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Commentaries on the Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach: An Interactive Companion

Non sa che chia dolore BWV 209 / BC G 50

For an Unknown Occasion, after 1729

The cantata Non sa che sia dolore BWV 209 (He knows not what sorrow is) is among the most puzzling compositions that bear the name Johann Sebastian Bach. For more than a century, scholars have sought with greater and lesser degrees of persuasive power to illuminate the darkness that envelops its origins, its source transmission, and, above all, its authenticity. The first to attempt to blaze a trail through this thicket was that classic Bach biographer of the late nineteenth century, Philipp Spitta. His assertion that the Italian text, despite several poetic commonplaces, is linked to an actual event has not been refuted to this day. Admittedly, according to Spitta, this occasion

can, however, only be made out dimly from the text, which is evidently put together by a German and consists of awkward and sometimes incorrect and meaningless Italian, with the admixture of scraps extracted from original Italian poetry. A friend wishes to return to his native country, that is, from Germany into Italy. He is supposed to have been resident for some time in Anspach and to congratulate himself on being once more able to be of service to his country, the more so that his work in foreign lands has not met with due recognition and support. But the poet tells us that the favorable opinion of some illustrious personage that he has gained while in Anspach will assist him in achieving great things in his own country. Personal circumstances in connection with Bach seem to play some part in this.1


A half century later, Arnold Schering, as chronicler of the music history of Leipzig and one of the most important Bach scholars of his era, attempted to pick up the thread left by Spitta and pursue it further.2 According to Schering, the person celebrated in the cantata was a young married professor who was highly respected at the court of Ansbach, although his scholarship stood in opposition to traditional views. When he returned to Italy, he followed, as the text has it, a “sign from heaven” (cenni del cielo)—hence, in all probability, an appointment to a post. He completed the trip by water, at least in part, since the poem describes him as displaying courage during a sea voyage. With respect to the mention of Ansbach, Schering thought a connection to Bach by way of Johann Matthias Gesner to be possible. Like Bach, Gesner (six years Bach’s junior) was active in Weimar after completing his education in Ansbach and also had to leave his post because of strained relations with the reigning duke there, twelve years after Bach did. For a short time, Gesner worked near his hometown as rector of the Gymnasium in Ansbach before he took over the rectorship at Leipzig’s St. Thomas School and thus became Bach’s superior there for four years. According to Schering, the cantata could have been a commissioned work with which Gesner bid farewell to an Italian known to him from his time in Ansbach. Gesner himself may therefore have been the hitherto unknown librettist who made good and bad use of the Italian language. 

In about 1950 Italian scholars criticized the poet’s poor mastery of the Italian language. At the same time, they corroborated the suspicion expressed by Spitta that certain parts of the text were borrowed from contemporary writers. However, only recently have we learned more precisely where these quotations come from. In 1981 Reinhard Strohm, one of the foremost authorities on Italian opera of the eighteenth century, identified a place in Pietro Metastasio’s opera libretto Semiramide riconosciuta (Semiramis recognized) as the source of the final aria of the cantata ascribed to Bach.3 The second act in Metastasio’s libretto contains the aria “Il pastor, se torna Aprile” (The shepherd, if April returns), whose middle section, beginning “Il nocchier, placato il vento” (The helmsman when the wind has calmed), is otherwise identical to the cantata:

Qual nocchier, placato il vento
Più non teme o si scolora,
Ma contento in su la prora
Va cantando in faccia al mar.

Like the helmsman when the wind drops
No longer fears nor turns pale
But is content in his prow
And goes singing in the face of the sea.


In 1729 Metastasio’s opera text was set by Leonardo Vinci and Nicola Porpora in short order and then later by Geminiano Giacomelli and Giovanni Battista Lampugnani; after 1740 it was set by Johann Adolph Hasse, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and Baldassare Galuppi; and still much later it was set by Antonio Salieri and Giacomo Meyerbeer. In view of the astonishing vitality of this libretto, it is rather amazing that it took so long for the connection to Bach’s cantata to be discovered. However, it should be mentioned that the line beginnings in the cantata and the opera aria are often different and hence do not invite a systematic comparison. The situation is different with the cantata’s prominent beginning, “Non sa che sia dolore.” In 1990 Klaus Hofmann was able to show that the first two lines go back to a poem by Giovanni Battista Guarini printed in 1598 and entitled “Partita dolorosa” (Sorrowful departure).4 “Non sa che sia dolore,” it reads there, and continues, “Chi da la Donna sua parte, e non more” (Who parts from his beloved and does not die). The cantata librettist changed this to “Chi dell’amico suo parte, e non more” (Who parts from his friends and does not die).

It is only the Metastasio text that provides a single clue as to the cantata’s genesis. Considering the opera libretto’s first performances in Rome and Venice, Bach’s composition cannot have originated before 1729. The question whether the proposed connections from Bach to Gesner—who served as rector of St. Thomas School from 1730 to 1735, very close to 1729—actually played a role must be left aside. Other considerations focus on Lorenz Christoph Mizler. Born in Franconia in 1711 and a member of Bach’s circle of students, Mizler studied in Leipzig until 1731. In the autumn of 1734 he traveled back to his hometown, perhaps hoping to establish a career in Ansbach. Admittedly, the question as to who might have commissioned the farewell cantata remains open. That Bach of his own volition might have offered a cantata in honor of a young scholar who, while certainly promising, was not exactly suffering from a lack of self-confidence is not quite the first supposition that comes to mind.

Other things need to be reconsidered. The work’s source transmission is another reason that scholars have had such a hard time clarifying the genesis of this cantata. The only manuscript that preserves this work for posterity comes from the collection of the Göttingen music historian Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who spent the last three decades of his life searching out every possible trace of Bachiana. The copy of the cantata Non sa che sia dolore may have been commissioned by him and prepared in his presence because he himself entered the rather problematic Italian text. The question arises whether Forkel stumbled across the exemplar for his copy—unnamed by him and not preserved—or whether he found it after a deliberate search. His systematic research would have brought together names and branches of tradition known from the Bach biography or to Forkel himself. Such persons might have included Johann Matthias Gesner, Lorenz Christoph Mizler, or the Ansbach-born Johann Georg Voigt, one of Bach’s last students. On the other hand, a chance discovery would obviate premises such as these.

All of these considerations have to do with the musical material and call for an explanation, directly or indirectly, for Bach’s composition “alla maniera italiana,” or perhaps just the extent of his revision of a foreign original. In Bach’s time at Leipzig, his engagement with Italian vocal music ranged from a copy of the solo cantata Armida abbandonata by Georg Friedrich Händel, about 1730, to his late recasting of the Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi as the cantata Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden BWV 1083. The cantata Non sa che sia dolore belongs to this context—presuming the work’s authenticity as a composition by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Several factors speak in favor of Bach’s authorship: above all, the unusual prominence of the instrumental component in the arias and the extensive opening sinfonia, which, as a concerto movement in three-part da capo form, is entirely attuned to the cantata’s basic melancholic affect. In many aspects that are consistent with Bach’s concertos known to have originated in the 1730s, such as the Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins BWV 1043, the sinfonia anticipates the stylistic devices of later decades, such as the fragmented sigh motives. The first aria, “Parti pur e con dolore” (Go, then, and with sorrow), seems less ambivalent, at first devoting itself entirely to the pain of farewell, the voice rising to the point of sobbing, undeterred by the tendril-like figuration of the accompanying flute and only in the consoling middle section allowing the soprano to be carried away by the nimble coloratura of the instrument. In contrast to this wealth of expression and the form that is just as concentrated as it is convincing (with regard to its stylistic integration with the Bachian oeuvre), the happy final movement of the cantata seems to have been produced with somewhat too light a hand. The quick dance tempo of the final aria can certainly be reconciled with our understanding of Bach’s writing style; further, there are many parallels in Bach’s works after about 1730 for the syncopated rhythms of the “Lombardian taste” found here, whose qualities of expression Johann Joachim Quantz called “lively and fresh” (lebhaft und frech). Admittedly, the remarkable ninth chord in the theme of the final aria remains quite singular; thus not all doubt as to the authenticity of the composition can be resolved.

Addendum

In 2010 Schulze revisited the questions of the cantata’s date as well as the name of its dedicatee. In addition to the candidates identified in his 2006 essay (Johann Matthias Gesner, Lorenz Christoph Mizler, and Johann Georg Voigt the Younger), Schulze investigated several others with associations to Ansbach and J. S. Bach. He noted that in addition to the libretto’s quotation from Metastasio’s Semiramide, the third movement also contains a quote from Metastasio’s 1722 Naples libretto, Galatea. A setting of Metastasio’s Semiramide by J. A. Hasse was performed in Leipzig on May 6 and 9, 1746, by Ensemble Mingotti. Exactly half a year later, Georg Scheufer offered Galatea for the first time. Performances lasted into the following year, very close to a performance of Hasse’s Semiramide in Dresden.

These dates, together with the clues in the text, provided Schulze the parameters he needed to develop a profile of the cantata’s dedicatee:
Schulze selected all students at the University of Leipzig from 1729 to 1750 who listed their hometown as Ansbach and then compared them to various reference works, the most important of which was Johann August Vocke’s almanac of births and deaths of scholars, writers, and artists in Ansbach.5 

Schulze found a single candidate who matched all the criteria: Lorenz Albrecht Beck, listed in the calendar under his birthdate, December 30, 1723. His date of death, October 2, 1768, is also given: “Beck, Lorenz Albrecht. 1723. (from Ansbach) court government and justice councillor there, took public and special education at the Gymnasium of his hometown, studied from 1743 on for three and a half years in Leipzig, returned in 1746, and became justice councillor in 1747 and court and government councillor in 1752.”6 University of Leipzig matriculation records provided Schulze with Beck’s date of enrollment, baccalaureate, and master’s graduations: “Beck, Laurent. Albert. Al Beckius o. Becquius Onoldin. B.i. 24.V.1743, b.a. in December 1744, m. 16.II.1747.” Thus Beck completed his studies in early 1747; the date 1746 in Vocke may be based on a print of his dissertation. 

Abraham Kriegel, tertius of Leipzig’s St. Thomas School, provided more detail about Beck’s academic career in an almanac he maintained regarding activities of scholars in Leipzig,7 though without saying anything about the position awaiting him in Ansbach. The court and state calendar shows, however, that he must have assumed it in 1747: although the 1747 edition, printed in advance, does not mention Beck, he is listed as a member of the judicial council in 1748.

Schulze concluded that Lorenz Albrecht Beck (1723–68) of Ansbach must be regarded as the one to whom a circle of friends offered the cantata Non sa che sia dolore as a farewell performance shortly after February 16, 1747. Unfortunately, the questions of who prepared the problematic Italian text, whether the text was circulated in print, and what may have happened to the performing parts all must be left open. Bach would have retained his score; it may have been the exemplar from which Johann Nikolaus Forkel had a copy prepared for his collection of Bachiana. The question whether Bach may have composed all the movements new or relied on existing materials cannot be answered unless the score turns up. The same is true of the question whether he may have received assistance from his circle of students, perhaps from his student and later son-in-law, Johann Christoph Altnikol, in composing—perhaps—the final aria. 

Footnotes

  1. Spitta (1899, 2:639).—Trans.↵
  2. Schering (1933, 60 ff.).↵
  3. Strohm (1976, 206, 232); Strohm (1981, 81-99, esp. 84).↵
  4. Hofmann (1990).↵
  5. Vocke (1796).—Trans.↵
  6. “Beck, Lorenz Albrecht, 1723 (aus Ansbach) Hof- Regierungs- und Justizrath allda, genoss des oeffentlichen und besondern Unterrichts auf dem Gymnasium seiner Vaterstadt, studierte von 1743 an 3 1/2 Jahrein Leipzig, kehrte 1746 zurueck, und wurde 1747 Justizrath und 1752 Hof- und Regierungsrath.”—Trans.↵
  7. Kriegel (1747, 237, 242 ff.).—Trans.↵

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