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Freue dich, erlöste Schar BWV 30 / BC A 178
St. John’s Day, June 24, 1738?
Bach’s cantata Freue dich, erlöste Schar BWV 30 (Rejoice, redeemed host) is for St. John’s Day, celebrated on June 24 as the birthday of St. John the Baptist since the fourth century. The work probably originated in 1738; thus it is regarded as among the late works of the cantor of St. Thomas School. The text of our cantata, the work of an unknown librettist, hews closely to the Gospel reading for St. John’s Day. Found in Luke 1, it first gives the account of the birth of the son of Elizabeth, whose parents named him John, against the suggestions of relatives and neighbors. Zechariah, the father of the child, was mute for a long time because he did not believe the prophecy of the archangel Gabriel that, in spite of his wife’s advanced age, he would have another son with her. When the prophecy had been fulfilled, “his mouth and his tongue were opened, and he spoke and praised God” (Luke 1:64). Zechariah’s song of praise forms the second main part of the Gospel reading for St. John’s Day:Praised be the Lord, God of Israel! For he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up for us a horn of salvation in the house of his servant David, as he has said since ancient times through the mouths of his holy prophets: that he would save us from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, and showed mercy to our fathers and remembered his covenant and the oath he swore our father, Abraham, to grant us that we, having been delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear our entire lives in holiness and righteousness as would please him. And you, little child, will be called a prophet of the highest. You will go before the Lord to prepare his ways to give knowledge of salvation to his people, which is in forgiveness of their sins; through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dawn from on high has visited us that he may appear to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death and guide our feet upon the way of peace. (Luke 1:68–79)
Numerous references to the Gospel reading are to be found in the libretto. Even so, the text remains rather vague: in contrast to most of the cantata texts set by Bach, it is hard to find a clear and focused dramaturgy of action. But the librettist is only partly to blame; for the most part, he fulfilled his thankless task with care and discretion. The reasons for the shortcomings of the text lie elsewhere: they have to do with the cantata’s prehistory and particularly with the librettist’s contractual situation.
Like so many of its sibling works, the cantata Freue dich, erlöste Schar is not an original composition. Instead, it goes back—except for the recitatives and the chorale—to the congratulatory cantata Angenehmes Wiederau, freue dich in deinen Auen BWV 30.1 (Charming Wiederau, rejoice in your meadows), performed in September 1737 in honor of Johann Christian Hennicke, who inherited the Wiederau manor in the summer of that year and took ownership on September 28. From the earlier work’s six recitatives, five arias, and ensemble movement at the beginning (repeated with different text at the end), Bach selected four arias and the opening and closing tutti for inclusion in the church cantata. The recitatives were left behind, as usual, as well as the final aria, whose unmistakable mazurka dance character would have made adaptation to church style all too difficult. To this extent, Bach’s task would simply have been another application of parody technique, the reuse of older compositions on hand with new text.
Remarkably, the librettist of the parody version was not content to simply use the closed forms—the arias and tutti movements, as is typical for Bach in his later years. Instead, regarding the meter and structure of the recitatives, the congratulatory music and the St. John’s Day cantata are remarkably congruent. The next to last movement is an exception to this: as so often in congratulatory works, at this point several of the soloists enter at the same time to bring the action to a happy ending. An equivalent could scarcely have worked in a cantata for St. John’s Day. Even so, the number of verses and the syllable counts of both versions are nearly identical here. Even more remarkable is the dependence of the soprano recitative, the next to last recitative movement in the St. John’s Day cantata, upon the secular predecessor. In the Wiederau cantata, the poet Henrici had given the following to the allegorical figure of Time:
Und obwohl sonst der Unbestand
Mit mir verschwistert und verwandt,
So sei hiermit doch zugesagt:
Sooft die Morgenröte tagt,
Solang ein Tag den andern folgen läßt,
So lange will ich steif und fest,
Mein Hennicke, dein Wohl
Auf meine Flügel ferner bauen.
Dich soll die Ewigkeit zuletzt,
Wenn sie mir selbst die Schranken setzt,
Nach mir noch übrig schauen.
And although inconstancy
Is closely linked and related to me,
May it nonetheless herewith be promised:
As often as the rosy morning dawns,
As long as one day is followed by another,
So long will I, strongly and firmly,
My Hennicke, build your well-being
Further on my wings.
Eternity shall at last,
Even when it sets limits upon me,
See your welfare still remaining after me.
In the church cantata, the first six verses were adopted with hardly any change, and the rest of the verses were paraphrased with exactly the same syllable count; only at the end is a minor deviation to be found:
Und obwohl sonst der Unbestand
Den schwachen Menschen ist verwandt,
So sei hiermit doch zugesagt:
Sooft die Morgenröte tagt,
Solang ein Tag den andern folgen läßt,
So lange will ich steif und fest,
Mein Gott, durch deinen Geist
Dir ganz und gar zu Ehren leben.
Dich soll sowohl mein Herz als Mund
Nach dem mit dir gemachten Bund
Mit wohlverdienten Lob erheben.
And although inconstancy is otherwise
Related to the weak person,
May it nonetheless herewith be promised:
As often as the rosy morning dawns,
As long as one day follows another,
So long will I, strongly and firmly,
My God, through your spirit
Live wholly to your honor.
You shall my heart as well as mouth,
According to the covenant made with you,
Exalt with well-deserved praise.
One might wonder whether Bach planned, extraordinarily, to transplant the majority of the secular work’s recitatives in the church cantata or whether the librettist of the new version decided on his own initiative to set out the recitatives congruently. An unusual amount of thought was given to (and squandered on) the accuracy of the fit. The content of the new text cannot always keep pace here. The figure Fortune in the Wiederau cantata pays homage to the new squire in an aria with the following text:
Was die Seele kann ergötzen,
Was vergnügt und hoch zu schätzen,
Soll dir Lehn und erblich sein.
Meine Fülle soll nichts sparen
Und dir reichlich offenbaren,
Daß mein ganzer Vorrat dein.
Whatever can delight the soul,
Whatever satisfies and is to be valued highly
Shall be your fief and inheritance.
My abundance shall spare nothing
And lie richly open to you,
That my entire stock is yours.
The church cantata version, whose content shows little relationship to the secular aria, reads as follows:
Kommt, ihr angefochtnen Sünder,
Eilt und lauft, ihr Adamskinder,
Euer Heiland ruft und schreit.
Kommet, ihr verirrten Schafe,
Stehet auf vom Sündenschlafe,
Denn itzt ist die Gnadenzeit!
Come, you beleaguered sinners,
Hurry and run, you children of Adam,
Your savior calls and cries.
Come, you straying sheep,
Awaken from your sleep of sin,
For now is the time of grace!
The problematic nature of the text did not stop the Thomaskantor from transplanting the opening and closing movements, as well as four of the five arias from the secular version into the St. John’s Day cantata, composing new recitatives and dividing the result at the halfway point with a chorale to satisfy the requirement for a two-part form. This would allow the cantata to be performed both before and after the sermon, in accordance with Leipzig custom. Bach’s workload was significantly reduced by the fact that the secular performing parts could for the most part be used again for the church cantata; only the parts for the voices and the organ needed to be created anew. Despite the festive character of St. John’s Day, the trumpets and drums in the opening and closing movements were left out of the church cantata. The dance character of most of the arias was retained, perhaps tempered by the choice of slower tempi and a more emphatic manner of performance; the fashionable syncopated rhythms also passed without objection, such as the Lombard rhythms in the bass aria.
In view of modern features of this sort and perhaps because of the neutral formulations of its text, it is no wonder that the church cantata enjoyed continued currency in the generation of Bach’s sons. In 1780 Carl Philipp Emanuel performed the first six movements in Hamburg; several decades earlier in Halle, Wilhelm Friedemann probably performed the entire cantata. Independently of his father’s ideas, Friedemann included brass instruments in the opening movement. He thus unconsciously acted as a forerunner to the nineteenth-century editors who understandably assumed that the original parts for trumpets and drums, found among the combined materials for the secular and sacred versions, were part of the church cantata. It was reserved for scholarship of the twentieth century to discover that Bach had granted more opulence to the secular occasion than to the sacred one. Experience has shown that performers do not always find this renunciation easy.