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• 1 2023-09-26T09:35:47+00:00 Bekennen will ich seinen Namen BWV 200 / BC A 192 12 Occasion unknown. First performed in 1742 in Leipzig after Trinity 1727. . plain 2024-04-30T14:51:53+00:00 BWV 200 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 BC A 192 Johann Sebastian Bach Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Bekennen will ich seinen Namen BWV 200 / BC A 192" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 571 James A. Brokaw II in 1742 Leipzig after Trinity 1727

  Occasion Unknown. First performed around 1742 in Leipzig.

  It was in early 1935 that the musical world learned of the existence of the cantata Bekennen will ich seinen Namen BWV 200 (I will confess his name) for the first time. Ludwig Landshoff, then active in Berlin as a conductor and music scholar, prepared the first edition of the work for the venerable firm of Peters in Leipzig.¹ In contrast to the firm’s owner, Henri Hinrichsen, Landshoff emigrated shortly afterward and thereby escaped the Nazi terror. His edition reflects the approaching danger. Regarding the manuscript’s provenance, Landshoff’s foreword reads (more by way of obfuscation than illumination): “The autograph for the alto aria by Bach printed here for the first time is in private hands in Berlin. It was thankfully made available to me for publication by the current owner. The previous owner, also living in Berlin, was unable to say anything further about where the manuscript came from, other than that it was found among his father’s papers after his death in Berlin in 1924.” Landshoff is silent as to the names of the owner, the previous owner, and the father of the previous owner. He may have been simply taking the usual precautions to protect the privacy of the owners against the curious. But it seems more likely that the person who died in 1924 and his son were members of Berlin’s Jewish population and that Landshoff deemed it advisable not to mention their names. Obviously, the same is true of the collector in Berlin who counted the Bach autograph among his treasures in 1935. Not until after World War II did it become known that he was the pianist Franz-Joachim Osborn. Born in 1903, Osborn studied piano with Artur Schnabel and Max Pauer, composition under Franz Schreker, and conducting with Franz Busch. He emigrated to England in 1934, a year before Landshoff’s edition was published. In England Osborn concertized with the famous violinist Max Rostal. Later he returned to the Continent and died in Basel in 1955. The manuscript remained in the possession of his widow, who later remarried as Lady Hutchison, and in May 1979 it reached the Berlin State Library by way of their son Christopher Osborn. 
  
  The contents of the Bach manuscript that surfaced in 1935 are as mysterious as their provenance. Although the work has been called a cantata since then, in actuality it is only a single aria. What context it belongs to has not yet been ascertained. Its text—free poetry by an unknown librettist—shows that it is part of a church cantata:

  Bekennen will ich seinen Namen, 
  Er ist der Herr, er ist der Christ,
  In welchem aller Völker Samen
  Gesegnet und erlöset ist.
  Kein Tod raubt mir die Zuversicht:
  Der Herr ist meines Lebens Licht.
  
  I will confess his name,
  He is the Lord, he is the Christ
  In whom the seed of all peoples
  Is blessed and redeemed.
  No death will rob me of the confidence:
  The Lord is the light of my life.

  
  The rather superficial pathos of this verse yields very few clues as to its author. Further, there are few indications as to the work’s place in the church calendar. From the keywords “Tod” (death) and “Zuversicht” (confidence), as well as “Lebens Licht” (light of [my] life), some have inferred the Feast of Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the conceptual world of the ancient Simeon. But the praise of the name of Jesus could be related to New Year’s Day or another holiday, and the word “Licht” (light), accentuated at the close, could point to the feast of Epiphany. The vocabulary represented in the aria text is also found in hymnals of the period beneath the rubric “Von Jesu Namen” in particular.
  
  The music is not much more illuminating. Despite the absence of scoring indications, it is clear that the alto voice is accompanied by two violins and the basso continuo. The hymnic gesture of the melody and the euphonious voice leading seem more characteristic of Handel or another Italian-influenced composer than of Bach. Even so, the authenticity of the manuscript is beyond doubt, and the number of corrections speaks against the possibility that this could be a copy or arrangement of another composer’s work. And so for the moment, the only possible explanation for the rather unusual style that remains is the time of the work’s origin, probably in 1742, and the absence of any vocal works by Bach for comparison during this period.

  Addendum

  Only two years after the first edition of Schulze’s book was published, many of the riddles that attended this freestanding aria were resolved. Peter Wollny was able to determine that BWV 200 is indeed not an original work by Bach and is instead his arrangement of the aria “Dein Kreuz, o Bräutigam meiner Seelen” (Your cross, O bridegroom of my soul), from the Passion oratorio by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690–1749) entitled Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld (also known by the title on its earliest printed libretto, Der leidende und am Creutz sterbende liebe Jesu). Wollny was able to make this determination based on several other recent discoveries that outline a rich artistic exchange between Bach, Stölzel, and others. These discoveries in turn are based on the printed text booklets distributed to church congregations in Leipzig, a large cache of which was discovered in St. Petersburg about fifteen years ago. 

  “Texte zur Leipziger Kirchenmusik”: Bach’s Activities during the 1730s and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel

  For more than a century, researchers have used the printed text booklets distributed to church congregations and secular audiences as tools to positively establish the dates and locations for performances of Bach’s cantatas and other vocal works. The booklets are a rare commodity: small in format and numerous when issued, they attracted the interest of very few collectors at the time. They were issued for sacred as well as secular occasions: for church services, city council elections, birthdays, memorials, school inaugurations, and so on. A relatively large percentage of texts of cantatas for court and state occasions have been preserved in archives and museums; those for church occasions are, however, quite rare.
  
  Around 1900, several such booklets were found in the St. Nicholas Church archive: one for Easter and the two following Sundays in 1731, another for Pentecost and Trinity in the same year, and one for the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 of 1734. Sacred and secular cantata text booklets have also been found in the Leipzig and Dresden city archives. 
  
  In the early 1970s, while searching for materials relating to the life and work of Georg Philipp Telemann, Wolf Hobohm discovered nine more text booklets for Leipzig church music during Johann Kuhnau’s and Bach’s era in a place far removed from Leipzig: the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (then the State Public Library “Saltykov-Ščedrin” in Leningrad).² Hobohm had sought out the Russian library as a repository of over two centuries of rich cultural and commercial exchange between Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and German trade and university cities. 
  
  J. S. Bach’s close association with Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, music director at the court of Gotha, has long been well known, as evidenced by the “Partia di Signore Steltzeln” in the Clavierbüchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and, of course, the aria “Bist du bei mir” in the second notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, from Stölzel’s opera Diomedes oder die triumphierende Unschuld (Diodemes or innocence triumphant).³ In 2008, two years after the initial appearance of Hans-Joachim Schulze’s Die Bach-Kantaten, three studies were published simultaneously in Bach-Jahrbuch that presented significant findings regarding libretto booklets, findings that clarified the nature of BWV 200 and illuminated Bach’s artistic relationship with Stölzel to a stunning degree. First, Tatjana Schabalina reported the discovery of a far greater corpus of printed texts in St. Petersburg to vocal works by Bach and his contemporaries than previously known.⁴ She identified more than nine hundred new sources relevant to German music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, largely from the collection of Józef Andrzej Załuski, a key figure of the Polish Enlightenment with close connections to Leipzig and Dresden. (Johann Christoph Gottsched dedicated the first volume of his Nöthiger Vorrath zur Geschichte der deutschen Dramatischen Dichtkunst to Załuski.)⁵ The most significant of these for Bach’s vocal music are text booklets for church music dating from 1724, 1725, 1727, and 1728; a printed text for the Passion oratorio Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld by Stölzel; and a print of the 1728–29 Picander annual text cycle, whose only other known copy vanished in 1945 from the Dresden State Library. 
  
  It had long been suspected that Stölzel’s Passion oratorio might have been performed in St. Thomas Church and belonged to Bach’s active Leipzig repertoire because a copy of the work had been among the holdings of the library at St. Thomas School until 1945. The text booklet for the work discovered by Schabalina verifies that the Passion oratorio was indeed performed in Leipzig on Good Friday, April 23, 1734 (the season before Bach’s Christmas Oratorio BWV 248).
  
  In the second study, Marc-Roderich Pfau reported the discovery of two further text booklets, previously unknown, from Bach’s era in Leipzig.⁶ While searching for printed texts of cantatas performed by Johann Theodor Roemhildt in Merseburg, Pfau came upon the two Leipzig booklets bound in a collection containing Merseburg cantata text prints for the 1734–35 church year. The first of these is for the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248; it matches the copy held by the Bach-Archiv Leipzig. 
  
  The second booklet contains four cantata texts for the thirteenth through sixteenth Sundays after Trinity. Pfau determined that all four of these belong to Stölzel’s adaptation and composition of an annual text cycle by the Silesian poet Benjamin Schmolck (1672–1737), Das Saiten-Spiel des Herzens (The string play of the heart). Schmolck’s annual cycle was quite popular and was set multiple times, first by Stölzel in Gotha and again by Johann Friedrich Fasch in Zerbst in 1724 or 1725. There are three cantatas by Georg Philipp Telemann on texts from Schmolck’s annual cycle. Other composers to set texts from the cycle are Johann Balthasar Christian Freislich and Johann Theodor Roemhildt. Stölzel was the only composer to set the entire annual cycle.
  
  The booklet has sixteen pages and is paginated 49–64, apparently to allow it to be bound with others in a series. Since Bach’s Leipzig work year began with the first Sunday after Trinity, Pfau shows that the booklet must have been preceded by three similar booklets, paginated 1–16, 17–32, and 33–48, containing texts for the first to twelfth Sundays after Trinity as well as St. John's Day and the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. Although the printed text booklet from Stölzel’s performance of his cycle in Gotha is lost, Fasch’s from Zerbst survives—and its libretti for the thirteenth through the sixteenth Sundays after Trinity match those of the Leipzig text book exactly. Pfau marshals this fact—together with the singular occurrence of another composer’s work appearing on four successive Sundays, the pagination of the Leipzig text booklet to allow the entire series to be bound at a later date, and the fact that the entire annual cycle was presented elsewhere by others—in service of a compelling case that Bach indeed presented Stölzel’s entire annual cycle of cantatas in 1735–36 in Leipzig.
  
  The third study, by Peter Wollny (translated in the Riemenschneider Bach journal), synthesizes and expands upon many findings from the two that preceded it in Bach-Jahrbuch 2008.⁷ The revelation that Stölzel’s Passion oratorio was in fact performed in Leipzig in 1734 enabled Wollny to make the determination regarding BWV 200 described at the outset of this discussion, namely, that it is Bach’s arrangement of a movement from Stölzel’s Passion oratorio, the aria “Dein Kreuz, o Bräutigam meiner Seelen.”
  
  This remarkable discovery is one among several further revelations regarding Bach’s performance of materials by Stölzel and others. Wollny further corroborated Bach’s presentation in Leipzig of the entire Stölzel cantata cycle by identifying yet another text booklet whose pagination matches the one discovered by Pfau. Moreover, Wollny identified ten cantatas that survive from the Stölzel annual cantata cycle and suggests that another setting of the Schmolck libretto now attributed to Carl Heinrich Graun may actually be still another fragment of the Stölzel cycle. Further, the performance of Stölzel’s Passion oratorio—that is, a work whose text consists entirely of free poetry—was the first of its kind in Leipzig’s main churches. It had been thought that only oratorical Passions, consisting of biblical text and poetry, were performed in St. Thomas and St. Nicholas. Other Passion oratorios associated with Leipzig—a copy of Handel’s Brockes Passion HWV 48 in Bach’s estate and a fragmentary set of parts for a Passion oratorio by Telemann, now missing—thus can now be understood as fragments of Bach’s active performing repertoire during the 1730s.
  
  Wollny writes:

  The three cantata cycles that have come down to us, and the comparatively small number of oratorical works that have been preserved or that can be documented—these cannot represent the entire corpus of works performed during Bach’s twenty-seven-year tenure. These must have been supplemented by a considerable number of figural works by other composers. . . . Over the long term, a single individual working alone could not possibly have supplied the musical diversity that was apparently expected. This observation provides the basis—if recognizable only in outline—for a dense network of professional and private connections that constituted the precondition for a flourishing business of music copying and lending, and in which Bach would naturally have been involved.⁸ 

   

  ---

  Footnotes

  1. Landshoff (1935).—Trans.↵
  2. Hobohm (1973).—Trans.↵
  3. Schabalina (2008, 84).—Trans.↵
  4. Schabalina (2008).—Trans.↵
  5. Schabalina (2014).—Trans.↵
  6. Pfau (2008).—Trans.↵
  7. Wollny (2017).—Trans.↵
  8. Wollny (2017, 38).—Trans.↵
• 1 2023-09-26T09:32:58+00:00 Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen? BWV 81 / BC A 39 11 Fourth Sunday after Epiphany. First performed 01/30/1724 in Leipzig (Cycle I). plain 2024-04-24T16:53:10+00:00 1724-01-30 BWV 81 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 14Epiphany4 Fourth Sunday after Epiphany BC A 39 Johann Sebastian Bach Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?, BWV 81 / BC A 39" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 124 James A. Brokaw II Leipzig I

  Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, January 30, 1724

  
  The cantata Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen? BWV 81 (Jesus sleeps, what hope have I?) is for the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, a date that appears only when Easter Sunday falls on April 8 or later in the church calendar—on average, every three years. Such was the case in 1724, during Johann Sebastian Bach’s first year as cantor of St. Thomas in Leipzig. Scholars long assumed that the present cantata must have been assigned to January 30 of that year, and source studies in the twentieth century solidified this conclusion. A printed text discovered in the former Imperial Library in St. Petersburg in 1970 provided the final confirmation.¹ The booklet to be used by a congregation member bears the title Texts for Leipzig Church Music, on the Second, Third, Fourth Sundays after the Revealing of Christ, the Feast of the Purification of Mary, and the Sundays Septuagesimae, Sexagesimae, Estomihi, as well as the Feast of the Annunciation of Mary 1724.² Among the cantata texts to be consulted during performance, Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen? also appears beneath the heading “On the fourth Sunday after the Revealing of Christ. In the Church of St. Thomas.”³
  
  The libretto, the work of an unknown author, closely follows the Gospel reading for the Sunday. Found in Matthew 8, it recounts a sea journey taken by Jesus and his disciples that briefly brought them into danger. The Evangelist Matthew places this event on an unspecified “ocean”; according to the parallel account in Luke 8, it involves the Sea of Galilee and a crossing in a southeasterly direction toward the Land of the Gadarenes. In Matthew 8:23–27 the passage reads:

  And he entered into the ship, and his disciples followed him. And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: and he slept. And his disciples came to him and awoke him, saying, Lord, help us: we perish. And he said unto them, You of little faith, why are you so fearful? Then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm. But the men marveled, saying, What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him!

  
  In the first cantata movement, an aria, the poet describes the slumber of Jesus as an existential danger for the individual in which sleep is perceived as a complete absence, in the sense of the “search motif ”:⁴

  
  Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?
  Seh ich nicht
  Mit erblaßtem Angesicht
  Schon des Todes Abgrund offen?
  
  Jesus sleeps, what hope have I?
  Do I not see,
  With pale countenance,
  The abyss of death already open?

  Question after question follow in the next movement as well, a recitative, alluding to the first verse of Psalm 10, which reads: “Herr, warum trittst du so ferne, verbirgst dich zur Zeit der Not?” (Lord, why do you walk so far away, do you hide yourself in time of trouble?). The recitative derived from this reads:

  Herr, warum trittst du so ferne?
  Warum verbirgst du dich zur Zeit der Not, 
  Da alles mir ein kläglich Ende droht?
  Ach, wird dein Auge nicht durch mein Not beweget, 
  So sonsten nie zu schlummern pfleget?
  
  Lord, why do you walk so far away?
  Why do you hide yourself in time of trouble,
  When everything threatens me with a miserable death? 
  O, does not my distress move your eye,
  Which otherwise is never wont to sleep?

  
  With an allusion to the Star of Bethlehem it continues:

  Du wiesest ja mit einem Stern 
  Vordem den neubekehrten Weisen, 
  Den rechten Weg zu reisen,
  Ach, leite mich durch deiner Augen Licht, 
  Weil dieser Weg nichts als Gefahr verspricht.
  
  You certainly pointed with a star, 
  Before the newly converted Wise Men, 
  The right way to journey.
  O lead me through the light of your eyes, 
  For this way promises only peril.

  
  What danger awaits is depicted by the second aria, which compares the turbulent sea to “Belial’s streams,” a torrent that threatens to wash the human soul into the abyss of hell, should the soul’s firm grasp of faith be lost:

  Die schäumende Wellen von Belials Bächen 
  Verdoppeln die Wut.
  Ein Christ soll zwar wie Wellen [wie Felsen?] stehn, 
  Wenn Trübsalswinde um ihn gehn,
  Doch suchet die stürmende Flut
  Die Kräfte des Glaubens zu schwächen.
  
  The foaming waves of Belial’s streams 
  Redouble their fury.
  A Christian should stand like waves [like crags?]
  When the winds of tribulation swirl about him.
  Yet the storming flood seeks
  To weaken the powers of faith.

  Whether this truly means that the Christian should stand in the storm “wie Wellen” (like waves) remains a mystery known only to Bach and his librettist. In any case, the word “Wellen” stands in Bach’s autograph score, in the original performance part for the singer, as well as in the printed text just mentioned. However, the substitution of a word suggesting greater strength of resistance, “Felsen” (crags), for example, is by no means forbidden.⁵
  
  If the evangelist’s narrative up to now has served as a kind of foil for the reflections without being itself the object of depiction, it speaks directly with the words of Jesus in Matthew and names the source of all evils: “Ihr Kleingläubigen, warum seid ihr so furchtsam?” (You of little faith, why are you so fearful?). And now the heart of the scene can appear in an aria as Jesus enters as rescuer amid the storm at sea:

  Schweig, aufgetürmtes Meer! 
  Verstumme, Sturm und Wind! 
  Dir sei dein Ziel gesetzt,
  Damit mein auserwähltes Kind 
  Kein Unfall je verletzet.
  
  Silence, towering ocean! 
  Quiet, storm and wind!
  Let your goal be so restricted 
  That my chosen child
  By no accident is injured.

  
  A brief recitative expresses the gratitude of those rescued:

  Wohl mir, Jesus spricht ein Wort, 
  Mein Helfer ist erwacht,
  So muß der Wellen Sturm, des Unglücks Nacht 
  Und aller Kummer fort.
  
  Blessed am I, Jesus speaks a word, 
  My helper is awakened;
  So must the wave’s storm, the night of misfortune, 
  And all tribulation be gone.

  
  The cantata text closes with the second strophe from Johann Franck’s hymn of 1650, Jesu, meine Freude ( Jesus, my joy):

  Unter deinem Schirmen    
  Bin ich vor dem Stürmen    
  Aller Feinde frei.
  Laß den Satan wittern, 
  Laß den Feind erbittern, 
  Mir steht Jesus bei.
  Ob es itzt gleich kracht und blitzt, 
  Ob gleich Sünd und Hölle schrecken, 
  Jesus will mich decken.
  
  Beneath your shelter
  I am free from the storms
  Of all enemies.
  Let Satan prowl about,
  Let the enemy grow enraged, 
  Jesus stands with me.
  Though it now thunders and lightnings, 
  Though now sin and hell terrify me,
  Jesus will shelter me.

  Johann Sebastian Bach’s composition of this text is as rich in contrasts as it is in imagery, and it exploits its possibilities fully. The alto aria “Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?” develops in a region of tension between outer calm and increasing inner agitation. The chordal texture of the strings suggests a familiar scene of slumber as they sound in their deep register, brightened by a pair of recorders at the upper octave and combined with restful repeated notes in the basso continuo, as well as long sustained tones in the vocal part, but they are countered by the constant presence of sigh motives, the entrance of sharp dissonances, and the disjunct questions of the voice. The tenor recitative that follows takes up its lamenting tone and intensifies it to an ardent plea.
  
  In the aria that follows, a depiction of nature unclouded and cheerful is briefly evoked by the virtuoso competition between the voice and the cascading passagework of the string texture, led by the first violins. After only a few measures, sharper dissonances make clear that these are not just any “foaming waves” but the dangerous rapids of “Belial’s streams.” Despite three ruminative pauses, the breakneck momentum in this aria retains the upper hand. A change is first heard with the words of Jesus from the Gospel reading. Performed by the bass, the vox Christi, it unfolds with impressive repeated motives that follow in quick succession between voice and accompanying parts in a musical progression that, if not truly fugue, is strongly related to the spirit of fugue and appropriate to the severe question, “Ihr Kleingläubigen, warum seid ihr so furchtsam?”
  
  The aria “Schweig, aufgetürmtes Meer,” derived from the Gospel text, is also given to the bass. The turbulence of the elements, expressed in massive repeated unisons in the strings, is countered by the voice with similar effects, supported by the calming timbre and more restful motion of the two oboi d’amore. The last freely versified movement, expressing thanks for the rescue of body and soul, is also given to the alto voice, which at the cantata’s begin- ning was trapped by fear and doubt. As resolute and collected as it began, the cantata ends with a four-part setting of the melody Jesu, meine Freude.

  ---

  Footnotes

  1. Hobohm (1973).↵
  2. Texte / Zur Leipziger / Kirchen-Music, / Auf den / Andern, dritten, vierdten Sonntage / nach der Erscheinung Christi, / Das / Fest Mariä Reinigung, / Und die Sonntage / Septuagesimae, Sexagesimae, / Esto mihi, / Ingleichen / Auf das Fest / der Erscheinung Mariä 1724. // Leipzig, / Gedruckt bei Immanuel Tietzen. ↵
  3. “Am vierdten Sonntag nach der Erscheinung Christi. In der Kirche zu St.Thomae.”—Trans.↵
  4. The soul’s search for Jesus in the Christian reading of the Song of Songs.—Trans.↵
  5. The St. Petersburg pamphlet indeed reads “Wellen.” The alternative was suggested by Wustmann (1982, 48).—Trans.↵
• 1 2023-09-26T09:34:18+00:00 Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ BWV 177 / BC A 103 7 Fourth Sunday AFter Trinity. First performed 07/06/1732 at Leipzig. Text by J Agricola. plain 2024-04-24T17:35:17+00:00 1732-07-06 BWV 177 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 05Trinity04 Fourth Sunday AFter Trinity BC A 103 Johann Sebastian Bach J Agricola Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 177 / BC A 103" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 318 James A. Brokaw II Chorale Cantata Annual Cycle Leipzig

  Fourth Sunday after Trinity, July 6, 1732

  In early 1732, Johann Sebastian Bach closed a long-standing gap in his annual cycle of chorale cantatas with Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ BWV 177 (I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ). The reason for this gap was an idiosyncrasy of the church calendar. In 1724, when Bach was hard at work on the cycle, the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin fell on the fourth Sunday after Trinity, July 2, 1724. As usual, the higher-ranking holiday was celebrated—in this case, the Marian feast—and, accordingly, Bach composed a cantata based on the chorale Meine Seele erhebt den Herren BWV 10 (My soul doth magnify the Lord) as part of his cycle of chorale cantatas, which he had begun only a few weeks before. At that time, he appears not to have taken the precaution of composing a cantata for the omitted occasion, the fourth Sunday after Trinity. It was certainly not his plan to run a thriving business of complete cantata cycles, as did many of his contemporaries, and he could defer filling the gap to a later time. Hence it would seem that the unidentified librettist working for Bach had already been notified that he could spare himself the adaptation of an appropriate chorale text in the direction of recitative and aria forms. It is less likely that a libretto was prepared in 1724 for a cantata to be composed in the future—one that the cantor of St. Thomas School then discarded eight years later.
  
  In any case, the unchanged wording of the main hymn of this Sunday, the chorale Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, served as text for Bach’s chorale cantata. Documented in 1529 and ascribed at various times to Johann Agricola or Paul Speratus, the five-strophe chorale is unanimously assigned to the fourth Sunday after Trinity, especially in view of its relation to the epistle of the day, a passage from Romans 8.
  
  And so the discovery in 1970 of a Leipzig publication of the text from 1725 caused something of a stir, since it assigned the same five-strophe cantata libretto not to the fourth but rather to the third Sunday after Trinity.¹ On this basis, a date of origin for our cantata seven years earlier was proposed, along with an attempt to explain Bach’s date of 1732 in his own hand as a reperformance. But these hypotheses do not convince. It would appear that, during the weeks in question in 1725, the Thomaskantor performed several works by other composers, mainly Telemann, and may have now and again had someone else stand in as performance director. Whether he himself or his representative caused the chorale text actually belonging to the fourth Sunday after Trinity to be assigned to the Sunday a week earlier we do not know. One justification, while not entirely conclusive, could be provided by the fact that in 1725—just as in 1724—the fourth Sunday after Trinity was omitted, this time because of its coincidence with St. John’s Day. 
  
  The hymn Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ belongs to the group of hymns “Vom christlichen Leben und Wandel” (Of the Christian life and progress). Several hymnals of the period apply headings to the strophes and set the word “Glaube” (faith) above the opening strophe:

  Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,
  Ich bitt, erhör mein Klagen,
  Verleih mir Gnad zu dieser Frist,
  Laß mich doch nicht verzagen;
  Den rechten Glauben, Herr, ich mein,
  Den wollest du mir geben,
  Dir zu leben,
  Mein’m Nächsten nütz zu sein,
  Dein Wort zu halten eben.
  
  I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ,
  I pray, hear my lament,
  Grant me grace at this time,
  But let me not despair:
  The true faith, Lord, I mean,
  You would give to me,
  To live for you,
  To be of use to my neighbor,
  To abide by your word.

  
  It is worth mentioning here that, in most of the hymnals of Bach’s era, the fifth verse of this strophe is given as “Den rechten Weg, o Herr” (The true way, O Lord), while the version composed by Bach reads “Den rechten Glauben, Herr” (The true faith, Lord). The second strophe of the chorale text appears beneath the heading “Hoffnung” (hope), the third strophe beneath “Liebe” (love):

  Verleih, daß ich aus Herzensgrund,
  Mein’ Feinden mög vergeben,
  Verzeih mir auch zu dieser Stund,
  Gib mir ein neues Leben;
  Dein Wort mein Speis laß allweg sein,
  Damit mein Seel zu nähren,
  Mich zu wehren,
  Wenn Unglück geht daher, 
  Das mich bald möcht abkehren.
  
  Grant that I, from the bottom of my heart,
  Might forgive my enemies.
  Pardon me too at this hour,
  Grant me a new life:
  Let your words always be my meal
  With which to nourish my soul,
  To defend me
  When misfortune comes
  That might soon turn me away.

  
  “Abkehren” here is aimed at the concept of “Kehraus” (clean sweep, final dance, etc.), a word that is etymologically related to the much more threatening “Garaus” (death). Accordingly, the last two strophes pray for constancy in faith and help in conflict and danger.
  
  The scope of the individual movements in Bach’s composition matches the richness of text in the chorale strophes. This applies in particular to the opening movement, nearly three hundred measures long in 3
  4 meter. The main reason for the length is the instrumental component, which is independent of the chorale’s content and dominated by a solo violin. At the beginning, the violin enters alone against the motet-like counterpoint of the voices; the other instruments enter only after the entrance of the soprano with the chorale melody. In the further course of the movement, the texture thickens until near the end the soprano / cantus firmus and all other voices enter at once, without preparation. Even the solo violin must pay tribute to this transformation, evidently meant to amplify the urgent pleas in the text, giving up its independence in favor of a stronger integration. 
  
  There are no recitatives among the inner strophe settings; all appear in the form of arias. The second movement is laid out in two parts; the alto, with a particularly clear-cut and distinctive theme, is accompanied only by basso continuo. The third movement is in three parts: the soprano and basso continuo are joined in the tenor range by the muted coloration of an oboe d’amore. The fourth movement is in four parts; it employs the exquisite combination of solo violin, bassoon, tenor, and basso continuo. The cheerful virtuoso play of the upper voices—in which the basso continuo attempts to participate, in vain—experiences a darkening shortly before the end, when the text speaks of rescue from death. 
  
  The closing chorale develops an unusual melodic elegance, as if the composer wanted to demonstratively set apart his compositional style of the 1730s from that of the previous decade.

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  Footnotes

  1. Hobohm (1973).↵