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• 1 2023-09-26T09:36:18+00:00 Der Herr denket an uns BWV 196 / BC B 11 8 Wedding. First performed 06/05/1708 in Mühlhausen. . plain 2024-04-24T17:24:25+00:00 1708-06-05 BWV 196 Mühlhausen Wedding BC B 11 Johann Sebastian Bach Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Der Herr denket an uns, BWV 196 / BC B 11" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 596 James A. Brokaw II Mühlhausen

  Wedding, 1707–1708

  The cantata Der Herr denket an uns und segnet uns BWV 196 (The Lord thinks of us and blesses us) is one of those sacred musical works of Johann Sebastian Bach that lack any specific information as to their purpose. The work is transmitted in only a single source, a copy made in the early 1730s in the close circle around the Thomaskantor by an eighteen-year-old student at the St. Thomas School who later became cantor in Falkenhain, northeast of Leipzig. It seems unlikely that he copied the score on commission from the composer. The source transmission suggests more strongly that the client, the one who requested the copy, is to be found in the New Church, not far from St. Thomas Church, whose music director, Carl Gotthelf Gerlach, was related to the student.¹ Admittedly, we do not know what might have prompted the two to copy one of Bach’s compositions, at the time nearly twenty-five years old. The cantata originated neither during the composer’s Weimar period nor in Leipzig; this is established solely by the work’s compositional style.
  
  Another clue is seen in the text, in which the modern forms recitative and aria are not found, in which free poetry does not appear, and in which even chorales are missing. The text basically consists of four verses from Psalm 115: “Der Herr denket an uns und segnet uns. Er segnet das Haus Israel, er segnet das Haus Aaron. Er segnet, die den Herrn fürchten, beide, Kleine und Große. Der Herr segne euch je mehr und mehr, euch und eure Kinder. Ihr seid die Gesegneten des Herrn, der Himmel und Erde gemacht hat” (12–15; The Lord thinks of us and blesses us. He blesses the House of Israel, he blesses the House of Aaron. He blesses those who fear the Lord, both small and great. May the Lord bless you more and more, you and your children. You are the blessed of the Lord, who made heaven and earth). Such a concentration on biblical passages is rather more typical of the seventeenth century than the eighteenth. However, it can also be understood as a deliberate retreat from the innovative developments of the day. In his younger years in Mühlhausen, there appears to have been a situation in which Bach could develop a program in contrast to the spirit of the age. With his festive cantata for the town council election in 1708, Gott ist mein König BWV 71 (God is my king), he had in fact sought to evoke the timbral brilliance and rich instrumentation he had come to know in the famous Abendmusiken in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck in late 1705;²however, his well-meant offering seems to have been received rather critically by his fellow citizens.
  
  According to current knowledge, the musical taste of the Mühlhausen congregation at the beginning of the eighteenth century was distinctly conservative. The decades-long work of Bach’s two predecessors, the two organists at the St. Blasius Church, Johann Rudolph Ahle and Johann Georg Ahle, contributed to this. In 1662 the elder Ahle wrote that he could have used “a different and more difficult style,” that in his sacred arias he focused simply on “loveliness . . . so that the beautiful text would be better comprehended by the simple minded.” The same idea was defended by Rudolph Ahle’s son Johann Georg when in 1690 he remarked that “the coloristic music introduced in the churches” detracted from the intelligibility of the text in an unbearable manner; the music irritated those who understood and confused the simpleminded. Neither did it please God nor did it edify the congregation, who did not want to suffer it in church.³ 
  
  With its text consisting only of psalm verses and its limited musical demands, the cantata Der Herr denket an uns needs to be understood against the background of views like these. Stylistically it belongs to the milieu of those compositions known to have been composed in Bach’s time at Mühlhausen from June 1707 to June 1708. Nor does an examination of the text reveal any further detail. Even so, Philipp Spitta, the most important Bach scholar of the nineteenth century, developed a theory in 1873 that has a certain degree of persuasiveness even if its ultimate proof fails. Spitta takes the psalm verse literally: “Der Herr segne euch je mehr und mehr, euch und eure Kinder” (May the Lord bless you more and more, you and your children). This indicated a wedding, he maintained; yet it precluded an ordinary wedding. A special anniversary also lay outside the realm of the probable. But the second marriage of a widower was something to consider when the children from the first marriage were still living. Moreover, the phrase “ihr seid die Gesegneten des Herrn” (you are the blessed of the Lord) was most appropriate for a bridal pair from religious life. Both conditions apply during the time period in question to the pastor Johann Lorenz Stauber, who was active in the tiny village of Dornheim near Arnstadt and officiated at the wedding there of Johann Sebastian Bach and his cousin Maria Barbara née Bach on October 17, 1707. Four months earlier, Stauber had lost his wife after a marriage of nineteen years. After the year of mourning had passed he married again on June 5, 1708, into the Bach family circle. His bride, Regina Wedemann, who was forty-seven years old, like himself, was the youngest daughter of an Arnstadt town clerk. Whether Philipp Spitta’s argumentation establishes a secure assignment for the cantata Der Herr denket an uns must be left undecided: in view of the bride’s age, the blessing pronounced in the psalm verse, “for you and your children,” cannot be taken literally. And so the question remains open whether Stauber’s wedding on June 5, 1708, is meant or perhaps a different wedding. Finally, it is worth asking whether a wedding is really meant at all or whether the blessings are meant for some other occasion. 
  
  In any case, Bach’s composition belongs to his early years. This is clear from the characteristic short-breathed structure with many brief phrases and cadences but also other attributes that indicate the gradual development of ability in the management of compositional materials. Among these is the care with which the young composer avoids overly bold excursions into distant keys that would entail a difficult way back. In contrast, others betray a great sensitivity, and many an adept move earns the observer’s respect for the abilities of the young autodidact. Such skill characterizes the opening sinfonia, a twenty-one-measure movement for strings and basso continuo. Above a quietly moving bass line the two violins, at times with the viola and cello as well, take part in a rhythmically profiled contrapuntal texture. Only upon closer examination does one recognize that the two violin parts are led thematically, while the two deeper parts only give the appearance that they are of equivalent structural significance. The four measures at the beginning are repeated literally at the end both to round out the movement and to serve as transition to the choral movement that follows, whose characteristic beginning with two staggered intervallic leaps reveals the movement’s close connection to the opening sinfonia. On two occasions at the beginning of this first choral movement the strings pause twice to then let fanfare motives resound—as if this were a brass ensemble; this is among the several remarkable aspects of this music that need to be clarified. The center section of this choral movement is a permutation fugue, a form Bach had mastered completely even during his younger years; the fugue employs the instruments as well as the voices. At the end, the opening measures are recalled, along with the fanfares by the strings—which remain unclear.
  
  The cantata’s first solo movement, on the text “Er segnet beide, Kleine und Große” (He blesses both, the great and the small), is an aria for soprano. The two violins unite, forming a sonorous obbligato part whose diction clearly shows that the composer’s main sphere of activity was that of organist. Within the tradition-bound cantata, the duet for tenor and bass, “Der Herr segne euch” (The Lord blesses you), that follows represents an even older layer. The old-fashioned 3
  2 meter, the wooden alternation between voices and instruments, the frequent cadences, and the adherence to particular textural models—all these lend the duet the character of a composition that reaches far back into the seventeenth century. The closing choral movement, “Ihr seid die Gesegneten des Herrn,” is a sharp contrast; it begins with stormy passages in the orchestra, into which the chorus tries to fit as best it can. With a richly structured fugue on the final word, “Amen” (not part of the original psalm text), this cantata, as lively as it is enigmatic, comes to an end.

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  Footnotes

  1. Glöckner (1981).↵
  2. Abendmusiken were evening concerts featuring elaborate five-part oratorios on the five Sundays before Christmas in the Marienkirche in Lübeck. These concerts came to prominence under Dieterich Buxtehude and would have been heard by Bach during his stay in Lübeck with Buxtehude from late October / early November 1706 to late January / early February 1707.↵
  3. Ernst (1987, 76).↵