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• 1 2023-09-26T09:32:58+00:00 Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht BWV 124 / BC A 30 15 Chorale cantata on hymn by Christian Keymann. Sunday after Epiphany. Part of Chorale Cantata Annual Cycle. First performed 01/07/1725 in Leipzig (Cycle II). plain 2024-04-29T15:47:48+00:00 1725-01-07 BWV 124 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 14Epiphany1 Chorale Cantata Sunday after Epiphany BC A 30 Johann Sebastian Bach Christian Keymann Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Meinen Jesum lass ich nicht, BWV 124 / BC A 30" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 93 James A. Brokaw II Chorale Cantata Annual Cycle Leipzig II

  Sunday after Epiphany

  The cantata Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht BWV 124 (I will not let my Jesus go) belongs to Bach's chorale cantata cycle, a complex of about forty-five compositions that are similar in structure. Typically, a chorale cantata is based on the text and melody of a church hymn—normally a chorale from the sixteenth or seventeenth century—and uses the first and final strophes of the hymn as a frame. The final strophe requires the least expenditure of effort; it almost always appears as a simple if harmonically rich four-part setting in which the instruments undertake no independent role but simply support the voices in unison. By contrast, the opening movement, the composition of the opening chorale strophe, is most often extensively developed. Here the orchestra takes on an independent concertante role, with prelude, interludes, and postlude. The chorale melody is presented by one of the voices in long note values, and the other voices either support the leading voice chordally or are contrapuntally subordinate to it in the manner of a motet. 
  
  The portions of the text between the first and last strophes of the chorale may be composed without change as recitatives and arias, or, more commonly, they may be reworked in a madrigalesque manner in order to better suit these forms. 
  
  Philipp Spitta, the great Bach biographer of the second half of the nineteenth century, felt that he was justified in asserting that this mature model was characteristic of Bach’s composition in his fiftieth to sixtieth years of age and that it represented the crowning achievement of his work with the chorale. Hence the following summary of the chorale cantatas flowed from Spitta’s pen:

  As we glance backwards from this point over Bach's life, we are struck by the completeness and rounding-off of his artistic development. His starting-point in early youth was the sacred song of the people, and to it he returns at the end of his career. He felt that all he could create in the sphere of Church music must have an inherent connection with the chorale and the forms of art conditional to it. He must have deemed it the noblest goal of his ambition to give his genius that direction which should create a form that displays the chorale in its highest possible stage of artistic development. The chorale cantatas lack, it may be, that profuse variety of form which during the earlier and middle periods of his life calls forth our highest wonder. But the serene mastery over the technical materials of his art, the deep mature earnestness which pervades them, can only be regarded as the fruit of such a superabundant art-life. In considering these works in their unalterable and characteristic grandeur, we seem to be wandering through some still, lofty, Alpine forest in the peaceful evening that closes a brilliant summer day.¹

  
  There is little to object to in Spitta’s assessment of the importance of the chorale tradition. Whether the chorale cantatas exhibit a lack of “diversity of form” in comparison to other cantatas by Bach or, more pointedly expressed, whether they deserve the reproach of uniformity is a matter of opinion, on the other hand. Spitta evidently derived the justification for this reproach from his apparent judgment that the chorale cantatas belonged to Bach’s late period and that the composer had, for practically a decade, held on to a model once found to be effective in the calm of his later years—or even the stubbornness thereof.
  
  At the end of the 1950s, this castle of hypothesis collapsed like a house of cards as the study of the original sources proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the chorale cantatas belong not to Bach’s late period but, for the vast majority, to his second year in office as cantor of St. Thomas School—between the summer of 1724 and early 1725.² Thus Bach’s adherence to a model is to be ascribed not to the unconflicted tranquility of old age but rather to the intention to create an entire annual cycle of cantatas for all Sundays and holidays based on the same unified concept.
  
  According to current knowledge, the chorale cantata cycle of 1724 to 1725 represents the most wide ranging and ambitious project that Bach ever took on. And if we are not completely mistaken, this plan overwhelmed even his capabilities, causing him to give up the project prematurely. A large number of occasions in quick succession on one side and unyielding artistic standards on the other could not be reconciled over the long run. And so the cantata series ends not on the Feast of Trinity 1725 as envisioned but before Easter, on Palm Sunday. 
  
  The cantata Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht came at the end of a particularly dense succession of new compositions. From the first day of Christmas, December 25, 1724, until the first Sunday after Epiphany, January 7, 1725—within fourteen days, in other words—no fewer than seven chorale cantatas were performed for the first time. This meant an unusual burden for Bach, even if one allows for the fact that he could make use of the period between the first Sunday of Advent and Christmas Day, a period that was free of musical obligations.
  
  The text and melody of the hymn Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht come from the city of Zittau in eastern Saxony. Christian Keymann, rector of the Gymnasium there, wrote the six strophes of text; Andreas Hammerschmidt, organist at the Church of St. Johannis in Zittau, published them in musical form in his collection Fest-, Buß-, und Danklieder (Hymns of celebration, penance, and thanksgiving) of 1658. The occasion for the text was the death of the Saxon electoral prince Johann Georg I in October 1656. Johann Georg was, in the words of his biographer, “overly devoted to the hunt and to drinking to excess” and “theologically in the thrall of a literal piety.”³ He had made “Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht” his motto to live by and professed this motto even on his deathbed. The unfortunate politics of Johann Georg during the Thirty Years’ War, his futile attempt to protect Saxony from the ravages of war through alliances—first with the Holy Roman emperor, then with King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden—led instead to terrible devastation of the country, bringing living conditions to a low level without parallel, including in Zittau, the workplace of Christian Keymann and Andreas Hammerschmidt. With this background it is easier to understand why, in song collections of the era, this hymn is inscribed “Auf Churfürst Johann Georgii I. zu Sachsen Symbolum; auch wider die Traurigkeit.”
  
  Traditionally, this chorale appears among the hymns for the Sunday after Epiphany. It is, however, difficult to draw cross connections to the Gospel reading for that Sunday, the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple in Luke 2, or to the Epistle from Romans 12. Further, the unknown librettist, who quite freely reworked the second through fifth strophes of Keymann’s poem to form recitatives and arias, made little effort to achieve a closer relation to the themes of the day. In the first recitative-aria pair, his verses revolve around “Ich laße meinen Jesum nicht,” in life as in death. The “search” theme, familiar from the Song of Songs, appears in the second recitative, where this life is described as a “Wüstenei und Marterhöhle / Bei Jesu schmerzlichste Verlust” (wilderness and den of torment / At the most painful loss of Jesus). Due to its meter, the associated aria text is filled with an unusual cheerfulness as it casts its eye without a fight, as it were, toward the other side: 

  Entziehe dich eilends, mein Herze, der Welt, 
  Du findest im Himmel dein wahres Vergnügen.
  Wenn künftig dein Auge den Heiland erblickt.
  
  Withdraw yourself quickly, my heart, from the world,
  You will find in heaven your true contentment.
  When, in the future, your eye sees the savior.

  
  The closing chorale strophe, unchanged, once again alludes to the motto of the Saxon electoral prince:

  Jesum laß ich nicht von mir,
  Geh ihm ewig an der Seiten;
  Christus läßt mich für und für
  Zu dem Lebensbächlein leiten.
  Selig, der mit mir so spricht:
  Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht.
  
  I will not let Jesus go from me.
  I go eternally at his side;
  Christ leads me forever and ever
  To the little stream of life.
  Blessed is he who says to me:
  I will not let go of my Jesus.

  
  The letters that begin the first five lines—J G C Z S—stand for Johann Georg, Churfürst zu Sachsen.
  
  For his composition, Johann Sebastian Bach chose E major, a key he rarely used. His contemporary Johann Mattheson characterized it thusly: “E major is unsurpassed in expressing a despairing or fatalistic sorrow. . . . In certain circumstances it has something so cutting, parting, suffering, and penetrating that it can be compared with nothing other than the fatal separation of body and soul.”⁴
  
  The structure of the opening movement is such as to have the epigram “Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht,” which stands in the center of the entire chorale, understood as personal testimony. Thus it places a solo oboe d’amore against the chorus and the string ensemble. The warm timbre and the endless garlands of the solo part can be taken to embody the human voice; indeed, it can embody the person himself in the sense of the next to last line of the chorale, “Er ist meines Lebens Licht” (He is the light of my life). The use of the oboe d’amore in the aria for tenor, the third movement in the cantata, points in the same direction: while the pitiless, rhythmically jagged chords of the string instruments take up the text passages “Furcht und Schrecken” (fear and horror) and the “hartem Todesschlag” (hard death blow), the bravely assertive oboe is associated with the closing lines of the text: “Doch tröstet sich die Zuversicht: / Ich laße meinen Jesum nicht” (Yet this assurance comforts me: / I will not leave my Jesus).
  
  The second aria, “Entziehe dich eilends, mein Herze, der Welt,” a lively, dance-like duet for soprano and alto, seems to turn more toward the world rather than away from it. One frequently comes across things of this sort in Bach’s cantatas; that is, a textual statement meant negatively is transformed to its positive antithesis, achievable only in music. Thus the dance-like liveliness of the duet may symbolize an image of the thoughtless frivolity of this world—unless it is aimed at the second line of text, “Du findest im Himmel dein wahres Vergnügen,” in which case a “heavenly dance” (himmlisches Reigen) is meant. In any case, the plain accompaniment by bass instruments means the total avoidance of worldly ornament.
  
  In closing with the inward-turning chorale strophe “Jesum laß ich nicht von mir,” the cantata returns to the words and melody of Christian Keymann and Andreas Hammerschmidt. Only a few years later, we find the same text a second time in Bach’s work, along with its melody, the key of E major, and even many harmonic details: in the first version of the St. Matthew Passion BWV 244.1.29 as the closing chorale of the first part.

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  Footnotes

  1. Spitta (1899, 3:107–8).—Trans.↵
  2. Dürr (1957); Dadelsen (1958).↵
  3. “der Jagdlust und dem Trunke bis zum Übermaß übergeben” and “theologisch in der sprichwörtlich gewordenen Kurfrömmigkeit befangen.”—Trans.↵
  4. “E dur drücket eine verzweiflungsvolle oder ganz tödliche Traurigkeit unvergleichlich wohl aus. . . . [E]s hat bey gewissen Umständen so was schneidendes, scheidendes, leidendes und durchdringendes, daß es mit nichts als einer fatalen Trennung Leibes und der Seelen verglichen werden mag” (Mattheson 1713, 250).—Trans.↵