This page was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Elizabeth Budd.
Himmelskönig, sei willkommen BWV 182 / BC A 53
Palm Sunday, March 25, 1714
In several respects, the cantata Himmelskönig, sei willkommen BWV 182 (King of heaven, be welcomed) occupies a special place among the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. One of these is the fact that this is the work with which Bach began his regular composition of cantatas at Weimar. Another exceptional feature concerns the work’s intended place in the church year.For Bach, the move from Mühlhausen to Weimar in the early summer of 1708 meant a change from a position as city organist to a similar one at court. He served for nearly six years as court organist and chamber musician before he gained a promotion. If his main focus had previously been on organ performance and composition and, according to family lore, gaining “the goodwill of his gracious employers,” he now had to turn to a new, more strictly regimented realm of activity. The earliest biography states: “In the year 1714 he was named concertmaster at the same court. Now, the functions connected with this post then consisted mainly in composing church pieces and performing them.”1 At present we have no further detail about the appointment because part of the archive was destroyed in 1774 when a lightning strike and resulting fire consumed much of the Weimar castle.
Fortunately, at the beginning of the twentieth century an alternative was found for the lost records. The notes of a court secretary, akin to a diary, were examined in the Weimar archive, providing fairly precise points of reference. In the volume for 1714 the notes state: “Friday, the 2. of March, 1714, His Serene Highness the Reigning Duke most graciously conferred upon the quondam Court Organist Bach, at his most humble request, the title of Concertmaster, with official rank below that of Vice-Capellmeister Drese, for which he is to be obliged and to be held accountable to perform new works monthly.”2
Bach’s “most humble request” has not been handed down. Even so, it is worth considering what it probably contained. The court organist would have referred to his appointment in 1708 with “most humble gratitude,” to the continuing grace and kind benevolence of the entire princely house, and to his obligations regarding the castle church organ and the court chapel ensemble. At this point, Johann Sebastian Bach would have started to speak of the high cost of living, the need to support his ever-increasing family, and the urgency of either receiving an increase in salary at court or seeking advancement elsewhere. For this last possibility, he held a trump card in his sleeve: in mid-December 1713, having successfully passed an audition, he had been chosen as organist at the Church of Our Lady in Halle and had a written contract in hand, ready for countersigning, and was at that moment engaged in drawing out negotiations with more monetary demands.
If he wanted to retain his capable court organist, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar had no other option than to give in to the pressure and strike a compromise acceptable to both sides. The appointment of a certain Georg Christoph Strattner in 1695 could serve as a model. Strattner was named vice music director with the requirement that he “in the absence of the current Capellmeister Johann Samuel Drese, or when he is unable to come out because of his known physical infirmity, shall direct the entire chapel, and in such cases hold the usual rehearsals in Drese’s quarters, and not less frequently than every fourth Sunday, perform a piece of his own composition in the ducal castle church under his own direction.” Strattner died in 1704; his position was taken over by a son of music director Drese, who was still in office in 1704 as well as 1714—and still sick.
And so, in early 1714, the new position of concertmaster was arranged for Johann Sebastian Bach, together with the age-old obligation to provide newly composed Stücke (pieces)—in today’s parlance, church cantatas—in the castle church every month, in other words, on a four-week rotation. Traditionally, rehearsals were to be held outside the church, but there appear to have been problems with this. The notes of the court secretary make quite clear: “NB. Rehearsing of the musical pieces at home or one’s own lodgings was changed as of March 23, 1714, and it was expressly ordered that it should always take place in the church chapel.”3 Two days after the issuance of this direct order, Bach’s cantata Himmelskönig, sei willkommen was heard for the first time in the Kirchen-Cappelle, the elevated music gallery in the church.
Certainly, this work was not the very first Weimar church cantata by Bach. Two solo cantatas on texts by the Darmstadt court librarian Georg Christian Lehms probably preceded it: the cantatas Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut BWV 199 and Widerstehe doch der Sünde BWV 54. In addition, a composition on a text by Erdmann Neumeister could have originated before 1714: the Sexagesima cantata Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt BWV 18. But it is just as clear that Bach’s Himmelskönig cantata is his first work composed “von Amts wegen” (officially in his new position). It is for Palm Sunday, the last Sunday before Easter. The Gospel reading for this Sunday, Matthew 21:4–8, is an account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem:
All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, saying, “Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.” And the disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, And brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon. And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and scattered them in the way.
It is here that the cantata’s librettist begins. We do not know who it was; suggestions focus on the Weimar ducal consistory secretary Salomon Franck. Evidence in favor of Franck, twenty-six years older than Bach, includes the relatively conservative form of the text. Although it does not avoid the modern aria form, it seems to regard the contemporary recitative with undisguised mistrust. At the beginning of his text he placed a short strophe, meant for the chorus, that compares the arrival of Christ in Jerusalem to the human heart:
Himmelskönig, sei willkommen,
Laß uns auch dein Zion sein!
Komm herein,
Du hast uns das Herz genommen.
King of heaven, be welcomed,
Let us too be your Zion!
Come in,
You have stolen our hearts.
A recitative follows, yet it contains no modern madrigalistic versification. Instead, it cites Psalm 40:7, certainly words of the psalmist yet unmistakably placed in the mouth of Jesus and binding the events of Palm Sunday and Holy Week:
Siehe, ich komme; im Buch ist von mir geschrieben.
Deinen Willen, mein Gott, tu ich gerne.
See, I come; in the book it is written of me.
I delight to do thy will, my God.
In various ways, this logical connection characterizes all the movements that follow: three arias, a chorale, the concluding chorus. The second of the three arias takes up the “garments” mentioned in Matthew; it now appears as “unbeflecktes Kleid” (spotless garment), a metaphor for the cleansing of sin:
Leget euch dem Heiland unter,
Herzen, die ihr christlich seid!
Tragt ein unbeflecktes Kleid
Eures Glaubens ihm entgegen.
Lay yourselves underneath the savior,
Hearts that are Christian!
Offer up a spotless garment
Of your faith to him.
The texts of the first and third arias speak of crucifixion and a martyr’s death:
Starkes Lieben,
Das dich, großer Gottessohn,
Von dem Thron
Deiner Herrlichkeit getrieben,
Daß du dich zum Heil der Welt
Als ein Opfer vorgestellt.
What strong love,
That you, great Son of God
From the throne
Of your glory were driven,
That you, to heal the world,
Presented yourself as a sacrifice.
Later:
Jesu, laß durch Wohl und Weh
Mich auch mit dir ziehen!
Schreit die Welt nur, “Kreuzige,”
So laß mich nicht fliehen.
Jesus, through wealth and woe
Let me also go with you!
Though the world may only cry “Crucify!”
So let me not flee.
Even the text of the closing chorus is unable to free itself from this dynamic:
So lasset uns gehen in Salem der Freuden,
Begleitet den König in Lieben und Leiden.
Er gehet voran
Und öffnet die Bahn.
Then let us go into the Salem of joys,
Accompany the King in love and sorrow.
He goes ahead
And opens the way.
Just as the opening chorus is separated from the three arias by the psalm verses, the concluding free verse does not follow this group directly. Instead, it is preceded by the only chorale in the cantata, the next to last strophe from Paul Stockmann’s passion hymn Jesu Leiden, Pein und Tod ( Jesus’s suffering, pain, and death), whose text begins “Jesu, deine Passion ist mir lauter Freude” ( Jesus, your Passion is pure joy to me).
The rather austere libretto inspired Bach to one of his most richly imaginative cantata creations. The words of the evangelist, “Siehe, dein König kommt zu dir sanftmütig” (Behold, your King comes meekly unto you), hover, unspoken, over the opening sonata: in their luminous upper ranges, recorder and solo violin proceed in solemn rhythm above dabbed chords in the strings—a procession experienced from afar, intangible as the ether, almost surreal, descending only at the close to the earth from heavenly heights. The first chorus is by contrast earthbound, alternating between the architectonic discipline of a permutation fugue, free canonic structures, and—in the central section—a dialogue between singers and instruments.
The psalm verses given to the bass, the vox Christi, shift quickly from free recitative to the more appropriate arioso. The first aria is also given to the bass, the voice that embodies “Strength”; the self-confident, powerful texture of strings, led by the lively figuration of the violins, seems to be directly developed from the text’s opening phrase, “starkes Lieben.” The expressive alto aria, “Leget euch dem Heiland unter,” is characterized by constantly descending arabesques of melody, alternating between the voice and obbligato flute. In several respects, the tenor aria, “Jesu, laß durch Wohl und Weh,” goes even farther: in a key distant from the bass and alto arias, the accompanying instrumental ensemble is reduced to basso continuo, intensifying the expression and achieving the strongest sense of inwardness. The ensuing chorale is composed as a motet movement in which the singers are in part supported by the instruments; the chorale melody Jesu Kreuz, Leiden und Pein (Jesus’s cross, suffering, and pain) is performed in long note values by the soprano, together with violin and the recorder, at the octave in the manner of a four-foot register on an organ. In formal design, compositional technique, and treatment of text, the closing choral movement “So lasset uns gehen in Salem der Freuden” is the precise counterpart of the first chorus, so that the increasing anticipation of Holy Week in the course of the cantata ends with the return to the world of Palm Sunday.
Johann Sebastian Bach reperformed his first Weimar masterpiece several times in Leipzig. He designated the work “Tempore Passionis. In specie Dominica Palmarum” (For Lent: Particularly for Palm Sunday), knowing well that in Leipzig, Palm Sunday fell during the period without music. “Tempore Passionis aut Festo Mariae Annunciationis” reads Bach’s title at another place, thereby focusing on the Feast of the Annunciation, an occasion when the cantata might be used in Leipzig. Upon the distribution of Bach’s estate in 1750, Philipp Emanuel Bach added to the three designations a fourth, for Estomihi Sunday. It is certainly a unique case among Bach’s cantatas and, to that extent, an estimation of the singular esteem held for this cantata.