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Herr, wie du willt, so schick's mit mir BWV 73 / BC A 35
Third Sunday after Epiphany
The title of the cantata Herr, wie du willt, so schick’s mit mir BWV 73 (Lord, as you will, let it be done with me) is remarkable for the anachronistic usage “willt” instead of “willst.” In contrast to other archaicisms, nearly every German speaker is familiar with it, even if only from the first strophe of Eduard Mörike’s poem:Herr! Schicke, was du willt,
Ein Liebes oder Leides;
Ich bin vergnügt, daß beides
Aus deinen Händen quillt.
Lord, grant me what you will,
Be it joy or suffering;
I am content, that both
Flow from your hands.
The title of our cantata comes from the first line of the chorale of the same name by Kaspar Bienemann in 1582. At the same time, there is a close relationship to the Gospel reading for the third Sunday after Epiphany, the report of the healing of a leper and a gout-ridden man in Matthew 8. Here it reads at the start:
As he however came down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him.
And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if you will, can you make me clean. And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. (1–3)
Similar accounts are found in the Gospels of Mark and Luke.
The unknown poet of the cantata text took little note of these miraculous healings, the core of the Gospel reading for the Sunday. Instead, his lines of thought essentially revolve around the first two lines of the chorale text:
Herr, wie du willt, so schick’s mit mir
Im Leben und im Sterben!
Lord, as you will, so let it be done with me,
In life and in death!
In order to achieve a particularly close connection to the chorale text, the cantata poet makes use of the technique known as troping, or the interpolation of freely versified passages between the lines of the chorale. After beginning with “Herr, wie du willt, so schick’s mit mir / Im Leben und im Sterben,” he continues:
Ach! Aber ach! Wie viel läßt mich dein Wille leiden!
Mein Leben ist des Unglücks Ziel.
Oh! But oh! How your will allows my suffering!
My life is the goal of misfortune.
After the chorale lines “Allein zu dir steht mein Begier, / Herr, laß mich nicht verderben” (Alone for you do I long, / Lord, let me not perish) there follows a wide-ranging interpretation, beginning with “Du bist mein Helfer, Trost und Hort / So den Betrübten Tränen zählet” (You are my helper, consolation, and refuge / Who counts the tears of the bereaved), and even the chorale’s closing line, “Denn dein Will ist der beste” (For your will is the best), is extensively commented upon:
Dein Wille zwar ist ein versiegelt Buch,
Da Menschenweisheit nichts vernimmt.
Your will is a locked volume
Of which human wisdom understands nothing.
These lines appear at the close:
Doch macht dein Geist uns dieses Irrtums frei
Und zeigt, daß uns dein Wille heilsam sei.
But your spirit frees us of this error
And shows that your will heals us.
The keyword “Wille,” along with its derivations, appears a total of thirteen times altogether in the cantata text; it is missing only from the second movement, an aria. The aria’s beginning, “Ach, senke doch den Geist der Freuden dem Herzen ein!” (Ah, sink the spirit of joy into my heart!), connects to the “Du bist mein Helfer, Trost und Hort” of the opening movement. But the ensuing recitative brings a return to the original sphere of ideas. “Ach, unser Wille bleibt verkehrt, / bald trotzig, bald verzagt” (O, our will remains wrong, / now resisting, now despondent) alludes to verse 9 in Jeremiah 17: “Es ist das Herz ein trotzig und verzagtes Ding; wer kann es ergründen?” (The heart is a resisting and despondent thing; who can know it?). With three short text strophes, each beginning with “Herr, so du willt,” the poet finally turns, in the penultimate movement, an aria, to the surrender to the transitoriness of existence and speaks of “Todesschmerzen” (pain of death), “Staub und Asche” (dust and ashes), and “Leichen-Glocken” (funeral bells). Nevertheless, a comforting close is achieved with the last strophe of Ludwig Helmbold’s hymn Von Gott will ich nicht lassen (From God I will not stray) and its text, beginning, “Das ist des Vaters Wille / Der uns erschaffen hat” (That is the father’s will / Who has created us).
Bach’s composition comes from the first year of his cantorate at St. Thomas in Leipzig and was heard for the first time on January 23, 1724. This date is confirmed by a printed booklet of the text that survived by chance, Zur Leipziger Kirchen-Musik, meant to be read during performance. The text appears beneath the heading “Am dritten Sonntag nach der Erscheinung Christi. In der Kirche zu St. Nicolai” (On the third Sunday after the appearance of Christ. In St. Nicholas’s Church). About a decade later, the cantor of St. Thomas performed the work again with only minor changes.
Yet the work left traces beyond his realm of activity, a remarkable circumstance, since in his day, Bach’s cantatas were regarded as complicated and difficult to perform. A copy of the score from about 1730 indicates a performance at the Neue Kirche in Leipzig. Although this church stood only a few hundred meters from St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, the main churches of Leipzig, it had its own musical organization and performance apparatus and was essentially independent of St. Thomas. The origin of this set of handwritten performance materials, consisting of score and parts, could be confirmed only at the end of the twentieth century. It is mentioned in a music index named “Apparatus musicalis” in the possession of a certain Strohbach—undoubtedly Johann Gottfried Strohbach, who died in 1801 and was cantor at St. John in Chemnitz. A signum on the manuscript is associated with one of his predecessors, a certain Gottfried Ernst Sonntag.1 Nothing is as yet known about connections between the cantor of St. John in Chemnitz and the Thomaskantor in Leipzig.
The opening movement of Bach’s composition particularly deserves a more detailed consideration. The form of the text shows that it exists in several parts: at three points, a chorale strophe is expanded by interpolated recitative texts. The chorale melody by itself can hardly create cohesion over six or seven sections; the instrumental part needs to take on a unifying role. In this regard, two passages strike the ear in particular: a soft, beguiling melody in the two oboes, moving mostly in thirds and sixths, and a commanding four-pitch motive that is unmistakably derived from the beginning of the chorale melody, accentuated by the horns in their highest register. This imperious “fate motive” (Schicksalsmotiv) is not only heard right at the beginning in measure 2 but also continuously present elsewhere, in particular, with the recitative interpolations, performed in turn by tenor, bass, and soprano. What is meant by the incessant appearance of the four-tone motive becomes perfectly clear at the end of the movement at the latest, as the chorus sings four times “Herr, wie du willt” in exactly this emblematic form.
The question remains as to the meaning of the blissful passage in thirds and sixths for the woodwinds. It is remarkable that these passages—if only for a few measures—omit the obligatory foundation of the basso continuo and either continue without accompaniment altogether or come up with what is known as a “bassetto,” in which the foundational part is in the high strings. In Bach, instrumental effects of this sort always mean something in particular. Often (for example, in an aria from the St. Matthew Passion), he uses this type of effect to characterize the highly unusual, the incomprehensible, or what can be understood only by a circuitous route. In other cases, he uses it to symbolize a situation in which a firm grip is lost or is simply not used. The aria “Jesu, laß dich finden” (Jesus, let yourself be found), from the cantata Mein liebster Jesu ist verloren BWV 154 (My beloved Jesus is lost), serves as a literal model, for this work originated only two weeks before our cantata. There, as here, two oboes join a foundational part that consists only of the upper strings. In the first movement of our cantata, Bach accordingly intends a sharp comparison between human desire—seeking, insecure, and with few prospects—and the will of God—commanding and on a firm foundation. It was easy for the listener of the era to recognize this association, for the melody to which the chorale Herr, wie du willt is sung is the widely known Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält (Should God the Lord not stay with us). Wherever this firm foundation is missing, “so ists mit uns verloren” (then we are lost), as the chorale text reads. This is clearly the point of the instrumental part in our cantata’s opening movement, however puzzling it may seem at first.
The musical events in the other movements are more transparent. In the second movement, a tenor aria with obbligato oboe, the composer symbolizes the “Geist der Freuden” with the voice’s joyfully animated coloraturas and the instruments that compete with it and the “sinking of joy into the heart” with a beguiling downward movement. In the third movement, a recitative for bass, the harmonies assigned to the phrase “Ach, unser Wille bleibt verkehrt” (Ah, our will remains perverse) are remarkably indifferent; the ensuing “bald trotzig, bald verzagt” (now resisting, now despondent) is distinguished by a jarring harmonic shift that, as soon as it has appeared, dissolves again into the mundane.
The recitative leads directly into the fourth movement, a bass aria accompanied by strings, which begins immediately without instrumental prelude. This procedure was quite common in opera of the era; in more recent times, it became known as a “motto aria” (Devisenarie) because the main theme of the movement is stated right at the beginning, like a motto or a device on a banner. Remarkably, the pitches of this motto or device are identical to the beginning of the aria “Bist du bei mir” from the second Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. Whether Bach intended an allusion to the aria by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel2 is impossible to say. Bach followed the essential ideas of the text as he composed the three strophes of the cantata aria in various ways. Suspensions, sigh motives, and chromaticism are featured in the first part, whose text speaks of sighs and the pains of death; the dense string texture of the second part symbolizes an interment; in the third part, the sound of bells is illustrated by pizzicato strings; finally, the phrase “Herr, so du willt” is repeated several times as the aria ends in serene composure. The cantata ends just as peacefully with the closing strophe from Ludwig Helmbold’s hymn Von Gott will ich nicht lassen in simple four-part texture.