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Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen BWV 65 / BC A 27
Epiphany, January 6, 1724
The Feast of Epiphany, also known as High New Year or Three Kings’ Day, is celebrated on January 6. As the feast of the birth and baptism of Christ, it has been among the most popular holidays of the church year since ancient times. The Gospel reading for this feast day, the story of the Wise Men from the East found in the second chapter of Matthew, and the Epistle of the day, from the sixtieth chapter of the prophet Isaiah, have proven to be virtually inexhaustible sources of inspiration for artistic creativity, although certainly with different emphasis. According to Arnold Schering, “The old Italian and Netherlands painters . . . conceived the scenes of the Three Kings’ worship of the child Jesus as a rule as major state affairs. They placed mother and child in the center of the painting, both surrounded, however, with such an abundance of animated humanity and heaps of garments, jewelry, and beasts of burden, so confused that one feels present at a sumptuous homage to royalty rather than at a silent devotion in a Bethlehem manger.”1A “silent devotion in a Bethlehem manger” would match the section of the Gospel reading as Johann Sebastian Bach composed it for the sixth cantata of the Christmas Oratorio: “As they saw the star, they became overjoyed and went in the house and found the little child with Mary, his mother, and fell to their knees and prayed to him and brought out their treasures and gave him gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (Matthew 2:10–11). By contrast, one indeed encounters a “sumptuous” scenario in Isaiah 60:4–6, which reads:
Lift up your eyes and look around: these all gathered together come to you. Your sons shall come from afar, and your daughters will be carried in arms. Then you shall see your pleasure, and flow together, and your heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee. For the multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; they will from Sheba all come, they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall sing forth the praises of the Lord.
The Sabaean people alluded to here have been known to inhabit southern Arabia at least from the eighth century BCE through the second century CE. Trade routes between India, Ethiopia, and northern lands brought the area great affluence. Its star declined as transport by caravan on land was gradually replaced by ships at sea.
This context becomes significant when one goes about bringing Bach’s score to life. In particular, the instrumental part in the opening movement is as rich as it is attractive; in it, horns, recorders in the upper regions of their range, and hunting oboes—oboi da caccia—appear in pairs. The horns move partly in the harmony-filling “horn range” and partly in the higher clarino register. The oboi da caccia—reed instruments originally in half-round, curved form with a large bell—have a darkly sonorous, distinctively attractive sound in the context of the original instruments of the Bach era. Together with the strings and the recorders in their upper ranges, the hunting horns and oboes produce a multicolored array of sonorities that seem entirely appropriate to the pomp of a royal procession. The
8 meter chosen by Bach also can be seen to fit with this scenario: it can symbolize “completeness,” “church,” or “angels”—but also royalty. An older interpretation of our opening movement ascribed a pastorale coloring and hence had the horns tuned in C, sounding an octave lower than notated. This practice is in no way justified, although it is still stubbornly adhered to. Instead, what is meant is a heraldic symbolism focusing on the kings from Sheba apostrophized in the second movement of the cantata, where the horns must sound in their upper range.
After eight purely instrumental measures, the chorus enters with “Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen,” the incoming throng symbolized by the overlapping, canonic entries of thematic material. Ten measures later, the bass begins a rocking, then lively fugue theme, taken up immediately by tenor, alto, and soprano, at first in permutation procedure and then in stretto. How seriously the composer took his task here can be seen in an extensive set of sketches—a relatively rare case for Johann Sebastian Bach—which were preserved by chance in a cantata score of the same period.2 Above all, they show the evolution of the fugue theme from a rather clumsy, uncharacteristic tune with many pitch repetitions, reworked until it received its final, elegant form. Contrary to earlier interpretations, the choice and implementation of fugue do not point to an “anwachsenden und sich vergrößernden Strom” (growing and increasing stream); instead, they point to the general sense of order, dignity, pomp, and high rank, befitting the scenario at the crib at the birth of Christ the king.3 The movement’s close takes up the initial theme again and concludes with, so to speak, the global text line in unison, “Und des Herren Lob verkündigen” (And announce the praise of the Lord). The thematic correspondence with the Prelude in C Major BWV 547 for organ is palpable. Which of the two pieces came first and what hides behind the similarity of course remain unknown at this point.
Following such an overpowering opening, it is difficult for the other movements to assert themselves. The chorale strophe “Die Kön’ge aus Saba kamen dar” (The kings came out of Sheba) connects in meaningful ways with the text of the opening movement. Here we are dealing with a section of the 1545 hymn Ein Kind geborn zu Bethlehem (A child is born in Bethlehem), a German version of the ancient Latin Puer natus in Bethlehem, whose fourth strophe, “Reges de Saba veniunt,” is the source. The chorale has a direct relationship to the liturgy for Epiphany, since the Puer natus hymn was heard at the beginning of the service.
After this simple chorale movement one could imagine a caesura in the cantata’s course, closing the first half before the sermon. If so, the bass recitative that follows would have begun the cantata’s second half. Free poetry appears here for the first time; its author remains unknown. The prophecy of Isaiah is recounted, along with the events in Bethlehem; and gold, frankincense, and myrrh appear as “priceless presents” in the recitative. However, the following lines seem rather wooden and clumsy:
Mein Jesu, wenn ich itzt an meine Pflicht gedenke,
Muß ich auch zu deiner Krippe kehren
Und gleichfalls dankbar sein,
Denn dieser Tag ist mir ein Tag der Freuden.
My Jesus, if I now remember my duty,
I must also return to your crib
And likewise be thankful,
For this day is to me a day of joys.
If one recalls the fact that the cantata Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen was written for January 6, 1724, it may have been that Bach occasionally encountered problems finding suitable texts, especially in his first year in office.
No less infelicitous is the text of the ensuing aria, whose didactic tone is not exactly conducive to musical inspiration:Bach helps himself here with a quartet texture—bass voice, basso continuo, two oboi da caccia—in which the rhythm of the opening line, “Gold aus Ophir ist zu schlecht,” persists in every measure. “Ophir” here means a fabulous country that turns up occasionally in the Hebrew Bible, such as in 1 Kings 9:27–28: “And Hiram sent his servants by ship, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.” This land was thought to be in the Near East or India, in South Africa, or even in distant Peru (although this is difficult to reconcile with navigational capabilities in biblical times). Bach may have meant the exotic sound of the oboi da caccia as an allusion to this far-off, unknown land of gold.Gold aus Ophir ist zu schlecht,
Weg, nur weg mit eitlen Gaben,
Die ihr aus der Erde brecht,
Jesus will das Herze haben.
Gold from Ophir is too poor,
Away, but away with idle gifts
That you break out of the earth.
Jesus wants to have your heart.
After the recitative and aria for bass, the tenor voice has its say with the same sequence. “Des Glaubens Gold, der Weihrauch des Gebets, die Myrrhen der Geduld sind meine Gaben” (The gold of faith, the frankincense of prayer, the myrrh of patience are my gifts)—these are the “köstliche Geschenke” (precious gifts) in the earlier recitative for bass, now declared to be personal offerings of thanksgiving. Musical development is possible only with difficulty at this point. It succeeds again only in the aria for tenor, “Nimm mich dir zu eigen hin” (Take me unto yourself as your own), whose joyous testament, with its yearning leaps of the sixth at the beginning of the theme, almost has a touch of sentimentality about it, which is hardly moderated by the dancelike
8 meter but instead intensified by the orchestra’s blaze of color. The interchange between the instrumental groups and, above all, the octave doublings between registers recall the brilliant array of timbral juxtapositions in the first movement. And so the progression from the outward display of “Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen” to the turn to the personal in “Nimm mich dir zu eigen hin” seems to be the conceptual core of the cantata text, elucidated and made clear musically.
A simple four-part chorale movement on the melody Was mein Gott will, das g’scheh allzeit (What my God wills is for all time) concludes the cantata. It is only by a circuitous path that we know which strophe Bach intended to underlie the melody. An entry in the original score indicates a strophe from Paul Gerhardt’s hymn Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn (I have to God’s heart and mind). According to a recent investigation,4 the entry is in the hand of Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, Johann Sebastian’s second-youngest son, and may go back to the missing original parts, and to this extent can claim a significant degree of authority.