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• 1 2023-09-26T09:35:18+00:00 Ihr Menschen, rühmet Gottes Liebe BWV 167 / BC A 176 11 St John's Day. First performed 06/24/1723 in Leipzig (Cycle I). plain 2024-04-24T17:55:53+00:00 1723-06-24 BWV 167 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 02StJohn St John's Day BC A 176 Johann Sebastian Bach Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Ihr Menschen, rühmet Gottes Liebe, BWV 167 / BC A 176" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 531 Leipzig I

  St. John’s Day, June 24, 1723

  Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata Ihr Menschen, rühmet Gottes Liebe BWV 167 (You people, extol God’s love) is for St. John’s Day on June 24, which has been celebrated as the birthday of St. John the Baptist since the fourth century. Bach first performed it in 1723, his first year of service as cantor of St. Thomas School in Leipzig, and it was reperformed many times afterward. One of these performances took place in the nearby city of Halle between 1746 and 1764, when Bach’s oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, was organist and director of music at the Market Church of Our Dear Lady. The text of this Halle version was paraphrased by someone unknown as festive music for general use; it begins with the words “Auf, Menschen, rühmet Gottes güte” (Arise, people, extol God’s goodness). Further evidence of its dissemination is provided by an entry in a musical supply catalog prepared by a certain Strohbach in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. He owned both the score and the performing parts of Bach’s St. John’s Day cantata—a quite unusual circumstance for the period—so that a performance of the work may conceivably have taken place. The owner was clearly Johann Gottfried Strohbach, who served as cantor of St. John, the city church in Chemnitz, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century; his manuscript collection thus provides remarkable evidence for the dissemination of Bach’s vocal works in southern Saxony.
  
  The text of our cantata, the work of an unknown librettist, hews closely to the Gospel reading for the feast day. Found in Luke 1, it first gives the account of the birth of the son of Elizabeth, whose parents named him John against the suggestions of relatives and neighbors. Zechariah, the father of the child, was mute for a long time because he did not believe the prophecy of the archangel Gabriel that despite his wife’s advanced age, he would have another son with her. Now that the prophecy had been fulfilled, “his mouth and his tongue were opened, and he spoke and praised God” (Luke 1:64). Zechariah’s song of praise forms the second main part of the Gospel reading for St. John’s Day:

  Praised be the Lord, God of Israel! For he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up for us a horn of salvation in the house of his servant David, as he has said since ancient times through the mouths of his holy prophets: that he would save us from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, and showed mercy to our fathers and remembered his covenant and the oath he swore our father, Abraham, to grant us that we, having been delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear our entire lives in holiness and righteousness as would please him. And you, little child, will be called a prophet of the highest. You will go before the Lord to prepare his ways to give knowledge of salvation to his people, which is in forgiveness of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dawn from on high has visited us that he may appear to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death and guide our feet upon the way of peace. (68–79)

  
  The unknown librettist adopts the tone of the song of praise in the first aria:

  Ihr Menschen, rühmet Gottes Liebe
  Und preiset seine Gütigkeit!
  Lobt ihn aus reinem Herzenstriebe,
  Daß er uns zu bestimmter Zeit
  Das Horn des Heils, den Weg zum Leben
  An Jesu, seinem Sohn, gegeben.
  
  You humankind, extol God’s love
  And praise his goodness!
  Acclaim him out of pure urgings of the heart,
  Since, at the appointed time,
  The horn of salvation, the way to life
  He has given us in Jesus, his son.

  
  The phrase “Horn des Heils” (horn of salvation) alludes to the passage in the Gospel reading that uses the horn—a symbol of strength, power, and dignity going back to the beginnings of human history—as a metaphor of salvation and applies it to Jesus. Strictly speaking, this runs ahead in the sequence of events, but the recitative that follows immediately fills in what has been skipped over: “Gelobet sei der Herr Gott Israel” (Praised be the Lord God of Israel) it begins, quoting from the Gospel for St. John’s Day, and then continues with regard to sending the son of God as “Welterlöser” (world redeemer). A bit later:

  Erst stellte sich Johannes ein
  Und mußte Weg und Bahn
  Dem Heiland zubereiten;
  Hierauf kam Jesus selber an,
  Die armen Menschenkinder 
  Und die verlornen Sünder 
  Mit Gnad und Liebe zu erfreun
  Und sie zum Himmelreich in wahrer Buß’ zu leiten.
  
  First John appeared
  And had to prepare the way and path
  For the savior;
  Thereupon Jesus himself arrived
  To gladden the poor children of humankind
  And the lost sinners
  With grace and love
  And lead them to the heavenly kingdom in true penance.

  
  The ensuing aria paraphrases the “Eid, den er geschworen hat unserm Vater Abraham” (oath that he swore to our father, Abraham):

  Gottes Wort, das trüget nicht,
  Es geschieht, was er verspricht.
  Was er in dem Paradies
  Und vor so viel hundert Jahren
  Denen Vätern schon verhieß,
  Haben wir gottlob erfahren.
  
  God’s word does not deceive;
  It happens, what he promises.
  What he in paradise
  And so many hundred years ago
  Pledged to our fathers,
  We, praise God, have experienced.

  
  The last freely versified text, a recitative, recapitulates “den Segen, den Gott Abraham, dem Glaubensheld, versprochen” (the blessing that God promised Abraham, the hero of the faith) and the song of praise of Zechariah, mute until now, whose tongue was freed by God’s “Wundertat” (miracle). It closes with these lines:

  Bedenkt, ihr Christen, auch, was Gott an euch getan,
  Und stimmet ihm ein Loblied an!
  
  Consider, you Christians, also what God has done for you,
  And strike up for him a song of praise!

  
  This hymn is the fifth strophe of Johann Gramann’s chorale Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren (Now praise, my soul, the Lord), which begins:

  Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren
  Gott Vater, Sohn, Heiligem Geist.
  
  Blessing and praise with honor be
  To God father, son, Holy Spirit.

  
  With its cross-connections of biblical references, the text forms a closed, coherent whole. Its musical utility, however, is another matter. Philipp Spitta, the great Bach biographer of the last third of the nineteenth century, appears to have seen an insurmountable obstacle here. In any case, he made the comment regarding our cantata: “a work of little significance that scarcely merits any particular remark.”¹
  
  Even so, several “particular remarks” seem called for. Contrary to the emphatic admonition “You people, extol God’s love,” the vibrant opening movement, an aria for tenor and strings, is instead filled with an arcadian cheerfulness and serenity. The “complete” calm and self-possessed 12
  8 meter creates an atmosphere of contented tranquility in which musical contrasts are avoided. Hence the main events of this aria consist of a filigree of fine gradations of dynamics and density of texture, as well as subtly employed tone painting for the text “Horn des Heils.” The first recitative is all the more exciting, on the other hand. According to a recent study, its closing arioso portion, “in its unconventional chromaticism, in its free handling of dissonance, seems to contradict the rules of voice leading and resolution of Baroque counterpoint.”² In fact, the tonal freedom here is so extensive that the question of an anticipation of twelve-tone music is entirely apt. The textual grounds are seen in these lines, after Jesus has come:

  Und die verlornen Sünder
  Mit Gnad und Liebe zu erfreun
  Und sie zum Himmelreich in wahrer Buß’ zu leiten.
  
  And the lost sinners
  With grace and love
  And to lead them to the heavenly kingdom in true penance.

  
  The keyword “Buße” (penance) could be seen to justify the intense chromaticism, but Bach’s intentions obviously were aimed at the passage as a whole.
  
  Accordingly, the recitative’s conclusion is designed as a musical labyrinth, very similar to the procedure in a cantata composed several years later,³ where the crucial lines read “Unerforschlich ist die Weise, / Wie der Herr die Seinen führt” (Unfathomable is the way / In which the Lord leads his flock).
  
  In contrast to what has just been experienced, the aria that follows takes a more secure path. The sharp coloration of the obbligato oboe da caccia corresponds to the text statement “Gottes Wort, das trüget nicht” (God’s word does not deceive), as does the steady leading of the voices. Soprano and alto are in either strict parallel or equally strict imitation and scarcely allow themselves to deviate from the prescribed path. The bass recitative, the work’s penultimate movement, makes its call to strike up a song of praise (“Und stimmet ihm ein Loblied an!”), thereby anticipating the closing chorale using the melody Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren (Now praise, my soul, the Lord). The chorale itself then appears as an expansively designed arrangement. In its performance of the melody in large note values in one of the voices while the others provide motet-like figuration and in its concertante figuration of the preludes and interludes, the chorale anticipates the diversity of forms in Bach’s annual cycle of chorale cantatas, undertaken in his second year of service at Leipzig.

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  Footnotes

  1. Spitta (1899, 2:422).—Trans.↵
  2. “in seiner querständigen Chromatik, in seiner freien Dissonanzbehandlung den Stimmführungs- und Auflösungsregeln barocken Kontrapunkts zu widersprechen” (Gojowy 1975, 43).↵
  3. Ich habe meine Zuversicht BWV 188.—Trans.↵