This tag was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Angela Watters.
Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg BWV 149 / BC A 181
St. Michael’s Day, September 29, 1729 (1728?)
The cantata Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg in den Hütten der Gerechten BWV 149 (There is joyous singing of victory in the tents of the righteous) is for St. Michael’s Day and probably originated in September 1729. Bach took its text from a collection the Leipzig postal secretary and skilled poet Christian Friedrich Henrici had begun to publish in the early summer of the previous year under the title Cantaten auf die Sonn- und Fest-Tage durch das gantze Jahr, verfertiget durch Picandern (Cantatas for the Sundays and feast days of the entire year, prepared by Picander). He provided the collection with a descriptive foreword: “In honor of God, in response to the desire of good friends, and to promote much devotion, I have decided to prepare the present cantatas. I have undertaken this plan even more happily, since I may flatter myself that perhaps whatever is lacking in poetic charm will be replaced by the loveliness of the incomparable Herr Music Director Bach and will resound in the most important churches of devout Leipzig.”1 It remains unclear whether Henrici/Picander undertook this project with the agreement of the cantor of St. Thomas School, whether Bach could have promised to compose the entire annual cycle, or to what extent he was in any position to fulfill such a promise. The collection was published in four parts in 1728–29 and once again a few years later with the texts in a different order.
Even today scholars do not agree whether the texts provided Bach with the basis for his fourth annual cycle of cantatas or whether the cantor of St. Thomas School simply used a selection from Picander’s offering. If Bach indeed set the entirety of Picander’s annual text cycle to music, then this portion of his oeuvre must be regarded as lost for the most part. Scarcely ten compositions2—about a sixth of a complete cycle—can be documented at present.3
Hence our cantata is one of those works that may be all that remains of what was once a much larger entity. Its text begins with a reference to verses from Psalm 118, which Martin Luther particularly treasured. These verses speak of the faith struggle of the righteous, that is, the community of believers, and place faith struggle and victory in an experiential context: “Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg in den Hütten der Gerechten: ‘Die Rechte des Herrn behält den Sieg, die Rechte des Herrn ist erhöhet, die Rechte des Herrn behält den Sieg!’” (15; There is joyous singing of victory in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of the Lord gains victory, the right hand of the Lord is exalted, the right hand of the Lord gains victory!”). Normally these verses belong to the Gospel reading for Easter, as the Lutheran exegetic tradition places them in the context of Christ and his work of salvation—but not with the battle between the archangel Michael and the dragon. In this sense, the first aria only touches upon the Gospel reading for St. Michael’s Day and places the emphasis on the completion of the work of salvation:
Kraft und Stärke sei gesungen
Gott, dem Lamme, das bezwungen
Und den Satanas verjagt,
Der uns Tag und Nacht verklagt.
Ehr und Sieg ist auf die Fromme
Durch des Lammes Blut gekommen.
May power and strength be sung
To God, to the lamb, who has conquered
And driven away Satan,
Who accused us day and night.
Honor and victory have come to the devout
Through the blood of the lamb.
The ensuing recitative addresses the concerns of St. Michael’s Day more specifically, as it describes the angel as a protective, defensive force and evokes the scenario of the protective circle of chariots:
Ich fürchte mich
Vor tausend Feinden nicht,
Denn Gottes Engel lagern sich
Um meine Seiten her;
Wenn alles fällt, wenn alles bricht,
So bin ich doch in Ruh.
Wie wär es möglich zu verzagen?
Gott schickt mir ferner Roß und Wagen
Und ganze Herden Engel zu.
I am not afraid
Before a thousand enemies,
For God’s angels are encamped
Around me on all sides;
When all fails, when everything breaks,
Then I am still in repose.
How would it be possible to despair?
God sends me further horses and chariots
And entire hosts of angels.
The associated aria generalizes:
Gottes Engel weichen nie,
Sie sind bei mir allerenden.
Wenn ich schlafe, wachen sie,
Wenn ich gehe,
Wenn ich stehe,
Tragen sie mich auf den Händen.
God’s angels never retreat;
They are with me everywhere.
When I sleep, they are on watch,
When I go,
When I stay,
They carry me in their hands.
With its prayer that the repentant sinner might, in his last days, be assured of an angel’s escort, the second recitative alludes to the first lines of the closing chorale, which read:
Ach Herr, laß dein lieb Engelein
Am letzten End die Seele mein
In Abrahams Schoß tragen.
Ah, Lord, let your dear angel
At my last carry my soul
Into Abraham’s bosom.
These lines are from Martin Schalling’s 1569 hymn Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr (Sincerely do I love you, O Lord). The recitative reads as follows:
Ich danke dir,
Mein lieber Gott dafür;
Dabei verleihe mir,
Daß ich mein sündlich Tun bereue,
Daß sich mein Engel drüber freue,
Damit er mich an meinem Sterbetage
In deine Schoß zum Himmel trage.
I thank you,
My dear God, for this;
Grant me as well
That I repent my sinful actions,
That my angel may rejoice over it
And thus carry me on my death day
Into your bosom in heaven.
With a reference to Jeremiah 21:11, the ensuing aria completes the thought:
Seid wachsam, ihr heiligen Wächter,
Die Nacht ist schier dahin.
Ich sehne mich und ruhe nicht,
Bis ich vor dem Angesicht
Meines lieben Vaters bin.
Be vigilant, you holy watchmen,
The night is nearly gone.
I yearn and will not rest
Until I am before the countenance
Of my dear father.
It appears that Johann Sebastian Bach needed two attempts before the opening movement of our cantata gained its final form. He originally planned a wide-ranging new composition and had already sketched out the contours of the instrumental introduction on paper when, for unknown reasons, he abandoned the sketch and retreated to a composition already on hand. Remarkably, he decided on the cheerfully idyllic closing movement to the Hunt Cantata BWV 208, nearly two decades old. He transposed the earlier work from F major to D major, replacing the two horns with three trumpets and drums and the ode to Duke Christian of Weissenfels, written by Salomon Franck, with the multipartite psalm text. Whether and to what extent this particularly arduous variant of the parody process may have actually gained Bach any reduction of effort remains a matter of debate among scholars even today.
The beginning of the “Kraft und Stärke sei gesungen” for bass and basso continuo with violone follows the genre “aria with heroic affect” (Aria mit heroischen Affekten). However, the overbearing triadic motive is accompanied by a melodic gesture moving up and down in narrow steps, which represents the textual idea of the blood of the lamb in tone painting. Remarkably, the same figure appears in an extended, animatedly dance-like aria for soprano, in which it takes a downright dominating position and thereby connects the text dealing with “Gottes Engeln” (God’s angels) with the ideas in the preceding aria.
The melody of the third aria movement, a Nachtstück (night piece), as its text suggests, is unusually catchy. This determines the overall impression, despite the manifold imitation between the two voices, which intensifies the text, and in spite of the rather melancholy coloration that the bassoon contributes to the quartet texture.
Strangely, the closing chorale does not return to D major, the opening key, but allows the cantata to end in C major. This may be due to an oversight by a copyist; the sources of the cantata are all copies.4 The trumpets and kettledrums would have had to be retuned at the very end—only to allow a brief two-bar cadenza to be heard again at the end.
Footnotes
- “Gott zu Ehren, dem Verlangen guter Freunde zur Folge und vieler Andacht zur Beförderung habe ich entschlossen, gegenwärtige Cantaten zu verfertigen. Ich habe solches Vorhaben desto lieber unternommen, weil ich mir schmeicheln darf, das vielleicht der Mangel der poetischen Anmuth durch die Lieblichkeit des unvergleichlichen Herrn Capell-Meisters Bachs, dürfte ersetzet, und diese Lieder in den Haupt-Kirchen des andächtigen Leipzigs angestimmet werden.”—Trans.↵
- Two texts from Picander’s 1727–28 collection also appear in an annual text cycle published by Christoph Birkmann in Nuremberg in 1728: Welt, behalt du das Deine, for Quasimodogeniti, and Ich kann mich besser nicht versorgen, for Misericordia Domini. Birkmann studied theology at the University of Leipzig and regularly attended Bach’s performances at St. Thomas. He did not own Picander’s collection, suggesting strongly that Birkmann heard these previously unknown compositions performed by Bach. See Blanken (2015a).—Trans.↵
- Häfner (1975).↵
- Hofmann (2000).↵