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• 1 2023-09-26T09:32:59+00:00 Widerstehe doch der Sünde BWV 54 / BC A 51 7 Solo cantata (alto). Oculi. First performed in Weimar. Text by GC Lehms. plain 2024-04-24T14:59:06+00:00 BWV 54 Weimar 50.979493, 11.323544 19Oculi cantata for alto solo Oculi BC A 51 Johann Sebastian Bach GC Lehms Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Widerstehe doch der Sünde, BWV 54 / BC A 51" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 164 James A. Brokaw II Weimar between 1711 and 1717

  Oculi, 1708–1717

  
  It is only since 1970 that we have known that Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde BWV 54 (Resist sin indeed) was written for Oculi, the fourth Sunday before Easter. This is due to Elisabeth Noack’s discovery of the cantata text cycle Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer, published by the Darmstadt court librarian Georg Christian Lehms for the Darmstadt Court Chapel for “Früh- und Mittags-Erbauung” (Early and midday devotion). Johann Sebastian Bach took at least ten texts from this cycle, originally written for the court music director Christoph Graupner, who set much of it to music in 1711 and 1712. Of the ten texts set by Bach, two were composed in Weimar (thus 1717 at the latest), and eight more were composed during his third year in office as cantor of St. Thomas in Leipzig.
  
  In Lehms’s cycle, the cantata text Widerstehe doch der Sünde appears beneath the heading “Andacht auf den Sonntag Oculi” (Devotion for the Sunday of Oculi). There was church music on Oculi Sunday in Weimar and several other cities but not in Leipzig during Lent, also known as tempus clausum, during which polyphonic church music fell silent. This fact by itself would allow one to conclude that the cantata originated during Bach’s Weimar period. In addition, there is a peculiarity of the source transmission: the only manuscript source from the eighteenth century to preserve this work was copied in part by the Weimar city organist, Johann Gottfried Walther, a contemporary and cousin of Bach, and mostly by Johann Tobias Krebs the Elder, father of the better-known organist, composer, and Bach student Johann Ludwig Krebs. The elder Krebs was active as an organist in Buttelstedt near Weimar between 1710 and 1717, but as Johann Gottfried Walther reports in his Musikalisches Lexikon of 1732, he continued to study composition and keyboard playing with Walther himself at first and with Johann Sebastian Bach later. In sum, everything supports the view that Walther and his student Johann Tobias Krebs copied Bach’s cantata no later than 1717, making it  an undoubtedly early composition.
  
  Certainly, this does not solve all the puzzles, for the score of Widerstehe doch der Sünde appears under the heading “Cantata” without naming the point in the church calendar intended by the composer. The text itself shows only a loose relationship to the Gospel reading for Oculi Sunday, the account in Luke 11 of Jesus driving out the devil. The not terribly close relationship between cantata libretto and Sunday Gospel reading should certainly not be given too much weight: Georg Christian Lehms himself expressly wrote his rhymed “Andacht” (Devotion) for Oculi Sunday in the printed text collection of 1711, and Bach must have used exactly this publication. It is therefore not significant that the cantata text Widerstehe doch der Sünde was performed in 1739 and 1748 in Leisnig, Saxony (whether or not composed by Bach, remains to be seen), one occasion on Trinity Sunday and the other on the twentieth Sunday after Trinity. Scholars have considered an assignment to Bach’s Weimar performance schedule on the seventh Sunday after Trinity in 1714, but this remains hypothetical.
  
  However, another question was definitively answered by the recently discovered text source, namely, whether Bach’s cantata is complete. The suspicion has frequently been expressed that the cantata, which contains only three movements, might be a fragment of what was originally a more extensive work. This suspicion arose, on the one hand, from the relative brevity of the composition and, on the other, from the apparently narrow scope of ideas in its text, which revolves around sin and the devil, using powerful Baroque vocabulary. But the evaluation must proceed from the opposite direction. With Widerstehe doch der Sünde we are dealing with a cantata in the literal sense, an example of that construct that the theologian and poet Erdmann Neumeister in 1720 characterized as having the appearance of “a piece from an opera, assembled of recitatives and arias” (ein Stück aus einer Oper, von Stylo Recitativo und Arien zusammen gesetzt).¹ Two arias with an intervening recitative are practically the minimum needed to fulfill the definition of a cantata. In this context, concentration of ideas is not a fault; it is a virtue. Georg Christian Lehms, with above average experience for his young age, knew how to work with rigor and freedom as well as unity and contrast, as he created both opera libretti and texts for church music.
  
  Lehms’s great skill is demonstrated in the cantata text for Oculi Sunday, although it contains no more than two dozen verses. The first aria begins:

  Widerstehe doch der Sünde, 
  Sonst ergreifet dich ihr Gift.
  
  Resist sin indeed,
  Lest its poison take hold of you.

  
  After this admonition, the consequences of defiance are described:

  Laß dich nicht den Satan blenden 
  Denn die Gottes Ehre schänden 
  Trifft ein Fluch, der tödlich ist.
  
  Do not let Satan blind you,
  For those who disgrace God’s honor 
  Are struck by a curse that is deadly.

  
  In the text as published by Lehms, the closing line reads “Trifft ein Fluch, der tödlich trifft” (Are struck by a curse that strikes fatally); one must assume that the repeated “trifft” was intentional and not the result of oversight or ineptitude. The version in the Bach cantata avoids the repetition of the word but at the cost of the now-missing rhyme for the word “Gift.”
  
  The second aria—the cantata’s closing movement—proceeds in the opposite direction from the first movement. It begins with the consequences of defiance:

  Wer Sünde tut, der ist vom Teufel 
  Denn dieser hat sie aufgebracht
  
  Whoever commits sin, he is of the devil, 
  For the devil has brought it forth.

  
  It then points to “rechte Andacht” (proper devotion) as a promising remedy:

  Doch wenn man ihren schnöden Banden 
  Mit rechter Andacht widerstanden
  Hat sie sich gleich davongemacht.
  
  Yet if its vile bonds
  With proper devotion are resisted 
  It has made off immediately.

  The beginning of the aria proves to be a direct quotation from 1 John 3:8: “Wer Sünde tut, der ist vom Teufel; denn der Teufel sündigt vom Anfang. Darzu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes, daß er die Werke des Teufels zerstöre” (He that commits sin is of the devil, for the devil sins from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil).
  
  The reciprocal relationship between the two aria texts is reflected in the recitative that connects them in an opposition of external appearance and inner reality:

  Die Art verruchter Sünden
  Ist zwar von außen wunderschön.
  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
  Von außen ist sie Gold Doch, will man weitergehn
  So zeigt sich nur ein leerer Schatten Und übertünschtes Grab.
  
  The nature of wicked sins
  Is certainly wonderfully beautiful from the outside.
  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
  From outside it is gold. Yet if one goes further,
  It proves only an empty shadow And whitewashed sepulchre.

  The concept “außen Gold” (outwardly gold) and inner “leerer Schatten” (empty shadow) targets hypocrites and conceited Pharisees. The same is true of the image of the “whitewashed sepulchre”: it comes from Jesus’s sermon against the scribes and Pharisees from Matthew 23:27–28: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you are like the whitened sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inwardly they are full of bones of the dead, and of all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous before people, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” One finds similar language in Luke 11 and thus in the immediate vicinity of the Gospel reading for Oculi Sunday, obviously taken up by the librettist Lehms.
  
  At the time, a favorite vehicle for the comparison between outward appearance and inner condition—as well as the “übertünschter Gräber”—was the Sodomsapfel (apple of Sodom), the fruit of a shrub living near the Dead Sea. “Sie ist den Sodomsäpfeln gleich” (It is like the apple of Sodom), reads Lehms’s recitative regarding sin. What is meant—according to a description from 1721—is “a lovely fruit to look at, white and reddish, like small apples of Paradise. Inside, however, they are full of white seeds, like unripe    apples, without juice, bitter and tasteless. Those left on the vine dry out and turn black, and if one breaks them open they emit dust like ashes   Tacitus thought the same thing, almost in the same manner, as did the Jewish historian Josephus. Several scholars consider them a remnant or reminder of the destruction of Sodom.”² The history of the Jews, quoted here from Flavius Josephus in the first century CE, was in Bach’s library. Whether he consulted it in order to enlighten himself about the concept “Sodomsäpfel” must remain an open question.
  
  That Bach’s composition belongs to his Weimar period is shown not only by the source of the printed text (the presumed liturgical placement as well as its manuscript score copy) but also by particular musical details. Among these are the setting of the first movement, with two violins and two violas. Violas divisi are characteristic of Bach’s early work, but not that of Köthen or Leipzig. Also pointing to Weimar is the remarkably deep range of the voice: the solo alto operates mostly in the region of what is known as the “small octave” and frequently must descend as far as F below middle C.³ This could have to do with the specifics of the Weimar musical establishment, such as, for example, the performance of the cantata by a male falsettist. But the most likely reason is the relatively high tuning of the organ at Weimar castle church, which had the effect that the performance pitch of E-flat, relative to the chamber pitch at that time, sounded at least as high as F. The deep timbre of the strings, with glistening sixteenth-note figuration enveloping the voice, and the seductive dissonances, evocative of the modern Italian concerto, characterize the enticing pull of sin; at the words “sonst ergreifet dich ihr Gift” the voice too falls away. The long-held tones on the word “widerstehe” against dissonant cross-relations embody resistance, as do the rousing dissonances with which the movement suddenly begins, intended as a wakening call, together with the unaccompanied and hence clearly audible words of warning in the middle part of the first movement. The recitative begins restfully but flows into animated sixteenth-note passages in the accompanying part as sin is compared to a “scharfer Schwert” (sharp sword) in the text “das uns durch Leib und Seele fährt” (that slices through our body and soul). We are met with a sharper pace in the last movement: violins and violas are constantly in unison, whereby the number of voices as compared to the first movement shrinks from six to four. In place of the seductive, euphonious sonorities and the deceptive security of a slumber scene, there enters the alert vigilance of a vocal-instrumental fugue in which the strict half-tone steps assigned to the keywords “Sünde” (sin) and “Teufel” (devil) and the single-minded determination of the permutation technique so favored by Bach no longer allow any deviation from the prescribed path of virtue, embodied by “rechte Andacht” (proper devotion).
  
  In terms of its textual concept as well as its musical substance, the cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde proves to be a masterwork despite its early origin. Johann Sebastian Bach was also aware of the lasting value of his composition: in 1731, as he began work on a passion according to Mark, he recalled his Weimar cantata of nearly twenty years earlier and engaged his Leipzig librettist to write a new text for its first movement, allowing the aria to be included in his passion.

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  Footnotes

  1. Neumeister (1704, preface).—Trans.↵
  2. “Eine liebliche Frucht anzusehen, weiß und röthlich, wie kleinen Paradisäpfel. Inwendig aber sind sie voll weisser Körner, wie die unreiffen Äpfel, ohne safft, herb und ungeschmack. Die auf dem Stamme vertrocknen, werden schwärzlich, und wenn man sie aufbricht, stauben sie wie asche. . . . Es gedencket derselben schon Tacitus, fast auf gleiche Weise, und der Jüdische Geschichtsschrieber Josephus. Einige Gelehrtebetrachten sie als ein überbleibsel oder denckmal der sodomitischen Verwüstung.”—Trans.↵
  3. Schulze’s reference to the “small octave” comes from the Helmholtz system for describing musical pitches and octaves. The “small octave,” denoted by lowercase letters without primes, extends below middle C on the piano. Thus Schulze’s f is the pitch f below middle C.—Trans.↵