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Nur jedem das Seine! BWV 163 / BC A 158
Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity, November 24, 1715
The cantata Nur jedem das Seine! BWV 163 (Only to each what is his!) originated during Bach’s Weimar period and was first performed on November 24, 1715. It was Bach’s first performance of church music following the extended national period of mourning decreed upon the death of the nineteen-year-old Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, which silenced all music nationwide, including church music. The text of our cantata follows the Gospel reading for the twenty-third Sunday after Trinity, found in Matthew 22, which relates the parable of the tribute money:Then the Pharisees went and held a counsel, as they might ensnare him in his talk. And they sent their disciples to him together with the servants to Herod. And they said: Master, we know that you are honest and properly teach the way of God in truth and you ask after no one: for you do not care about the appearance of people. Therefore tell us: Is it proper to pay tribute to Caesar or not? As Jesus noticed their wickedness, he said: You hypocrites, why do you tempt me? Show me the tribute money! And they brought him a penny. And he said to them: Whose image is this, and the superscription? They said to him: Caesar’s. Then he said to them, Therefore give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s! When they heard this, they marveled and left him and went their way. (15–22)
Especially at the beginning, the cantata text addresses with particular intensity the conceptual realm of taxes, interest, submissions, and the hard cash they require. This should not come as a surprise: Salomon Franck, who published the libretto in his 1715 annual text cycle, Evangelisches Andachts-Opffer (Protestant devotional offering), was secretary of the Weimar Upper Consistory; but among his additional responsibilities was oversight of the royal numismatic collection. He found himself quite within his métier, then, as he began his text with this aria:
Nur jedem das Seine!
Muß Obrigkeit haben
Zoll, Steuern und Gaben,
Man weigre sich nicht
Der schuldigen Pflicht.
Doch bleibet das Herze dem Höchsten alleine.
Only to each what is his!
If authorities must have
Duties, taxes, and gratuities,
One may not avoid
One’s due obligations.
Yet the heart remains for the Most High alone.
A view of the authorities as articulated in Romans 13 resonates here unmistakably. Yet the strict boundary between the justifiable monetary demands of worldly rulers and the heart as the metaphorical dwelling place of God is established right away in this first movement. It is unquestioned in the second movement, a recitative that begins by praising God as the giver of all gifts, illustrating their wealth in the manner typical of Salomon Franck, a sequence of nouns: “Geist, Seele, Leib und Leben, / Und Hab und Gut und Ehr und Stand” (Spirit, soul, body, and life, / And property and goods and honor and station). But what can be given to God, asks the librettist, if all possessions come from God anyway? He then names the solution:
Doch ist noch eins, das dir, wohlgefällt:
Das Herze soll allein,
Herr, eine Zinsemünze sein.
Ach, aber ach, ist das nicht schlechtes Geld?
Der Satan hat dein Bild daran verletzt,
Die falsche Münz ist abgesetzet.
Yet there is still one thing that pleases you well:
The heart alone,
Lord, shall be your coin of tribute.
Ah, but ah, is that not worthless money?
Satan has marred your image on it,
The counterfeit coin is written off.
The second aria strives for a solution to this conflict so unexpectedly encountered. Here the process of minting coinage is compared to achieving purity of the human heart:
Laß mein Herz die Münze sein,
Die ich dir, mein Jesu, steure!
Ist sie gleich nicht allzu rein,
Ach so komm doch und erneure,
Herr, den schönen Glanz bei ihr,
Komm, arbeite, schmelz und präge,
Daß dein Ebenbild bei mir
Ganz erneuert glänzen möge.
Let my heart be the coin
That I pay you, my Jesus, as tax!
If it is now not entirely pure,
Ah, but come and restore,
Lord, the beautiful gleam upon it.
Come, work, melt down and stamp,
That your likeness
May gleam in me, entirely renewed.
But such a success is not to be achieved directly. The ensuing recitative speaks of reluctance, of the heart’s imprisonment in the world; at its close it formulates its matter of concern as follows:
So mache doch mein Herz mit deiner Gnade voll,
Leer es ganz aus von Welt und allen Lüsten
Und mache mich zu einem rechten Christen.
So make my heart full with your grace,
Empty it entirely of the world and all its pleasures
And make me a true Christian.
The last freely versified movement, again an aria, draws upon a formulation of Erdmann Neumeister’s, word for word, with its first verse, “Nimm mich mir und gib mich dir” (Take me from myself and give me to you), but it continues in a way that sounds completely different:
Nimm mich mir und gib mich dir;
Nimm mich mir und meinem Willen,
Deinen Willen zu erfüllen;
Gib dich mir mit deiner Güte,
Daß mein Herz und mein Gemüte
In dir bleibe für und für,
Nimm mich mir und gib mich dir.
Take me from myself and give me to you!
Take me from myself and my will
Your will to fulfill;
Give yourself to me with your goodness,
That my heart and my spirit
May abide in you forever.
Take me from myself and give me to you!
In closing, the last strophe from Johannes Heermann’s 1630 chorale Wo soll ich fliehen hin summarizes the flow of ideas:
Führ auch mein Herz und Sinn
Durch deinen Geist dahin,
Daß ich mög alles meiden,
Was mich und dich kann scheiden,
Und ich an deinem Leibe
Ein Gliedmaß ewig bleibe.
Lead my heart and mind
There through your spirit,
That I might avoid everything
That can separate me and you,
And I, of your body,
May ever remain a member.
It is well worth noticing how the Weimar court concertmaster analyzed this problematic text musically—it was undoubtedly imposed upon him—and how he extracted its few suitable pages. Bach illustrates the statutory character of “Nur jedem das Seine” in a tenor aria filled with intense gravity, in which the head motive, derived from the beginning of the text, is heard in nearly every measure. It seems remarkable that almost no use is made of the possibility of using direct and retrograde motion to set the obligations articulated in the text that point in different directions. It remains an open question whether one must agree with Philipp Spitta’s 1873 Bach biography that the movement is to be understood as a self-characterization on the part of Bach, particularly with regard to its “steadfastness, morality and a marvelous sense of order.”1 On the other hand, the same author describes the second aria as unsurpassed; it compares the overdue renewal of the human heart to melting and reminting in a coinage workshop. According to Spitta, this text “gave direction to the bold imagination of the master; the bass voice . . . carries on its earnest daily toil, while two busily working violoncellos cast a twilight effect over the piece.”2
A radical change of register characterizes the ensuing movement pair: soprano and alto take the lead, first in a recitative duet that moves from an imitative texture to wandering arioso coloraturas and then in an aria movement in which the “Nimm mich mir und gib mich dir” is enthusiastically savored. Even so, an unexpected formal rigor predominates here: the violins and violas in unison play the melody Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht in sections, so that the movement overall can be understood as a broadly conceived chorale arrangement. Instead, the composer spared himself the trouble of writing a polyphonic chorale at the end of the score; he simply notated the bass part and added the note “Choral. Simplice stylo” (Chorale. Simple style). It should be recognized that a melody used in Thuringia and used by Johann Pachelbel and Bach’s first father-in-law, Johann Michael Bach, is called for here—but whether conceived in two, three, or four parts Bach left for posterity to determine. In Leipzig he quite possibly had no reason to flesh out what was missing. Either he did not reperform the cantata there at all or instead of the Thuringian chorale melody he supplied another movement entirely, of which no trace has come down to us.