This page was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Elizabeth Budd.
Bekennen will ich seinen Namen BWV 200 / BC A 192
Occasion Unknown. First performed around 1742 in Leipzig.
It was in early 1935 that the musical world learned of the existence of the cantata Bekennen will ich seinen Namen BWV 200 (I will confess his name) for the first time. Ludwig Landshoff, then active in Berlin as a conductor and music scholar, prepared the first edition of the work for the venerable firm of Peters in Leipzig.1 In contrast to the firm’s owner, Henri Hinrichsen, Landshoff emigrated shortly afterward and thereby escaped the Nazi terror. His edition reflects the approaching danger. Regarding the manuscript’s provenance, Landshoff’s foreword reads (more by way of obfuscation than illumination): “The autograph for the alto aria by Bach printed here for the first time is in private hands in Berlin. It was thankfully made available to me for publication by the current owner. The previous owner, also living in Berlin, was unable to say anything further about where the manuscript came from, other than that it was found among his father’s papers after his death in Berlin in 1924.” Landshoff is silent as to the names of the owner, the previous owner, and the father of the previous owner. He may have been simply taking the usual precautions to protect the privacy of the owners against the curious. But it seems more likely that the person who died in 1924 and his son were members of Berlin’s Jewish population and that Landshoff deemed it advisable not to mention their names. Obviously, the same is true of the collector in Berlin who counted the Bach autograph among his treasures in 1935. Not until after World War II did it become known that he was the pianist Franz-Joachim Osborn. Born in 1903, Osborn studied piano with Artur Schnabel and Max Pauer, composition under Franz Schreker, and conducting with Franz Busch. He emigrated to England in 1934, a year before Landshoff’s edition was published. In England Osborn concertized with the famous violinist Max Rostal. Later he returned to the Continent and died in Basel in 1955. The manuscript remained in the possession of his widow, who later remarried as Lady Hutchison, and in May 1979 it reached the Berlin State Library by way of their son Christopher Osborn.The contents of the Bach manuscript that surfaced in 1935 are as mysterious as their provenance. Although the work has been called a cantata since then, in actuality it is only a single aria. What context it belongs to has not yet been ascertained. Its text—free poetry by an unknown librettist—shows that it is part of a church cantata:
Bekennen will ich seinen Namen,
Er ist der Herr, er ist der Christ,
In welchem aller Völker Samen
Gesegnet und erlöset ist.
Kein Tod raubt mir die Zuversicht:
Der Herr ist meines Lebens Licht.
I will confess his name,
He is the Lord, he is the Christ
In whom the seed of all peoples
Is blessed and redeemed.
No death will rob me of the confidence:
The Lord is the light of my life.
The rather superficial pathos of this verse yields very few clues as to its author. Further, there are few indications as to the work’s place in the church calendar. From the keywords “Tod” (death) and “Zuversicht” (confidence), as well as “Lebens Licht” (light of [my] life), some have inferred the Feast of Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the conceptual world of the ancient Simeon. But the praise of the name of Jesus could be related to New Year’s Day or another holiday, and the word “Licht” (light), accentuated at the close, could point to the feast of Epiphany. The vocabulary represented in the aria text is also found in hymnals of the period beneath the rubric “Von Jesu Namen” in particular.
The music is not much more illuminating. Despite the absence of scoring indications, it is clear that the alto voice is accompanied by two violins and the basso continuo. The hymnic gesture of the melody and the euphonious voice leading seem more characteristic of Handel or another Italian-influenced composer than of Bach. Even so, the authenticity of the manuscript is beyond doubt, and the number of corrections speaks against the possibility that this could be a copy or arrangement of another composer’s work. And so for the moment, the only possible explanation for the rather unusual style that remains is the time of the work’s origin, probably in 1742, and the absence of any vocal works by Bach for comparison during this period.
Addendum
Only two years after the first edition of Schulze’s book was published, many of the riddles that attended this freestanding aria were resolved. Peter Wollny was able to determine that BWV 200 is indeed not an original work by Bach and is instead his arrangement of the aria “Dein Kreuz, o Bräutigam meiner Seelen” (Your cross, O bridegroom of my soul), from the Passion oratorio by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690–1749) entitled Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld (also known by the title on its earliest printed libretto, Der leidende und am Creutz sterbende liebe Jesu). Wollny was able to make this determination based on several other recent discoveries that outline a rich artistic exchange between Bach, Stölzel, and others. These discoveries in turn are based on the printed text booklets distributed to church congregations in Leipzig, a large cache of which was discovered in St. Petersburg about fifteen years ago.“Texte zur Leipziger Kirchenmusik”: Bach’s Activities during the 1730s and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel
For more than a century, researchers have used the printed text booklets distributed to church congregations and secular audiences as tools to positively establish the dates and locations for performances of Bach’s cantatas and other vocal works. The booklets are a rare commodity: small in format and numerous when issued, they attracted the interest of very few collectors at the time. They were issued for sacred as well as secular occasions: for church services, city council elections, birthdays, memorials, school inaugurations, and so on. A relatively large percentage of texts of cantatas for court and state occasions have been preserved in archives and museums; those for church occasions are, however, quite rare.Around 1900, several such booklets were found in the St. Nicholas Church archive: one for Easter and the two following Sundays in 1731, another for Pentecost and Trinity in the same year, and one for the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 of 1734. Sacred and secular cantata text booklets have also been found in the Leipzig and Dresden city archives.
In the early 1970s, while searching for materials relating to the life and work of Georg Philipp Telemann, Wolf Hobohm discovered nine more text booklets for Leipzig church music during Johann Kuhnau’s and Bach’s era in a place far removed from Leipzig: the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (then the State Public Library “Saltykov-Ščedrin” in Leningrad).2 Hobohm had sought out the Russian library as a repository of over two centuries of rich cultural and commercial exchange between Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and German trade and university cities.
J. S. Bach’s close association with Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, music director at the court of Gotha, has long been well known, as evidenced by the “Partia di Signore Steltzeln” in the Clavierbüchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and, of course, the aria “Bist du bei mir” in the second notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, from Stölzel’s opera Diomedes oder die triumphierende Unschuld (Diodemes or innocence triumphant).3 In 2008, two years after the initial appearance of Hans-Joachim Schulze’s Die Bach-Kantaten, three studies were published simultaneously in Bach-Jahrbuch that presented significant findings regarding libretto booklets, findings that clarified the nature of BWV 200 and illuminated Bach’s artistic relationship with Stölzel to a stunning degree. First, Tatjana Schabalina reported the discovery of a far greater corpus of printed texts in St. Petersburg to vocal works by Bach and his contemporaries than previously known.4 She identified more than nine hundred new sources relevant to German music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, largely from the collection of Józef Andrzej Załuski, a key figure of the Polish Enlightenment with close connections to Leipzig and Dresden. (Johann Christoph Gottsched dedicated the first volume of his Nöthiger Vorrath zur Geschichte der deutschen Dramatischen Dichtkunst to Załuski.)5 The most significant of these for Bach’s vocal music are text booklets for church music dating from 1724, 1725, 1727, and 1728; a printed text for the Passion oratorio Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld by Stölzel; and a print of the 1728–29 Picander annual text cycle, whose only other known copy vanished in 1945 from the Dresden State Library.
It had long been suspected that Stölzel’s Passion oratorio might have been performed in St. Thomas Church and belonged to Bach’s active Leipzig repertoire because a copy of the work had been among the holdings of the library at St. Thomas School until 1945. The text booklet for the work discovered by Schabalina verifies that the Passion oratorio was indeed performed in Leipzig on Good Friday, April 23, 1734 (the season before Bach’s Christmas Oratorio BWV 248).
In the second study, Marc-Roderich Pfau reported the discovery of two further text booklets, previously unknown, from Bach’s era in Leipzig.6 While searching for printed texts of cantatas performed by Johann Theodor Roemhildt in Merseburg, Pfau came upon the two Leipzig booklets bound in a collection containing Merseburg cantata text prints for the 1734–35 church year. The first of these is for the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248; it matches the copy held by the Bach-Archiv Leipzig.
The second booklet contains four cantata texts for the thirteenth through sixteenth Sundays after Trinity. Pfau determined that all four of these belong to Stölzel’s adaptation and composition of an annual text cycle by the Silesian poet Benjamin Schmolck (1672–1737), Das Saiten-Spiel des Herzens (The string play of the heart). Schmolck’s annual cycle was quite popular and was set multiple times, first by Stölzel in Gotha and again by Johann Friedrich Fasch in Zerbst in 1724 or 1725. There are three cantatas by Georg Philipp Telemann on texts from Schmolck’s annual cycle. Other composers to set texts from the cycle are Johann Balthasar Christian Freislich and Johann Theodor Roemhildt. Stölzel was the only composer to set the entire annual cycle.
The booklet has sixteen pages and is paginated 49–64, apparently to allow it to be bound with others in a series. Since Bach’s Leipzig work year began with the first Sunday after Trinity, Pfau shows that the booklet must have been preceded by three similar booklets, paginated 1–16, 17–32, and 33–48, containing texts for the first to twelfth Sundays after Trinity as well as St. John's Day and the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. Although the printed text booklet from Stölzel’s performance of his cycle in Gotha is lost, Fasch’s from Zerbst survives—and its libretti for the thirteenth through the sixteenth Sundays after Trinity match those of the Leipzig text book exactly. Pfau marshals this fact—together with the singular occurrence of another composer’s work appearing on four successive Sundays, the pagination of the Leipzig text booklet to allow the entire series to be bound at a later date, and the fact that the entire annual cycle was presented elsewhere by others—in service of a compelling case that Bach indeed presented Stölzel’s entire annual cycle of cantatas in 1735–36 in Leipzig.
The third study, by Peter Wollny (translated in the Riemenschneider Bach journal), synthesizes and expands upon many findings from the two that preceded it in Bach-Jahrbuch 2008.7 The revelation that Stölzel’s Passion oratorio was in fact performed in Leipzig in 1734 enabled Wollny to make the determination regarding BWV 200 described at the outset of this discussion, namely, that it is Bach’s arrangement of a movement from Stölzel’s Passion oratorio, the aria “Dein Kreuz, o Bräutigam meiner Seelen.”
This remarkable discovery is one among several further revelations regarding Bach’s performance of materials by Stölzel and others. Wollny further corroborated Bach’s presentation in Leipzig of the entire Stölzel cantata cycle by identifying yet another text booklet whose pagination matches the one discovered by Pfau. Moreover, Wollny identified ten cantatas that survive from the Stölzel annual cantata cycle and suggests that another setting of the Schmolck libretto now attributed to Carl Heinrich Graun may actually be still another fragment of the Stölzel cycle. Further, the performance of Stölzel’s Passion oratorio—that is, a work whose text consists entirely of free poetry—was the first of its kind in Leipzig’s main churches. It had been thought that only oratorical Passions, consisting of biblical text and poetry, were performed in St. Thomas and St. Nicholas. Other Passion oratorios associated with Leipzig—a copy of Handel’s Brockes Passion HWV 48 in Bach’s estate and a fragmentary set of parts for a Passion oratorio by Telemann, now missing—thus can now be understood as fragments of Bach’s active performing repertoire during the 1730s.
Wollny writes:
The three cantata cycles that have come down to us, and the comparatively small number of oratorical works that have been preserved or that can be documented—these cannot represent the entire corpus of works performed during Bach’s twenty-seven-year tenure. These must have been supplemented by a considerable number of figural works by other composers. . . . Over the long term, a single individual working alone could not possibly have supplied the musical diversity that was apparently expected. This observation provides the basis—if recognizable only in outline—for a dense network of professional and private connections that constituted the precondition for a flourishing business of music copying and lending, and in which Bach would naturally have been involved.8