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Gottlob, nun geht das Jahr zu Ende BWV 28 / BC A 20
Sunday after Christmas
As implied by its title, this cantata is for an occasion that appears late in the civil year: the Sunday after Christmas, which comes up only now and then. Its appearance in 1725 caused the Thomaskantor a brief moment of awkwardness. During the period before Christmas when no music was performed and only a guest performance in Köthen with his wife, Anna Magdalena, had provided a bit of diversion, Johann Sebastian Bach began to set a collection of cantata libretti to music that had already inspired him to compose two solo cantatas during his time at Weimar. The prolix title of the collection at issue begins with Gottgefälliges / Kirchen- / Opffer / In einem gantzen / Jahr-Gange / Andächtiger Betrachtungen, / über / die gewöhnlichen / Sonn- und Fest-Tags Texte . . . (Church offerings to please God in a complete annual cycle of devout reflections on the standard texts for Sundays and holidays) by the Darmstadt court librarian Georg Christian Lehms, printed in 1711 and originally meant for Christoph Graupner. As a unified sequence of cantata texts of common origin from the first day of Christmas to the start of Epiphany, the poems by the Liegnitz-born Lehms were quite convenient. However, he had omitted the rarely occurring Sunday after Christmas from his opus. So Bach needed to seek a replacement, and he found it in Erdmann Neumeister’s Geistliche Poesien mit untermischten biblischen Sprüchen und Choralen auf alle Sonn- und Festtage (Sacred poems with interspersed biblical sayings and chorales for all Sunday and feast days), an annual cycle printed in Frankfurt and originally written for Georg Philipp Telemann. Whether the cantor of St. Thomas School found the time and opportunity to consider the subtle differences between Lehms’s somewhat incomplete gantzen Jahr-Gange (complete annual cycle), as his title continues, and Neumeister’s poetic texts auf alle Sonn- und Festtage (for all Sundays and holidays) we cannot know.Neumeister’s libretto, which Bach probably used as a matter of necessity, remarkably avoids any connection to the reading of the day, a selection from the second chapter of Luke. Directly following the Gospel reading for the Purification of Mary, with the depiction of the baby Jesus in the Temple, the verses meant for the Sunday after Christmas describe the meeting between Mary, the aged Simeon, and the equally elderly Hanna, who was spending her days in fasting and prayer. The cantata text, on the other hand, focuses on the threshold between the old and new year, expresses thanks for good deeds bestowed, and prays for blessings of the new year. Indeed, the text entitled “Am Sonntage nach Weynachten” (On Sunday after Christmas) could also be redesignated for New Year’s Day without further ado.
Even the opening movement, an aria, is filled with joyous feelings of thanksgiving:
Gottlob! nun geht das Jahr zu Ende,
Das neue rücket schon heran.
Gedenke, meine Seele, dran,
Wieviel deines Gottes Hände
Im alten Jahre Guts getan!
Stimm ihm ein frohes Danklied an;
So wird er ferner dein gedenken
Und mehr zum neuen Jahre schenken.
Praise God! Now the year comes to an end,
The new one already draws near.
Consider, my soul, this,
How much good your God’s hands
In the old year have done!
Strike up for him a joyful song of thanks;
That he will further think of you
And give more in the new year.
The request to strike up a song of thanks is answered by the first strophe of a chorale written by Johann Gramann in 1530:
Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren,
Was in mir ist, den Namen sein!
Sein Wohltat tut er mehren,
Vergiß es nicht, o Herze mein.
Now praise, my soul, the Lord,
Whatever is in me, praise his name!
His beneficence he increases,
Forget it not, O heart of mine.
A word of the Lord from Jeremiah 32:41 expands on the “Wohltat” (beneficence), taken from a section that promises the salvation of Israel: “So spricht der Herr: Es soll mir eine Lust sein, daß ich ihnen Gutes tun soll, und ich will sie in diesem Lande pflanzen treulich, vom ganzen Herze und von ganzer Seele” (Thus says the Lord: It shall be for me a pleasure, that I do good for them, and I will establish them in this land in faith, with my whole heart and my whole soul). The ensuing recitative responds to this promise with overflowing praise:
Gott ist ein Quell, wo lauter Güte fleußt,
Gott ist ein Licht, wo lauter Gnade scheinet,
Gott ist ein Schatz, der lauter Segen heißt,
Gott ist ein Herr, der’s treu und herzlich ist.
God is a spring, where pure goodness flows,
God is a light, where pure grace shines,
God is a treasure, that pure grace is called,
God is a Lord, whose intentions are true and sincere.
The associated aria combines praise, thanksgiving, and a prayer for a fortunate new year:
Gott hat uns im heurigen Jahre gesegnet,
Daß Wohltun und Wohlsein einander begegnet.
Wir loben ihn herzlich und bitten darneben,
Er woll auch ein glückliches neues Jahr geben.
Wir hoffens von seiner beharrlichen Güte
Und preisens im voraus mit dankbarem Gemüte.
God has blessed us in the present year,
That goodness and well-being have met each other.
We praise him sincerely and pray, moreover,
That he will grant us a happy new year.
We hope for this from his unwavering goodness
And praise him in anticipation with thankful spirit.
The keyword “preisen” (praise) provides the contact point for the concluding strophe from Paul Eber’s hymn Helft mir Gotts Güte preisen (Help me praise God’s goodness):
All solch dein Güt wir preisen,
Vater ins Himmels Thron,
Die du uns tust beweisen
Durch Christum, deinen Sohn,
Und bitten ferner dich:
Gib uns ein friedsam Jahre,
Für allem Leid bewahre
Und nähr uns mildiglich.
All such goodness of yours we praise,
Father on heaven’s throne,
Which you show us
Through Christ, your son,
And pray further to you:
Grant us a peaceful year,
From all suffering preserve
And nourish us abundantly.
Bach’s composition of this not entirely grateful text is dominated by the chorale arrangement in motet style, the second movement of the cantata. Philipp Spitta, in the second volume of his Bach biography, published in 1880, found the highest praise for it:
The principal chorus is the second number, but such is its weight, that the finished beauty of the preceding soprano air hardly asserts itself, and all that comes after sinks into nothingness. Bach had taken the composition of the chorus in hand earlier than the rest of the work and had sketched it first separately, for in the complete score it shows hardly any corrections and has all the appearance of a fair copy. At the conclusion of this gigantic work the master himself looked back on it with proud satisfaction—he has done what he scarcely ever did—counted up its 174 bars and noted them at the end. It is a chorale for chorus on “Nun lob mein Seel den Herren”—“My soul now praise the Lord”—and resembles a motet insofar as that the instruments—strings, three oboes, cornet, and three trombones—work with the voices, and it is only the figured bass that is here and there allowed a way of its own. The type is that of the Pachelbel organ chorale, elaborated to the highest degree of which it was capable within the limits of the motet form. Particularly we may note, as belonging to this form, the picturesque musical rendering of the separate lines of the verses by the use of contrapuntal parts, which interpret the forgiveness of “us miserable sinners” by acute chromatic passages, or pour out the consolations of God as it were in a stream over wretched humanity, and then soar up “like to the eagle.” Bach subsequently wrote several pieces of this kind, and they are worthy of the first-born, but none surpasses it.1
One could allow Spitta’s classification “first-born” to stand if it could be shown that our motet movement indeed originated before the chorale cantata cycle began in mid-1724. Otherwise, one would have to conclude that the compositional experience of writing at least forty chorale arrangements for instruments and chorus within a year’s time flowed into the creation of this unusually concentrated and closely worked movement. Particularly revealing in terms of the reception history of the chorale motet is the fact that, shortly after Johann Sebastian Bach’s death at the latest, it found its way into a motet pasticcio with the text Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren (Be lauded and praised with honor). The pasticcio combines a cantata movement by Telemann, our chorale motet, and an arrangement of a foreign work either by Bach or by his successor, Gottlob Harrer. Under the title Jauchzet dem Herrn, alle Welt (Cheer the Lord, all the world) with the designation BWV1 Anh. 160, the pasticcio belonged to the motet repertoire of the St. Thomas School, which so deeply impressed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on his visit to Leipzig in 1789.