This page was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Elizabeth Budd.
Wo gehest du hin? BWV 166 / BC A 71
Cantate Sunday, May 7, 1724
Bach composed his cantata Wo gehest du hin? BWV 166 (Where are you going?) in the first year of his Leipzig cantorate and performed it for the first time on May 7, 1724, presumably in St. Nicholas, Leipzig’s main church. In recent performance history, this work has long led a shadowy existence, since it seemed to be fraught with unmistakable weaknesses. It aroused limited interest only because the second movement, an aria for tenor with obbligato oboe on the text “Ich will an den Himmel denken” (I would think of heaven), existed in a nineteenth-century arrangement for organ trio, prompting the question whether this trio was an authentic composition by Johann Sebastian Bach or an unauthorized arrangement.The aria was eliminated as a possible model for the organ trio because of its quite poor composition with several empty places, a fact that may have influenced the judgment of the entire cantata and thereby caused its neglect. A study by the Göttingen Bach scholar Alfred Dürr in 1960 offered a surprising explanation for certain oddities of the composition.1 He was able to show that the cantata is incomplete in its transmission, quite possibly because of an understandable moment of inattention on the part of Bach’s heirs in the distribution of his musical estate after his death in 1750.
At that time, the family had to dismantle hundreds of sets of performance materials, probably within a short period of time, in such a way that two heirs could share in each composition: one person received the score, the other the parts. Because the parts made performance possible by themselves and possession of the score alone meant that time, effort, and funds were needed to produce new materials for a performance, the person with the score was considered disadvantaged. To compensate, he received several surplus parts from those allocated to other heirs—normally, two violin parts and a continuo part. In many cases, this practical procedure worked well in the 1750 division of the estate. Now and again, the violin first chair parts were inadvertently taken from the performing parts instead of the duplicates, as intended. This would not be an issue as long as the first chair parts and the duplicates had the same content. It would become problematic, however, if the wrongly separated first chair part contained a solo passage missing from the duplicate. If the score and the supposed duplicates (actually the first chair parts) went missing, so that only the supposedly complete set of parts was kept, then a fragmentary transmission of the work was the inevitable outcome.
Although this was a rare occurrence, it unfortunately applies to our cantata: the original part for the first violin is missing. The tenor aria previously thought to be problematic, “Ich will an den Himmel denken,” is not in fact a trio for oboe, voice, and basso continuo, as previously thought, but is instead a quartet to be performed by the ensemble just described plus a solo violin. But how to address this situation? It would have been hard to know where to turn had it not occurred to Alfred Dürr to combine the rather obscure organ trio with the surviving aria torso. The result is a coherent, musically convincing movement whose restoration required only minimal conjecture. The other question is what the sources might have been for the organ trio, now known to be a nineteenth-century arrangement.
It is possible that the Erfurt publisher Gottfried Wilhelm Körner, who published the trio in 1842, or one of his associates still had access to Bach’s score, which has been missing since then, and preserved essential portions of the violin part for later generations. If so, “Kommisar Zufall” (Commissioner Coincidence) would have played, if belatedly, the role of guardian angel for the endangered Bach cantata. As we have said, it is only since 1960 that scholars have been able to show that its second movement was not as impoverished as it once appeared but was affected by an incomplete source transmission. But in the interest of fairness, we should also mention the often unrecognized arranger of a series of Bach cantata piano reductions that appeared around 1900 from the Leipzig publisher Breitkopf. The arranger recognized early on the aria’s need for revision in its condition at that time and devoted their best efforts to enrich it, anticipating by more than half a century substantial portions of the violin part’s reconstruction in 1960.
All of this pertains to the second movement. Regarding the text, it is the first freely versified movement of our cantata. “Wo gehest du hin?” stands at the beginning, a quote from the Gospel reading for Cantate Sunday from John 16, which contains portions of Jesus’s farewell speeches. It begins: “Now, though, I go to him who has sent me; and no one among you asks me: Where are you going? Rather because I have said these things to you, your heart is full of sorrow. But I say to you the truth: It is good for you that I go away. For if I do not go away, the comforter will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (5–7).
The unknown poet of our cantata libretto immediately applies the words of Jesus he had chosen to begin the cantata to human existence:
Ich will an den Himmel denken
Und der Welt mein Herz nicht schenken.
Denn ich gehe
Oder stehe,
So liegt mir die Frag im Sinn:
Mensch, ach Mensch, wo gehst du hin?
I will think of heaven
And not give the world my heart,
For if I go
Or stay
There abides the question in my mind:
Man, O man, where are you going?
A chorale strophe taken from Bartholomäus Ringwaldt’s hymn of 1582, Herr Jesu Christ, ich weiß gar wohl (Lord Jesus Christ, I know full well), intensifies what has just been said with these lines:
Ich bitte dich, Herr Jesu Christ,
Halt mich bei den Gedanken
Und laß mich ja zu keiner Frist
Von dieser Meinung wanken,
Sondern dabei verharren fest
Bis daß die Seel aus ihrem Nest
Wird in den Himmel kommen.
I pray you, Lord Jesus Christ,
Hold me to these thoughts
And let me indeed at no time
Waver from this intention,
Rather hold fast to it
Until my soul, out of its nest,
Will come into heaven.
With texts for a recitative and aria, the focus shifts to the transitoriness of the world and its happiness. The recitative begins:
Gleichwie die Regenwasser bald verließen
Und manche Farben leicht verschießen
So geht es auch der Freude in der Welt.
Just as rain waters soon flow away
And many colors easily fade,
So is it also with joy in the world.
The aria follows with these lines:
Man nehme sich in acht,
Wenn das Gelücke lacht.
Denn es kann leicht auf Erden
Vor abends anders werden,
Als man am Morgen nicht gedacht.
One must take care
If good fortune laughs,
For on Earth it can easily
Turn out differently before evening
From what one in the morning had not thought.
This verse alludes to a place in the eighteenth chapter of the book of Sirach, where it is written: “If one is rich, one should consider that one soon can become poor. For by evening it can become quite different from what it was in the morning; and all such things happen quickly before God” (25–26).
The concluding chorale strophe, the beginning of the hymn by Ämilie Juliane von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende (Who can know how near to me is my end), consequently points to the uncertainty and limitations of human life.
Bach’s composition assigns the introductory words of Jesus to the bass, the vox Christi. Despite the fact that its text comprises only five syllables, the arioso movement spans over seventy measures. As a result of the frequent and unavoidable repetitions of text, the short question “Wo gehest du hin?” is intensified to a piercing urgency that eases only during the few coloraturas on the word “gehest,” while the instrumental part, honeycombed with pauses, is characterized by a restlessness that seldom permits a full stop. Faith and serenity, on the other hand, define the tenor aria and its balanced interweaving of the densely worked vocal and instrumental parts above a smoothly moving bass. The ensuing chorale text, conceived as the expression of the individual, is given to a single voice, the soprano. Together with a sonorous obbligato part with a broad pastose flourish comprising all of the higher string instruments and a rather unobtrusive bass part, the voice, led in large note values, forms a chorale trio well known in Bach’s organ works. A brief, concentrated recitative for tenor is followed by the cautioning alto aria, “Man nehme sich in acht, / Wenn das Gelücke lacht”: tone painting figures by the instruments depict laughing naturalistically, yet their sparse repetitions and the consistent descending motion point to hollowness and danger of earthly pleasure, in the face of which one’s laughter sticks in one’s throat. By contrast, the effect of the concluding chorale, Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten (Who only lets dear God rule), is almost liberating.