This page was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Angela Watters.
Christus, der ist mein Leben BWV 95 / BC A 136
Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, September 12, 1723
In terms of the number and variety of chorales they include, none of the surviving cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach can compare with Christus, der ist mein Leben BWV 95 (Christ, he is my life). In the course of only seven movements, there are no fewer than four different church hymns from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all with very different melodies. Therefore, this cantata, composed in mid-September 1723, together with its sister works in previous weeks, shows the cantor of St. Thomas experimenting with the possibilities of the chorale.1An undertaking of this sort would have been unthinkable without the services of a dedicated librettist. With considerable skill, the unknown author of our cantata text connected strophes from four main chorales from the sixteenth Sunday after Trinity—without, however, including the Gospel reading for the stipulated Sunday at any point. Nevertheless, the account of Jesus raising the boy of Nain, found in Luke 7, is present insofar as its ideas revolve around the longing for death and resurrection. The text begins with the brief opening strophe from a chorale first documented in 1609, mostly in anonymous transmission:
Christus, der ist mein Leben,
Sterben ist mein Gewinn;
Dem tu ich mich ergeben,
Mit Freud fahr ich dahin.
Christ, he is my life,
To die is my reward,
To which I surrender myself,
With joy I travel there.
The allusion in the last line to the canticle of the ancient Simeon, in Luther’s paraphrase of 1524, is soon verified with the adoption of the first strophe of that hymn:
Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin,
Nach Gottes Willen,
Getrost ist mir mein Herz und Sinn,
Sanft und stille.
Wie Gott mir verheißen hat:
Mein Tod ist mein Schlaf worden.
With peace and joy I travel there,
According to God’s will,
My heart and mind are comforted,
Soft and still.
As God has promised me:
My death has become my sleep.
The librettist connects the two strophes with a recitative that at the beginning paraphrases “Mit Fried und Freud fahr ich dahin” and at its end prepares the second strophe with the words “Mein Sterbelied ist schon gemacht, / Ach dürft ichs heute singen!” (My funeral dirge is already arranged, / O that I might sing it today!). A second recitative takes up the Luther strophe and expresses the enticements and temptations of this world using the familiar image of the apple of Sodom, lustrous without but disgusting within, and leads to yet another chorale strophe, the beginning of the chorale written by Valentin Herberger in 1619:
Valet will ich dir geben,
Du arge, falsche Welt,
Dein sündlich böses Leben
Durchaus mir nicht gefällt.
Im Himmel ist gut wohnen,
Hinauf steht mein Begier.
Da wird Gott ewig lohnen
Dem, der ihm dient allhier.
I want to bid you adieu,
You evil, false world,
Your sinfully wicked life
Thoroughly displeases me.
In heaven it is good to live,
Above stands my desire.
There God will eternally reward
Him who serves him here.
The readiness for death formulated in the freely versified text sections and the departure from this world are followed, after the third chorale strophe, by a prayer for a swift and blessed end, at first in a short recitative akin to soliloquy and then in a sigh of relief in the form of an aria:
Ach schlage doch bald, selge Stunde,
Den allerletzten Glockenschlag!
Komm, komm, ich reiche dir die Hände,
Komm, mache meiner Not ein Ende,
Du längst erseufzter Sterbenstag!
Ah, but strike soon, blessed hour,
The final toll of the bell!
Come, come, I reach my hands out to you.
Come, put an end to my misery,
You long-sighed-for day of death!
A final recitative speaks of the certainty of resurrection:
Denn ich weiß dies
Und glaub es ganz gewiß
Daß ich aus meinem Grabe
Ganz einen sichern Zugang zu dem Vater habe.
Der Tod ist nur ein Schlaf,
Dadurch der Leib, der hier von Sorgen abgenommen,
Zur Ruhe kommen.
For I know this
And believe it is quite certain
That I, from my grave,
Have wholly certain access to the Father.
Death is but a sleep
By which the body, here wasted away by care,
Will come to rest.
The line of thought concludes with the fourth strophe from Nikolaus Herman’s hymn Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist (When the hour of my death is at hand):
Weil du vom Tod erstanden bist,
Werd ich im Grab nicht bleiben;
Dein letztes Wort mein Auffahrt ist,
Todsfurcht kannst du vertreiben.
Denn wo du bist, da komm ich hin,
Daß ich stets bei dir leb und bin,
Drum fahr ich hin mit Freuden.
Because you from death are risen,
I will not remain in the grave;
Your last word is my ascension,
The fear of death you can drive away.
For where you are, I will come there,
That I may always be and live beside you,
Therefore with joy I travel there.
Bach’s composition of this libretto, whose structure is decisively shaped by chorale strophes, begins with a complex three-part movement that unmistakably reflects a search for new solutions. In an almost comfortable, rolling triple meter, the chorale melody Christus, der ist mein Leben by Melchior Vulpius is a reserved dialogue between the two oboi d’amore accompanied by the strings, into which the undaunted, ascending scales of the first violin do not quite want to fit. A bitter dissonance in the choral voices on the word “Sterben” and the overall reserved motion seem to want to prepare an untimely end to the idyll. But with the words “ist mein Gewinn” the ideal world, so to speak, is restored. The syncopated motives of the beginning maintain the upper hand; their effects are even heard in the animated tenor recitative in the middle of the movement. A radical reversal takes place after this: the key changes from G major to G minor, an alla breve meter dispels the previous tranquility, and with firm determination and no concern for possible ways out the phrase “Mit Fried und Freud fahr ich dahin” is sounded.
The rest of the cantata is also complex in structure. The soprano recitative moves directly into the strophe set as a chorale trio, “Valet will ich dir geben”, where a rhythmically constant triadic figure in the basso continuo accompanies both the soprano and a melodic figure in the unison oboi d’amore that is at once eloquent, elegantly dancelike, and unified. A bit later, the oboes take on a crucial function in the cantata’s only aria. While the strings continuously maintain a steady pizzicato depicting the “letzter Glockenschlag” (last bell stroke), the two oboi d’amore alternate lamenting parallel fourths and calming thirds. The lamenting intervals flow into calling motives, echo effects that lend a sense of spatial depth yet go unanswered.
With the next to last movement, a bass recitative, a different world is reached that begins with unexpected certainty and ends in animated joy. In the concluding chorale movement, longing for death and certainty of resurrection are not limited to the normal four-part setting: a fifth voice, an obbligato solo violin, climbs high above the chorus to luminous heights above.