This tag was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Angela Watters.
Erfreut euch, Ihr Herzen BWV 66 / BC A 56
Easter Monday, April 10, 1724
The cantatas Der Himmel lacht, die Erde jubiliert BWV 31 (Heaven laughs, the earth rejoices), Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen BWV 66 (Rejoice, you hearts), and Ein Herz, das seinen Jesum lebend weiß BWV 134 (A heart that knows its Jesus to be alive) constitute a group of compositions for the first, second, and third days of Easter, and they were heard in this order at least three times in Leipzig on the three holidays in 1724, 1731, and 1736. The three works have in common that they are not products of Bach’s Leipzig period but come from older stock. The cantata for the first day of Easter originated in Weimar, and the two others go back to secular works from Bach’s time in Köthen, around 1720. The origin of the cantata for the third day of Easter was easily discovered in the nineteenth century when Bach’s own copy of the secular original came to light.The situation was different for the cantata meant for the second day of Easter, Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen. In this case, no early version was known at first. However, Philipp Spitta, the great Bach expert of the nineteenth century, was so struck by what he called the work’s “pleasing character” (gefällige Charakter) that he felt compelled to search for the reasons for it. He thought he had found these reasons in the vicinity of the cantata for the third day of Easter, which could be shown to go back to a Köthen version, prompting him to hypothesize an attempt at assimilation by Bach. Spitta wrote:
Bach had the gift of throwing himself, up to a certain point, into various kinds of styles, whether those of other persons or his own in his earlier phases. Careful comparison will at once show that there is a relation between the occasional cantata “Erfreut euch ihr Herzen” and the same in its remodeled form. A pleasing character, aiming rather at breadth than at depth, is not the only characteristic that is common to both. The first chorus of the earlier composition agrees exactly in its plan with the last chorus of the later work, and even the passages set as duets, especially those of the middle movement, which in the occasional compositions were necessitated by the text, were copied in their setting in the Easter cantata. Both are full of genius and elegance, although they cannot lay claim to a prominent place among Bach’s Easter compositions.1
In light of our current knowledge, Spitta’s description of stylistic and compositional attributes hits the mark, but his suggestion of a deliberate assimilation on Bach's part took him down the wrong track. Thus the relationship of Erfreut uns, ihr Herzen to a vanished Köthen homage cantata escaped Spitta, even as he investigated its text after the second volume of his monumental Bach biography was published. Spitta had discovered that Christian Friedrich Hunold, born in Thuringia, a few years older than Bach, active as a poet at the court of Köthen for several years, had settled in nearby Halle, where he held readings on poetry and jurisprudence and supplemented his income by writing occasional poetry. Among the printed collections of poetry by Hunold, who adopted the pen name Menantes, Spitta stumbled upon the text for a serenata on the birthday of Prince Leopold of Köthen in 1718—but he let the matter rest with a short description and the carefully expressed doubt that Bach, overburdened with work during the period in question, could have composed the text at all.
From this point forward, the case of the Köthen serenata remained closed for half a century until Friedrich Smend, one of the most important Bach researchers of the twentieth century, took up the matter again. Smend showed convincingly that the Easter cantata Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen, except for its closing chorale, goes back to the Köthen serenata of 1718, even though only the text of this secular predecessor survives, its musical sources deemed entirely lost or destroyed. Hunold’s serenade text appeared under the title Das frolockende Anhalt (Anhalt rejoicing) in honor of Prince Leopold’s birthday on December 10, 1718. Hunold arranged the text itself as a dialogue, the interlocutors being “Die Glückseligkeit Anhalts” (The happiness of Anhalt) and “Fama,” the goddess of fame. The serenade included eight movements: four recitatives, two arias, a duet, and a concluding ensemble. The first four movements, as well as the closing ensemble, were adopted in the church cantata. The fact that the last movement became the opening movement of the church piece made the discovery of the connection somewhat more difficult. With one exception, the music of the other three movements of the original secular version left behind no trace among the compositions of J. S. Bach known today.
As Bach set about preparing church music for the Easter holidays, at the very latest in early 1724, and decided to revise two Köthen secular cantatas that had originated only three weeks apart as church cantatas, he must have been sure that he had available a text poet who was up to the task. For this person had to solve the problem not only of providing the arias, with their relatively regular strophic forms, with new text but also of accomplishing the same with the largely heterogeneous lines of the recitatives. The results of such a labor-intensive effort could turn out in very different ways: satisfaction of the composer and audience or extensive disapproval due to lack of quality, and the two might lie very close to one another. The prevailing view of older scholars, that such cases of retexting generally involve the mediocre stencil work of a mediocre poet, must be revised in the light of more recent findings that this work was often performed under more stringent standards. If an acceptable level of quality were to be achieved, the author of the new text needed, in addition to the previous text, a copy of the score or at least information regarding the layout of the composition, movement character, and the musical emphasis of individual words, thoughts, or entire movements.2
The unknown poet contracted by Bach who was to transform the 1718 serenade into a cantata for the second day of Easter also had to struggle with the dialogue character of several movements in the secular early version. He addressed this point of view in part by neglecting it and in part by introducing a dialogue in his revision between “Zuversicht” (Faith) and “Schwachheit” (Weakness). In a later reperformance, Bach changed these personifications to “Hoffnung” (Hope) and “Furcht” (Fear). Overall, an acceptable text underlay was achieved, if restricted to the death and resurrection of Jesus and without any clear relationship to the Gospel reading of the Sunday, the journey of the disciples to Emmaus in the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke.
The opening movement of the church cantata, whose early version was the concluding movement of the Köthen serenade, provides a good example of the nature of the retexting. In the secular version it reads:
Es strahle die Sonne,
Es lache die Wonne,
Es lebe Fürst Leopold ewig beglückt.
Ach Himmel, wir flehen,
Dies holde Licht sechzigmal wiederzusehen.
Gib, Höchster, was unsern Regenten erquickt.
May the sun shine,
May delight laugh,
May Prince Leopold live ever fortunate.
O heaven, we plead,
To see this sweet light sixty times again.
Give, Most High, that which our regent refreshes.
In the Easter cantata, this became:
Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen,
Entweichet ihr Schmerzen,
Es lebet der Heiland und herrschet in euch.
Ihr könnet verjagen
Das Trauren, das Fürchten, das ängstliche Zagen,
Der Heiland erquicket sein geistliches Reich.
Rejoice, you hearts,
Vanish, you sorrows,
The savior lives and reigns in you.
You can drive away
The mourning, the fears, the anxious dismay,
The savior fortifies his spiritual realm.
Even in its altered form and despite the chance provided by the new text to revisit the musical substance, Bach’s composition allows its original essence to show through in many ways. This is particularly true of the dance-like first and last sections of the opening movement, which pose no serious problems for the chorus but include all sorts of tricky passages for the instruments. In none of the cantatas he composed for Leipzig did Bach allow the second violin to climb to an a′′′ in thirty-second-note motion—but as a relic of a virtuoso piece for the Köthen court, he retained it in the Easter cantata. Whether the agonizingly chromatic middle section with its long duet between alto and bass was brought over from the secular version must be left open; the relatively neutral text “Ach Himmel, wir flehen” (O heaven, we plead) speaks against such a possibility. The third movement, an aria for bass whose text originally began with “Traget, ihr Lüfte, den Jubel von hinnen” (Carry, you breezes, the reveling from afar), now “Lasset dem Höchsten ein Danklied erschallen” (Let to the Most High a song of thanks resound), points to the court of Köthen not only with its dance-like character but also with its considerable length at more than 330 measures. The actual dialogue movements—the fourth and fifth movements—prove to be equally demanding, with an extended concerted passage in the middle of the recitative as well as an obbligato violin part with relentless figuration in the duet between “Furcht” and “Hoffnung.” The concluding chorale seems a little out of place in this setting, the third strophe of the ancient Easter hymn Christ ist erstanden.