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Ich armer Mensch, ich Sündenknecht BWV 55 / BC A 157
Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, November 17, 1726
Bach created the solo cantata Ich armer Mensch, ich Sündenknecht BWV 55 (I, wretched person, I, servant of sin) in November 1726 for the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity. In the Gospel reading for this Sunday, Jesus tells the parable of the wicked servant in answer to Peter’s question “Lord, how often must I forgive my brother who sins against me; is seven times enough?” to which Jesus answers, “Not seven times but seventy times seven.” The story compares the kingdom of heaven to a king who, upon calculating a final invoice and having noticed that one of his servants owed him a considerable amount of money, first ordered him to sell his belongings and his family but, upon his desperate pleading, canceled all of his debts. However, when this servant harassed one of his fellows over a comparably small sum, his lord ordered him before him and said, “You wicked servant, I have canceled all of this debt for you as you asked me; should you then not also have mercy upon your fellow servant as I have had mercy upon you?” As punishment, the debt cancellation was revoked. “Thus,” as Jesus concluded his parable, “thus will my heavenly father also do to you if you do not forgive from your heart one of your brothers for his mistake.”The unknown librettist1 has situated his text in the field of tension between deserved punishment and merciful forgiveness. In an aria at the beginning, he places a profound confession of guilt that, with its complete openness, immediately cuts off any possibility of evasion:
Ich armer Mensch, ich Sündenknecht,
Ich geh vor Gottes Angesichte
Mit Furcht und Zittern zum Gerichte.
Er ist gerecht, ich ungerecht.
I, poor person, I, servant of sin,
I go before God’s countenance
With fear and trembling to be judged.
He is just, I unjust.
The reason for the epithet Sündenknecht, missing up to now, is given at the beginning of the recitative that follows:
Ich habe wider Gott gehandelt
Und bin demselben Pfad,
Den er mir vorgeschrieben hat,
Nicht nachgewandelt.
I have acted against God,
And that same path
That he prescribed for me
I have not followed.
In what follows, the hopelessness of the situation and the impossibility of escape from just punishment are illustrated by drawing upon Psalm 139. There, God’s omnipresence and omniscience are discussed:
Wo soll ich hin gehen vor deinem Geist, und wo soll ich hin fliehen vor deinem Angesicht? Führe ich gen Himmel, so bist du da. Bettete ich mir in die Hölle, siehe, so bist du auch da. Nähme ich Flügel der Morgenröte und bliebe am äußersten Meer, so würde mich doch deine Hand daselbst führen und deine rechte mich halten.
Where shall I go from your spirit, and where shall I flee from your countenance? Were I to ascend to heaven, then you are there. Were I to make my bed in hell, behold, you are there also. Were I to take the wings of the dawn and remain in the farthest reaches of the sea, even there would your hand lead me and your right hand hold me. (7–10)
The cantata librettist recasts this for his own purposes as follows:
Wohin? soll ich der Morgenröte Flügel
Zu meiner Flucht erkiesen,
Die mich zum letzten Meere wiesen,
So wird mich doch die Hand des Allerhöchsten finden
Und mir die Sündenrute binden.
Ach ja!
Wenn gleich die Höll ein Bette
Vor mich und meine Sünde hätte,
So wäre doch der Grimm des Höchsten da.
Die Erde schützt mich nicht,
Sie droht mich Scheusal zu verschlingen,
Und will mich zum Himmel schwingen,
Da wohnet Gott, der mir das Urteil spricht.
Whither? Shall I choose the wings of dawn
For my flight,
Which would take me to the farthest sea,
Even then will the hand of the
Most High find me
And bind the canes of sin for me.
Ah, yes!
Even if hell had a bed
For me and my sins,
Then the rage of the Most High would be even there.
The earth does not shelter me,
It threatens to swallow me, a monster,
And if I would leap up to heaven,
There dwells God, who pronounces judgment upon me.
With this, the circle is closed and the return to the first movement is complete: the Sündenknecht stands quivering before God’s judgment. Without transition or preparation, the following aria changes from the individual’s self-accusation to an urgent plea for mercy in which it is not at first immediately obvious whether the speaker is identical with the speaker in the first aria:
Erbarme dich,
Laß die Tränen dich erweichen,
Laß sie dir zu Herzen reichen,
Laß um Jesu Christi willen
Deinen Zorn des Eifers stillen.
Have mercy,
Let my tears soften you,
Let them reach into your heart,
Let, for the sake of Jesus Christ,
Your rage of jealousy be stilled.
And almost as abruptly, the last freely versified movement, again a recitative, finds the long-sought way out through awareness of Jesus’s act of redemption:
Erbarme dich!
Jedoch nun tröst ich mich,
Ich will nicht für Gerichte stehen
Und lieber vor dem Gnadenthron
Zu meinem frommen Vater gehen.
Have mercy!
However now I console myself,
I do not want to stand for trial
And would rather go before the throne of grace
To my righteous father.
The closing reference to one’s own guilt is rather lighthearted:
Hinführo will ichs nicht mehr tun.
So nimmt mich Gott zu Gnaden wieder an.
Henceforth I will do no more.
Then God again receives me into grace.
As in the St. Matthew Passion, the chorale strophe “Bin ich gleich von dir gewichen” (Though I have turned away from you) follows the aria “Erbarme dich” (Have mercy), separated here only by the intervening recitative. The strophe is the sixth in Johann Rist’s 1642 hymn Werde munter mein Gemüte (Become cheerful, my spirit).
Bach’s composition of this libretto, rich in meaning though not entirely rich in contrast, belongs to a series of solo cantatas that originated in the autumn of his third year at Leipzig and that are grouped around the Kreuzstab cantata, as it is known.2 Whether from the outset Bach intended this to be a solo cantata is a question that must remain open. Some aspects of the musical text indicate that the cantata may have adopted several components of older compositions, although we can only speculate as to their nature. Even so, this may provide an explanation for the extraordinarily high demands the cantata places upon the solo tenor, particularly in the arias.
Without doubt, the heart of this work is its opening movement, whose instrumental ensemble—flute, oboe, two violins, and basso continuo—avoids the tenor range, reserving it for the vocalist. The ensemble with the singer, who is almost continuously forced into an uncomfortably high range, is combined in a densely woven six-voice texture. The tone of rueful contrition, dominant from the very beginning, intensifies over the course of the aria to a despairing self-accusation. At no point does the music move even briefly beyond gloomy minor key regions, and not even the abundant parallel thirds and sixths in the instrumental parts can provide any consoling warmth. Instead, their movement flows ever again in descending half- and whole-tone steps. Heard as sigh motives, in their uniformity they seem to give the impression of an unavoidable fate. The frequent half-tone progressions, which do not grant the harmonic flow a moment’s rest, culminate in passages at the end of the opening and closing sections of the aria. With their intensified chromaticism, these passages express “Furcht und Zittern” (fear and trembling), while the silence of the instruments symbolizes total abandonment.
This aria’s agitation and arousal linger on in the ensuing recitative and lead to a dramatic intensification. The following aria, “Erbarme dich,” cannot effect a fundamental change, despite its textual statement. However, the despair of the opening movement gives way to a relaxation that remains even as the lamenting and pleading figures of the voice and obbligato flute seem to strive against one another toward a climax. In some respects, this aria seems to anticipate the aria of the same name in the St. Matthew Passion BWV 244, performed for the first time a half year later. The final recitative is more consoling than what came before; the B-flat major harmony at the beginning seems to herald a change of scenery. With simple texture but in an unusually high range, the chorale movement on Johann Schop’s melody Werde munter, mein Gemüte closes a work that is unparalleled in its spiritual dimensions as well as its technical demands.
Footnotes
- In 2015 Christine Blanken identified Christoph Birkmann as the librettist of this and seven other cantata texts of 1725 and 1726. Birkmann, a musically active student of mathematics and later theology at the University of Leipzig from December 1724 to September 1727 who regularly attended Bach’s performances, published an annual cycle of cantata texts in 1728 that contains thirty-one works known to have been performed in Leipzig during Birkmann’s time there, among which are twenty-three known cantatas by Bach. See Blanken (2015b).—Trans.↵
- It is now thought that the librettist of these works was probably Christoph Birkmann. See Blanken (2015b, esp. 46, 55–56).—Trans.↵