This page was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Elizabeth Budd.
Ich bin in mir vergnügt BWV 204 / BC G 45
For Various Purposes, 1726 or 1727
Among the secular vocal works of Johann Sebastian Bach, the solo cantata for soprano Ich bin in mir vergnügt BWV 204 (I am content within) is the great unknown. If nothing else, this is because scarcely anything at all is known for certain about its origin. The reason for the work’s creation, probably in 1726 or 1727, has not been determined. It is often suggested that it was for music making in the Bach household, in spite of—or perhaps because of—its sedate, old-fashioned manner and that it was meant for Anna Magdalena Bach, who was a soprano. There is a plausible connection to the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, at which students and other music lovers gathered weekly for their own enjoyment and that of their listeners. Although Bach first took on leadership of this organization officially in 1729, before that point he seems to have provided them with his own compositions now and then as a guest.Above all, the “Cantata von der Vergnügsamkeit” (cantata of contentment), as Bach himself inscribed it, can be regarded as little known because today it is seldom performed, in contrast to several of its secular sibling works.
This neglect has nothing to do with its musical qualities but rather with the problematic nature of its text, which turns out to be a rambling “Loblied auf das Mittelmaß” (paean to the average). Substantial portions of this paean are to be found in the printed oeuvre of one of the era’s most popular poets, although it can be doubted that he would have approved of the text ultimately set by Bach. In any case, when Bach composed his cantata, Menantes was no longer among the living.
Menantes, whose real name was Christian Friedrich Hunold, was a few years older than Bach and, like him, came from Thuringia. Hunold also had in common with the future Thomaskantor that he lost his parents early and was sent away to northern Germany at a young age, returning later to his Thuringian hometown. Nothing is known of any personal relationship, but there is much to support the supposition that Hunold and Bach may have met one another, if not in Hamburg around 1700, then in Arnstadt in 1707. At this time, Bach’s professional ascent was proceeding along an assured path, while Hunold had long been searching in vain for a new position. In Hamburg the fun-loving and temperamental law student Hunold had begun a promising career as a writer, making a name for himself in 1703 and 1704 with the opera libretti Salomon and Nebucadnezar, written for Reinhard Keiser. Satires, all too candid, and habitual indebtedness forced him to flee Hamburg in June 1706 and return to Thuringia. Finally, in late 1708 he was able to gain a foothold in Halle, where he enjoyed a reputation as a popular writer and literary theorist until his early death in August 1721. In the last years of his life Hunold provided numerous cantata texts to the nearby court of Köthen, where Bach was responsible for their composition beginning in late 1717.
In contrast to the Hunold cantatas of 1718–20, in the “Cantata von der Vergnügsamkeit” we have the last of Bach’s compositions on Hunold texts and, at the same time, the earliest Hunold text he composed. The source Bach used was a collection published in 1713 in Halle and Leipzig entitled Menantes Academische Neben-Stunden allerhand neuer Gedichte nebst einer Anleitung zur vernünftigen (Menantes academic interludes of all sorts of new poems together with an introduction to rational poetry). In 1726, five years after the poet’s death, the collection was republished. It can be shown, however, that Bach used the older print of 1713. The famous Hamburg opera composer Reinhard Keiser set several cantata texts from this collection shortly after they appeared; in 1714 he published them under the title Musikalische Landslust . . . in moralischen Cantaten (Musical country pleasures . . . in moral cantatas). The attractiveness of the texts—and their quick appropriation by Keiser—may have had something to do with the fact that Hunold himself was not only a poet but also a great lover of music; according to contemporary reports, he “played various instruments pleasantly and to perfection, in particular the violin and viola da gamba.”
“Moral cantatas”—among them Bach’s “Cantata von der Vergnügsamkeit”—followed a trend of the period, particularly in Hamburg and Leipzig. In 1725 the Hamburg music director Georg Philipp Telemann made a request to the Frankfurt scholar Uffenbach for “a half or whole dozen cantatas of sacred moral content so that they can be performed in church as well as private concerts.”1 And as late as 1740 Telemann asked the poet Albrecht von Haller, then active in Göttingen, for “moralischen Oden” in order to set them in the style of Sperontes’s Singende Muse an der Pleiße (Singing muse on the Pleisse). In 1735 and 1736 Telemann published two collections of six “moralischen Cantaten” each; he was given the texts for the first group by Daniel Stoppe, the Gottsched follower active in Hirschberg, Silesia.2
It is not difficult to see a parallel to literature and philosophy of the time, in particular, the circulation of “moralische Wochenschriften” after the British “moral weeklies.” Tailored to the growing importance of the middle class, these publications were concerned with the improvement of moral standards and a rational existence oriented to striving for earthly happiness. The ideas of Stoic or Epicurean ethics made frugality and accommodation to existing conditions seem to be virtues. On the way to an “enlightened happiness,” Johann Christoph Gottsched sought, as its protagonist, “to root out unreason and vice and instead foster reason and virtue among his countrymen.”3 Thus it was just as important to demonstrate the negative effects of envy, slander, arrogance, self-love, and avarice as it was to show the positive effects of modesty, sincerity, love of one’s neighbor, and generosity.
Bach’s cantata follows this noble objective, but textually it is a bit too much of a good thing. The core of the libretto is a “Cantata der Zufriedenheit” (cantata of contentment), as per Hunold’s heading above the text. In plainly classical concentration, it comprises only three arias and two recitatives. A formal and intellectual frame is provided by a short motto placed at the beginning: “Ein edler Mensch ist Perlen-Muscheln gleich: In sich am meisten reich” (A noble person is like pearl oysters: in himself most rich), together with the last aria’s final lines:
In sich selber muß man finden
Perlen der Zufriedenheit.
In oneself one must find
Pearls of contentment.
It seems that this text did not match Bach’s wishes. In order to expand it to four each of recitatives and arias, at the libretto’s beginning he himself or someone commissioned by him placed a poem found elsewhere in Hunold’s collection entitled Der vergnügte Mensch (The contented person), written in Alexandrines. Moreover, the motto with the comparison of the noble person with pearl oysters was moved to the cantata’s conclusion, where, excessively, it was combined with several naively rhymed strophes of unknown origin.
In other similar revisions to his libretti, Bach showed a much more assured hand, particularly in the Trauerode BWV 198 (Mourning ode) of 1727 for the Saxon electress, as well as the expansion of the text for the Coffee Cantata BWV 211, composed only a few years later. Where Hunold’s original cantata contains fruitful oppositions, if only incipiently, the expanded libretto slides completely into a low-contrast “paean to the average.”
Bach’s composition must overcome the weaknesses of the overall concept through a carefully planned sequence of keys, richly varied instrumentation, and subtle deployment of dance types. The penultimate recitative can still be helped by the transition to the songlike arioso, but the Alexandrines of the opening movement with their many caesuras remain unintegrated. The lively final ensemble also fails to provide a definitive answer to the questions to what extent Bach intended in this cantata to “amuse” his listeners (i.e., to satisfy them) and to what extent he counted on a certain degree of Vergnügsamkeit (amusement): what is meant here is an undemanding contentment that the librettist at least began to preach only after his Hamburg excesses had brought him to the brink of catastrophe.