursting with vivid expression. Bach achieves this by way of the evenness of the
8 meter; a rich though restrained use of chromatic progressions; and, above all, the mild glow of an exquisite instrumental setting with two recorders and oboe da caccia, which leads for most of the movement. When the text of the middle section mentions “Weg zum Tode” (path to death) and the instrumental parts sink steadily in semitone progressions, this section seems like only an episode in relation to the whole. The situation is different in the second movement, a recitative for alto; here the last phrase of the closing verse, “ich muß noch vergebens flehen” (I must beseech in vain), is broadened to a four-measure-long, intensively expressive arioso full of emphatic intervallic leaps.
The third movement, a chorale with the sixteenth-century melody Wie nach einer Wasserquelle or Freu dich sehr, o meine Seele, follows the overall concept of the text, insofar as it is meant for a cantata, that is, a solo piece in the literal sense. Thus Bach does without the normally obligatory four-part chorale, instead giving the melody, phrase by phrase, to a single alto voice with the three winds in unison or in octaves, and he embeds the chorale tune in a thick texture of strings, whose animated figuration more nearly resembles Freu dich sehr, o liebe Seele than the lamenting text presented by the voice. In this, the effect of the ensuing recitative is partially foreshadowed, since it is here that by rights the harmonic transformation takes place, from sorrow and lament to consolation and hope.
However, this change would not have lasted anyway, for the ensuing bass aria, “Ächsen und erbärmlich Weinen” (Moaning and pitiful weeping), seems to return to the situation at the cantata’s outset with chromatic intensity, sigh motives, and large intervallic leaps and actually surpasses it in weight of expression. Yet the instrumental theme of the aria, assigned to an obbligato part comprising both recorders and a solo violin, is divided in two parts, with two different, even opposing characters. The reason for this is found in the text, which speaks of “Ächsen und erbärmlich Weinen” yet immediately declares this to be an ineffective way. Bach composes the beginning of the theme as if it were a direct statement and not its negation, but then he continues with rushing, almost tumbling joyful animation with runs and leaps, taking up the textual cornerstones “Himmel” (heaven), “Trost” (consolation), and “Freudenlicht” (light of joy), which appear only in the aria’s central section.
The poet may have been thinking of a different kind of musical contrast here that could effectively have closed a setting of his “Andacht auf den andern Sonntag nach der Offenbahrung Christi” (Devotion for the second Sunday after Epiphany). But this is not the only place where Bach went his own way. He was not content to simply place a one-part chorale in the center of the cantata. He also appended a closing chorale, unforeseen by the poet, in the concentrated four-part texture so characteristic of Bach: a strophe from Paul Fleming’s hymn In allen meinen Taten (In all my deeds), set to an ancient melody after Heinrich Isaac, O Welt, ich muß dich lassen (O world, I must leave you).