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Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir BWV 38 / BC A 152
Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, October 29, 1724
Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir BWV 38 (Out of deep distress I cry to you) is a chorale cantata based on the hymn of the same name by Martin Luther. This chorale, first documented in 1524, is a paraphrase of Psalm 130, whose Latin text begins “De profundis clamavi” and whose German text reads:Aus der Tiefe rufe ich, Herr, zu dir. Herr, höre meine Stimme, laß deine Ohren merken auf die Stimme meines Flehens! So du willst, Herr, Sünden zurechnen, Herr, wer wird bestehen? Denn bei dir ist die Vergebung, daß man dich fürchte. Ich harre des Herrn; meine Seele harret, und ich hoffe auf sein Wort. Meine Seele wartet auf den Herrn von einer Morgenwache bis zur andern. Israel hoffe auf den Herrn! Denn bei dem Herrn ist die Gnade und viel Erlösung bei ihm, und er wird Israel erlösen aus allen seine Sünden. (1–8)
Out of the depths I cry, Lord, to you. Lord, hear my voice, let your ears attend to the voice of my pleading. If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, who would stand? Except there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and I hope in his word. My soul waits for the Lord from one morning watch to the next. Israel, hope for the Lord! For in the Lord there is grace and much redemption with him, and he will redeem Israel from all its sins.
Luther’s first strophe is formulated in close reference to the psalm text; it is adopted in the cantata text without change:
Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir,
Herr Gott, erhör mein Rufen;
Dein gnädig Ohr neig her zu mir
Und meiner Bitt sie öffne!
Denn so du willt das sehen an,
Was Sünd und Unrecht ist getan,
Wer kann, Herr, vor dir bleiben?
Out of deep distress I cry to you,
Lord God, hear my calling;
Incline your gracious ear down to me
And open it to my prayer!
For if you would look at
Whatever sin and injustice has been done,
Who can, Lord, stand before you?
The economy of language seen here also predominates in Luther’s second strophe:
Bei dir gilt nichts denn Gnad und Gunst,
Die Sünde zu vergeben,
Es ist doch unser Tun umsonst
Auch in dem besten Leben.
Vor dir niemand sich rühmen kann,
Es muß sich fürchten jedermann,
Und deiner Gnade leben.
With you nothing counts except grace and favor
To forgive sins.
Our actions are, therefore, in vain,
Even in the best of lives.
Before you, no one can praise himself.
Everyone must fear you
And live by your grace.
In contrast, when the unknown cantata librettist arranged the second, third, and fourth strophes of Luther’s chorale as recitatives and one aria, he paid tribute to the usages and patterns of thought of the early eighteenth century:
In Jesu Gnade wird allein
Der Trost vor uns und die Vergebung sein,
Weil durch des Satans Trug und List
Der Menschen ganzes Leben
Vor Gott ein Sündengreuel ist.
Was könnte nun
Die Geistesfreudigkeit zu unserm Beten geben,
Wo Jesu Geist und Wort nicht neue Wunder tun?
In Jesus’s grace alone
Will there be comfort for us and forgiveness,
For through Satan’s deception and cunning
The entire life of humankind
Is an abomination of sin before God.
What could now
Give joyfulness to our prayers
If Jesus’s spirit and words did not work new wonders?
There is no mention of Jesus’s grace and miracles in Luther’s psalm paraphrase; the librettist is referring to the Gospel reading for the twenty-first Sunday after Trinity. The cantata Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir is just as closely related to this Sunday, which comes fairly late in the church year, as it is to its most significant text source, the chorale of the same name by Martin Luther. The Gospel reading in question is found in John 4 and gives the account of a miraculous healing:
And there was a royal official whose son lay ill at Capernaum. He heard that Jesus came from Judea into Galilee and went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was deathly ill. And Jesus said to him: When you do not see signs and miracles, then you do not believe. The royal official spoke to him: Lord, come down, before my child dies! Jesus said to him: Go on your way, your son lives! The man believed the word that Jesus had said to him and went on his way. And as he left, his servants met him and announced to him and spoke: Your son lives. Then he inquired of them the hour when he began to improve. And they said to him: Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him. Then the father noticed that it was at the same hour in which Jesus had said to him: Your son lives. And he believed, with his entire house. That is now the second sign that Jesus did as he came from Judea to Galilee. (47–54)
This Gospel reading, on the one hand, and Luther’s paraphrase, on the other, are also the main sources for the third movement of the cantata libretto, an aria:
Ich höre mitten in den Leiden
Ein Trostwort, so mein Jesus spricht.
Drum, o geängstigtes Gemüte,
Vertraue deines Gottes Güte,
Sein Wort besteht und fehlet nicht,
Sein Trost wird niemals von dir scheiden.
I hear, amid the suffering,
A word of comfort that my Jesus speaks.
Therefore, O anguished spirit,
Trust your God’s goodness.
His word prevails and does not fail,
His comfort will never leave you.
With the fourth movement, the librettist leaves the psalm paraphrase entirely. With the outcry “Ach! / Daß mein Glaube noch so schwach” (Ah! / That my faith is still so weak) he formulates the religious doubts expressed in the Gospel reading and then shows the path to overcoming them, also mapped out there:
Wie? Kennst du deinen Helfer nicht,
Der nur ein einzig Trostwort spricht,
Und gleich erscheint,
Eh deine Schwachheit es vermeint,
Die Rettungsstunde.
Vertraue nur der Allmachtshand und seiner Wahrheit Munde!
What? Do you not know your helper,
Who speaks but a single word of comfort
And immediately there appears,
Before your weakness imagines it,
The hour of deliverance.
Trust only the Almighty’s hand and the truth of his utterance!
Afterward there is a return to Luther’s hymn and its fourth strophe:
Und ob es währt bis in die Nacht,
Und wieder an den Morgen;
Doch soll mein Herz an Gottes Macht
Verzweifeln nicht, noch sorgen:
So tu Israel rechter Art,
Der aus dem Geist erzeuget ward,
Und seines Gotts erharre.
And if it lasts till late at night
And again in the morning,
Yet my heart shall not doubt
God’s might, nor worry:
So do rightly by Israel,
Who was created from the spirit,
And wait upon his God.
Here again the librettist digs deeply into the strings to go beyond Luther’s example and graphically depict the opposition of night and morning:
In closing, Luther’s fifth and final strophe reestablishes the direct connection to Psalm 130:Wenn meine Trübsal als mit Ketten
Ein Unglück an dem ander hält,
So wird mich doch mein Heil erretten,
Daß alles plötzlich von mir fällt.
Wie bald erscheint des Trostes Morgen
Auf diese Nacht der Not und Sorgen.
When my tribulation, as with chains,
Binds one misfortune to another,
So will my salvation still deliver me
So that everything will fall away from me.
How soon appears the hopeful morning
After this night of need and care.
Ob bei uns ist der Sünden viel,
Bei Gott ist viel mehr Gnade;
Sein Hand zu helfen hat kein Ziel,
Wie groß sei auch der Schade.
Er ist allein der gute Hirt,
Der Israel erlösen wird
Aus seinen Sünden allen.
Though in us there is much sin,
With God there is much more grace;
His helping hand has no limit,
As great the harm may be.
He alone is the good shepherd
Who will redeem Israel
From all its sins.
As previously said, Bach’s composition belongs to the annual cycle of chorale cantatas; it was performed for the first time in October 1724. In contrast to most of its sibling works, the opening movement is not set forth as a wide-ranging concertante chorale arrangement with independent instrumental part. This was prevented by the nature of the chorale melody in the Phrygian mode, one of the ancient church modes. On the other hand, one would like to think that the cantor of St. Thomas School, as one of the best-grounded experts in all possible harmonic relationships, would certainly still have been able to combine the modal characteristics of the chorale melody, with its roots in the pre-Reformation, with the cadential harmonies of a modern concerto movement. However, he avoided an experiment of that sort and wrote an extended motet-like arrangement for the opening movement, in which the chorale melody appears line by line in the soprano while the other three voices contribute to a thickly woven polyphonic texture. There is a danger here, namely, that working up the individual lines might result in a simple series of heterogeneous components; the composer deals with this through the subtle management of a fine-meshed network of sustained counterpoint and ostinato motives so that the movement can be understood as a sequence of variations that are related to one another. Moreover, in its layout and contrapuntal procedures, it stands in a tradition that reaches back past the central German organ master Johann Pachelbel to the sixteenth century and the vocal polyphony of Palestrina.
Faced with this dominating beginning, the subsequent movements do not have an easy time of it. A brief alto recitative is followed by an aria for tenor and two oboes whose main theme proves to be a transformation of the chorale on which the entire cantata is based. Abundant changes between biting chromaticism and full, harmonic consonance point up the juxtaposition of suffering, parting, and “anxious spirit,” on the one hand, and words of comfort and goodness, on the other.
The second recitative proves equal to its prominent position in the middle of the cantata, as its accompanimental bass part plays the entire chorale melody so that it functions as a kind of bridge pillar between the opening movement and the closing chorale. The earnest and confessional statement in the last aria’s text, “Wenn meine Trübsal als mit Ketten” (When my tribulation, as with chains), motivated the composer to write a dense, at times fugal movement for three voices and basso continuo. A carefully thought-out procedure of motivic linkages compensates for the tendency to become sequential, as in the motet movement at the cantata’s beginning. A dense, harmonically restrained four part chorale rounds out the composition.
Fifteen years after composing this cantata, Johann Sebastian Bach presented a new arrangement of the chorale melody in the great six-voice chorale prelude for organ Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir BWV 686, in Clavierübung III.