This page was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Elizabeth Budd.
Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust BWV 170 / BC A 106
Sixth Sunday after Trinity, July 28, 1726
Without question, this cantata is among the most challenging compositions of its kind. Who it was who had to master the difficult solo alto part at the first performance under Bach’s direction is not documented. It may have been Carl Gotthelf Gerlach, who is known to have occasionally served as an alto. A student in Leipzig, Gerlach was at the St. Thomas School earlier under Bach’s predecessor as cantor, Johann Kuhnau.The cantata was heard for the first time on July 28, 1726. Another cantata must also have been performed on the same day: Ich will mein Geist in euch geben JLB-7 (I will put my spirit within you), by Bach’s Meiningen cousin Johann Ludwig Bach. It is likely that one cantata was performed before the sermon during the main worship service, the other afterward. It is not known which work received the preferred position before the sermon. It may have been the cantata by Bach’s Meiningen cousin, because it alone makes direct reference in its text to the Gospel reading of the Sunday. While Bach’s source text is indeed designated as “Andacht auf den sechsten Sonntag nach Trinitatis” (Devotion for the sixth Sunday after Trinity), a relation to the Gospel reading is more difficult to make out than for the cantata by Johann Ludwig Bach. Therefore, the cantata Vergügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust BWV 170 (Contented rest, beloved pleasure of the soul) would have been performed on this initial occasion only after the sermon, during Communion.
This work is one of the few flawless examples in Bach’s oeuvre of the cantata as it is exemplified by Erdmann Neumeister in his collection Geistliche Cantaten statt einer Kirchen-Music (Sacred cantatas instead of a church music), prepared in 1702 and reprinted in 1704. That is, traditional church music with its mixture of biblical text, chorale strophes, and a few freely versified portions was to be replaced—according to Neumeister’s initiative—by subjective expressions of piety exclusively in free poetry.1 This effort achieved only partial success, although it was widely imitated. Who wrote the exclusively free poetry for this Bach cantata long remained a mystery to Bach research. On several occasions it was even suggested that Bach himself might have authored the text. In the 1950s it was proven not only that Bach had set this text to music in Leipzig but also that—fifteen years before Bach—Christoph Graupner had done so in Darmstadt, where he was court music director; he had also been among Bach’s competitors in 1723 for the Leipzig cantorate.2 With this, attention was focused on the Darmstadt court librarian Georg Christian Lehms as author of the text. But it was only as recently as 1970 that final confirmation came with the discovery of a copy of Lehms’s text collection Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer (Church offering pleasing to God), published at Darmstadt in 1711. It turned out that when he was at Weimar, before 1717, Bach had used two texts for composition from this volume and at Leipzig eight further texts in 1725 and 1726.3
For the era, it was not at all unusual to draw upon a relatively old collection of texts. It was an inaccurate premise of older scholarship that a close temporal relationship necessarily existed between the appearance of a printed collection and an associated composition—a premise that led to a number of disastrous errors. In the case of the Lehms texts, it is clear that they, with their powerfully elemental Baroque manner of expression, stood diametrically opposed to the galant sensibilities of the age. Whether Bach prized them for exactly this reason and deliberately adopted a backward-looking attitude is impossible to say.
The Andacht (devotional) text authored by Lehms comprises five movements: three arias and two recitatives. The language is characterized by the frequent use of compound nouns, a feature that betrays a proclivity to powerful Baroque expression. On the one hand, this may have to do with the collection’s relatively early origin; on the other hand, it could point to the author’s background and spiritual home. Although he finished his career in Darmstadt, Lehms came from Liegnitz in Lower Silesia. It was the Silesian schools of poetry, in particular, the Second Silesian School of the late seventeenth century, that the early eighteenth century regarded as the stronghold of harsh, crude, overladen, overblown expression. Bach himself had to endure such a comparison when in May 1737 Johann Adolph Scheibe in Hamburg launched an attack against Bach’s compositional style, calling his works turgid and confused and comparing them to the works of the Silesian playwright Daniel Casper von Lohenstein.
With “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust” (Contented rest, beloved pleasure of the soul), Lehms begins his hymn of praise to “wahren Seelenfrieden” (true peace of the soul)—the “Stille und Ruhe des Herzens” (heart’s quiet and ease). He continues:
Dich kann man nicht bei Höllensünden,
Wohl aber Himmelseintracht finden;
Du stärkst allein die schwache Brust.
Drum sollen lauter Tugendgaben
In meinem Herzen Wohnung haben.
You cannot be found amid the sins of hell
But rather in heavenly concord;
You alone strengthen the weak breast.
Therefore should true gifts of virtue
Have their dwelling in my heart.
But this gentle entreaty is only a prelude. Like a preacher thundering from the pulpit against the gathered throng of sinners, Lehms holds forth in his first recitative:
Die Welt, das Sündenhaus,
Bricht nur in Höllenlieder aus
Und sucht in Haß und Neid,
Des Satans Bild an sich zu tragen.
Ihr Mund ist voller Ottergift,
Der oft die Unschuld tödlich trifft,
Und will allein von Racha! sagen.
The world, that house of sin,
Breaks forth only in songs of hell
And seeks, through hate and envy,
To bear Satan’s image.
Its mouth is full of the poison of asps,
Which often strikes innocence mortally
And would only speak of Raca!
With this, the poet builds a bridge to the Gospel reading for the sixth Sunday after Trinity, found in Matthew 5, not far from the Sermon on the Mount. It focuses on the message of justification with the words of Jesus: “For I say to you: Unless your righteousness is better than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. You have heard what is said to the ancients: ‘You shall not kill; whoever kills, he shall be guilty before the law.’ I, however, say to you: Whoever is angry with his brother, he is guilty before the law; whoever, though, says to his brother: Racha! He is guilty before the council; however, he who says: You fool! He is guilty before the fires of hell” (20–22). In long, powerfully expressive verses, the second aria laments the misguided ways of the human heart:
Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen,
Die dir, mein Gott, so sehr zuwider sein;
Ich zittre recht und fühle tausend Schmerzen,
Wenn sie sich nur an Rach’ und Haß erfreun.
How the wayward hearts afflict me
That against you, my God, are so sorely set.
I truly tremble and feel a thousand pains
When they delight only in vengeance and hate.
“Gerechter Gott” (righteous God), cries the poet, “Was magst du doch gedenken” (What might you think), and concludes with the lines “Ach, ohne Zweifel hast du so gedacht: / Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen!” (Ah, without doubt have you thought: / How the wayward hearts afflict me!). Thus the return to the aria’s beginning is accomplished by a simple artifice, and the train of thought is closed. The last recitative continues the lament “Wer sollte sich demnach / Wohl hier zu leben wünschen” (Who should therefore / Wish to live here) but returns to “Gottes Vorschrift” (God’s injunction), namely, to love even the enemy as a friend. The final chorale closes the circle to the “Vergnügte Ruh” of the beginning:
Mir ekelt mehr zu leben,
Drum nimm mich, Jesu, hin.
Mir graut vor allen Sünden,
Laß mich dies Wohnhaus finden,
Wo selbst ich ruhig bin.
I am sickened to live longer;
Therefore, take me, Jesus, away.
I shudder before all my sins.
Let me find this dwelling place
Wherein I can find peace.
In spite of its rather overwrought language, the text is quite well suited for composition. It provided Bach the opportunity to draw on all registers of his art and to put an unusual wealth of invention on display. For the first aria, the song of praise to contented repose, the
8 meter, at peace within itself and complete, and the soft gleam of the key of D major provide ideal foundations. Here, the richness of tone of the strings and the warm timbre of the oboe d’amore unfold just as does the self-possessed singing voice. With the beginning of the first recitative, this ideal world is left forever. Indeed, the image of the world itself is put in question, for in the second aria, “Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen,” the world itself is—musically speaking—turned on its head. The otherwise obligatory bass foundation is omitted, violins and violas join to form a foundation in a high register, and singing voice and organ give themselves over to a harmonic and melodic adventure tantamount to the path through a maze. Only rarely did Bach employ this bassetto effect—the omission of the basso continuo—but on each occasion with particular intent. In this case, the “irregular” procedure characterizes the extraordinary, incomprehensible, not understandable rationally, or only in irregular fashion—in other words, the “wrong paths” of the “wayward” hearts. A parallel example of something not rationally explicable and hence set the same way in music would be the soprano aria from the St. Matthew Passion “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” BWV 244, 49.
With its thematic invention and dance-like verve, the third aria of the cantata could pass as a song of praise of the joys of earthly existence were there not, at the very beginning, an augmented step from D to G-sharp—a tritone, the diabolus in musica. It represents the revulsion against the pharisaical existence, the necessity of reversing course.
In 1750 Bach’s oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, performed the first aria of our cantata in Halle as part of a pasticcio (BR-WFB F 20), in which still another cantata movement4 by Johann Sebastian and a recitative of unknown origin were included. The second and third arias were not included; they were probably too challenging technically or, with their musical symbolism, would not have been understood.