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• 1 2023-09-26T09:32:58+00:00 Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen BWV 13 / BC A 34 28 Second Sunday after Epiphany. First performed 01/20/1726 in Leipzig (Cycle III). Text by GC Lehms. plain 2024-04-24T14:44:23+00:00 1726-01-20 BWV 13 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 14Epiphany2 Second Sunday after Epiphany BC A 34 Johann Sebastian Bach GC Lehms Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen, BWV 13 / BC A 34" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 106 James A. Brokaw II Leipzig III

  Second Sunday after Epiphany

  There are more than two hundred cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, not counting many others that have not survived. Even so, his production in no way rivals that of several of his contemporaries in either number or scope. Johann Friedrich Fasch in Zerbst, Christoph Graupner in Darmstadt, and above all Georg Philipp Telemann in Eisenach, Frankfurt, and Hamburg: each one by himself surpassed Bach’s contribution to the cantata genre many times over. Neither musical performance nor research could exhaust such a multitude, and further discoveries are possible at any time.
  
  An exploratory expedition into the vocal works of Christoph Graupner has been completed, albeit in stages. Over fourteen hundred of Graupner’s cantata compositions have survived. He is remembered as one of the most successful among Bach’s rivals in the competition for the Leipzig cantorate in 1722 and 1723. After several refusals and missteps, the Leipzig town council unanimously chose Graupner. They expected him to arrive in Leipzig at Easter 1723 but were forced to accept yet another written refusal. This left the path open for the royal court music director of Anhalt-Köthen, and Leipzig finally had the conditions in place for a new chapter in global music history to be written. 
  
  The connections between Bach and Graupner are by no means restricted to the biographical. In 1919 the Darmstadt musicologist Friedrich Noack was able to show that there were connections in the composition of cantatas as well. He found that the libretto of the recently discovered Bach cantata Mein Herz schwimmt im Blut BWV 199 (My heart swims in blood) was also composed by Christoph Graupner. This prompted the question whether Bach owned Graupner’s cantata or whether both composers made use of an as-yet-unknown collection of texts. The issue was definitively resolved in 1970, when Elisabeth Noack, younger sister of the scholar just mentioned, came across a long-missing volume of texts in Darmstadt with the title Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer (Church offering pleasing to God), by Georg Christian Lehms.¹ 
  
  It was then easily established not only that Graupner had set the fifty texts in this collection but also that Johann Sebastian Bach had also drawn upon it frequently. In contrast to Graupner, who set Lehms’s texts within a fairly short period of time—Pentecost 1711 to late autumn of the following year—Bach went back to the text cycle much later. According to our present knowledge, Bach set only two cantatas from the cycle soon after it appeared in 1711. Nevertheless, Bach, at that time still court organist and chamber musician at Weimar, must have acquired the entire collection soon after it was printed and held on to it, even when his activity as court music director in Köthen gave him little reason to be involved with church music. In 1723 he brought the volume with him to Leipzig, and in 1725 and 1726 he composed eight more cantatas from Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer.
  
  Of these eight Leipzig cantatas, six appeared in short order around the turn of 1725–26, beginning with the first day of Christmas and ending with the second Sunday after Epiphany. Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen BWV 13 (My sighs, my tears) is the last work in this series. Even its title suggests that it concerns the inexhaustible theme of mourning, consolation, and hope. Although Lehms begins immediately with an aria on “Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen können nicht zu zählen sein” (My sighs, my tears, cannot be counted) and does not leave this thought in the verses that follow, he gives no hint about what the keywords refer to: “Seufzer” (sighs), “Tränen” (tears), “Wehmut” (sadness), “Jammer” (crying), “Pein” (pain), “Tod” (death). The Gospel reading for the second Sunday after Epiphany, the story of the wedding in Cana, in John 2, seems to bear little relation to the text. But comparison to the poetry by other writers shows that an utterance of Jesus, rather casually inserted in the fourth verse (“Meine Stunde ist noch nicht gekommen” [My hour is not yet come]), is the crucial link. 
  
  Clearer points of connection are found in that Sunday’s Epistle, the second part of the Christian Rules of Living, from Romans 12. Verse 12 reads: “Seid fröhlich in Hoffnung, geduldig in Trübsal, haltet an in Gebet” (Be joyful in hope, patient in tribulation, and constant in prayer), and in verse 16: “Freuet euch mit den Fröhlichen und weinet mit den Weinenden” (Rejoice with the joyous and weep with those that mourn). Both the free poetry of the cantata’s first part (an aria and recitative) and the third movement of the cantata text (a strophe from Johannes Heermann’s chorale Zion klagt mit Angst und Schmerzen [Zion laments with anxiety and pain]) refer to these two passages. The chorale strophe reads:

  Der Gott, der mir hat versprochen
  Seinen Beistand jederzeit
  Der läßt sich vergebens suchen
  Jetzt in meiner Traurigkeit.
  
  The God, who has promised me
  His assistance at all times,
  He lets himself be sought in vain
  Now in my sadness.

  It bears mentioning that Heermann’s chorale is not assigned to the second Sunday after Epiphany in contemporary hymn collections; one suspects the librettist included it because of his sense that it fit well in the flow of ideas. In particular, “Vergebliches Suchen” (searching in vain) and “Trostlose Traurigkeit” (inconsolable sadness), as addressed by the chorale strophe, characterize the recitative texts that frame the strophe. The first is relatively measured:

  Mein liebster Gott läßt mich
  Annoch vergebens rufen
  Und mir in meinem Weinen
  Noch keinen Trost erscheinen.
  
  My dearest God allows me
  To call his name in vain
  And to me in my weeping
  Still lets no comfort appear.

  The second intensifies to truly drastic Baroque vividness: increasing sadness, a tear-filled “Jammerkrug” (crock of grief), and a depressing, sorrow-filled “Kummernacht” (night of heartache) culminate in the line “Drum sing ich lauter Jammerlieder” (And so I sing songs full of woe). Only now can consolation be expected: “Gott kann den Wermutsaft / Gar leicht in Freudenwein verkehren” (God can turn wormwood sap / Very easily to wine of joy). With this metaphor the poet draws a connection to the transformation of water into wine that stands at the heart of the Gospel reading. In the closing aria, the poet demonstrates the metaphor’s practical function:

  Ächzen und erbärmlich Weinen
  Hilft der Sorgen Krankheit nicht.
  Aber wer gen Himmel siehet
  Und sich da um Trost bemühet,
  Dem kann leicht ein Freudenlicht
  In der Trauerbrust erscheinen.
  
  Moaning and piteous weeping
  Do not help the illness of care.
  But whoever looks to heaven
  And seeks consolation there,
  To him can easily a light of joy
  Appear in the breast of sorrow.

  Here again we find a predilection for juxtapositions, typical for this author as well as his contemporaries, even if alien to modern sensibilities.
  
  Bach’s composition shows that whatever misgivings he may have had with respect to the drastic extremes of this text did not stand in the way of his decision to set it to music. On the contrary: the Lehms text, with its many keywords, offered an entirely practicable basis for a rich and powerfully expressive musical realization. Since the theme—mourning and consolation, simply put—seems rather narrowly defined, it was incumbent upon Bach to develop its various facets and nuances.
  
  The first movement, a tenor aria, is devoted to a rather subdued sorrow in spite of a vocabulary bursting with vivid expression. Bach achieves this by way of the evenness of the 12
  8 meter; a rich though restrained use of chromatic progressions; and, above all, the mild glow of an exquisite instrumental setting with two recorders and oboe da caccia, which leads for most of the movement. When the text of the middle section mentions “Weg zum Tode” (path to death) and the instrumental parts sink steadily in semitone progressions, this section seems like only an episode in relation to the whole. The situation is different in the second movement, a recitative for alto; here the last phrase of the closing verse, “ich muß noch vergebens flehen” (I must beseech in vain), is broadened to a four-measure-long, intensively expressive arioso full of emphatic intervallic leaps. 
  
  The third movement, a chorale with the sixteenth-century melody Wie nach einer Wasserquelle or Freu dich sehr, o meine Seele, follows the overall concept of the text, insofar as it is meant for a cantata, that is, a solo piece in the literal sense. Thus Bach does without the normally obligatory four-part chorale, instead giving the melody, phrase by phrase, to a single alto voice with the three winds in unison or in octaves, and he embeds the chorale tune in a thick texture of strings, whose animated figuration more nearly resembles Freu dich sehr, o liebe Seele than the lamenting text presented by the voice. In this, the effect of the ensuing recitative is partially foreshadowed, since it is here that by rights the harmonic transformation takes place, from sorrow and lament to consolation and hope.
  
  However, this change would not have lasted anyway, for the ensuing bass aria, “Ächsen und erbärmlich Weinen” (Moaning and pitiful weeping), seems to return to the situation at the cantata’s outset with chromatic intensity, sigh motives, and large intervallic leaps and actually surpasses it in weight of expression. Yet the instrumental theme of the aria, assigned to an obbligato part comprising both recorders and a solo violin, is divided in two parts, with two different, even opposing characters. The reason for this is found in the text, which speaks of “Ächsen und erbärmlich Weinen” yet immediately declares this to be an ineffective way. Bach composes the beginning of the theme as if it were a direct statement and not its negation, but then he continues with rushing, almost tumbling joyful animation with runs and leaps, taking up the textual cornerstones “Himmel” (heaven), “Trost” (consolation), and “Freudenlicht” (light of joy), which appear only in the aria’s central section. 
  
  The poet may have been thinking of a different kind of musical contrast here that could effectively have closed a setting of his “Andacht auf den andern Sonntag nach der Offenbahrung Christi” (Devotion for the second Sunday after Epiphany). But this is not the only place where Bach went his own way. He was not content to simply place a one-part chorale in the center of the cantata. He also appended a closing chorale, unforeseen by the poet, in the concentrated four-part texture so characteristic of Bach: a strophe from Paul Fleming’s hymn In allen meinen Taten (In all my deeds), set to an ancient melody after Heinrich Isaac, O Welt, ich muß dich lassen (O world, I must leave you).

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  Footnotes

  1. Noack (1970).↵
• 1 2023-09-26T09:32:57+00:00 Süßer Trost, mein Jesu kömmt BWV 151 / BC A 17 15 Third Day of Christmas. First performed 12/27/1725 in Leipzig (Cycle III). Text by GC Lehms. plain 2024-04-24T17:58:04+00:00 1725-12-27 BWV 151 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 12Christmas2 Third Day of Christmas BC A 17 Johann Sebastian Bach GC Lehms Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Süßer Trost, mein Jesu kömmt, BWV 151 / BC A 17" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 49 James A. Brokaw II Leipzig III

  Third Day of Christmas, December 27, 1725

  It was not until shortly before 1970 that the arranger of our cantata’s libretto could be researched,¹ when a long-missing volume of cantata poetry turned up in the Darmstadt State and University Library entitled Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer (Church offering pleasing to God). This volume was published in late 1711; the texts it contains were meant for Darmstadt court music director Christoph Graupner in particular. Of the roughly fourteen hundred cantatas preserved in Darmstadt, over forty are associated with this annual text cycle. All were written between Pentecost 1711 and the end of 1712.
  
  Georg Christian Lehms came from Liegnitz in Lower Silesia. The year of his birth (1684) lies between those of Graupner (1683) and Bach (1685). Following Gymnasium in Görlitz, in the summer of 1706 he went to the University of Leipzig. Perhaps he encountered Graupner during this period; it is certainly possible, for shortly thereafter, Graupner fled Leipzig for Hamburg due to the invasion of Swedish troops under King Charles XII, while Lehms remained in the trade fair city and, during his period of study, gained recognition as a successful author of cantata and opera librettos. Ultimately, they met one another, as Lehms was appointed court poet and librarian in the fall of 1710, and Graupner was active as court music director after January 1709. 
  
  Lehms was granted not even seven years in his position before he contracted an insidious disease in May 1717. Until shortly before his death he continued to prepare texts for church music in Darmstadt. The annual text cycles, printed at the court’s cost, were entitled Das singende Lob Gottes in einem Jahr-Gang andächtiger und Gottgefälliger Kirch-Music (The singing praise of God in an annual cycle of devotional and God-pleasing church music), Davids Heiligtum in Zion oder ein neuer Jahr-Gang andächtiger Kirch-Music (David’s sanctuary in Zion or a new annual cycle of devotional church-music), and, simply, Ein neues Lied, so dem Herrn dieses gantze 1716. Jahr hindurch . . . soll musiciret werden (A new song that the Lord through this entire year of 1716 . . . shall be celebrated with music).
  
  The first cycle, printed in 1711, must have found its way to Weimar only shortly thereafter. In any case, the organist at the court of Saxe-Weimar, Johann Sebastian Bach, composed at least two of the texts in the form of solo cantatas before 1715. Around the turn of 1725–26 in Leipzig, he produced six further cantatas, which were followed in the summer of 1726 by two more solo cantatas.
  
  The cantata Süßer Trost, mein Jesus kömmt BWV 151 (Sweet consolation, my Jesus comes) belongs to the group of works composed in quick succession at the end of 1725 and beginning of 1726. For the most part, its text consists of joyous announcements of the birth of Jesus. Thus the first aria reads:

  Süßer Trost, mein Jesus kömmt,
  Jesus wird anitzt geboren!
  Herz und Seele freuet sich,
  Denn mein liebster Gott hat mich
  Nun zum Himmel auserkoren.
  
  Sweet consolation, my Jesus comes,
  Jesus is now born!
  Heart and soul rejoices,
  For my dear God has
  Now predestined me to heaven.

  
  The lapse in subject-verb agreement and the use of several filler syllables and words reveal a poet not yet fully versed in his métier. It becomes even worse at the beginning of the first recitative:

  Erfreue dich, mein Herz,
  Denn itzo weicht der Schmerz
  Der dich so lange Zeit gedrucket.
  
  Rejoice, my heart,
  For now vanishes the pain
  That so long time oppressed you.

  
  The poet praises as a “wundervoller Tat” (wonderful act) that God sent his most beloved son in order to free the world from its “Sklavenketten” (slave chains) and then transitions, not without skill:

  Gott wird ein Mensch und will auf Erden
  Noch niedriger als wir und noch viel ärmer werden.
  
  God becomes a man and wishes on Earth 
  To become still lowlier than we and far poorer.

  
  The third aria pursues this line of thought:

  In Jesu Demut kann ich Trost,
  In seiner Armut Reichtum finden.
  Mir macht desselben schlechter Stand
  Nur lauter Heil und Wohl bekannt,
  Ja seine wundervolle Hand
  Will mir nur Segenskränze winden.
  
  In Jesus’s humility I can find consolation;
  In his poverty, wealth.
  His poor station makes known to me
  Only pure salvation and well-being.
  Indeed, his wonderful hand
  Will twine for me only wreaths of blessing.

  
  The last recitative anticipates the closing chorale rather abruptly, with its formulation:

  Du teurer Gottessohn,
  Nun hast du mir den Himmel aufgemacht
  Und durch dein Niedrigsein
  Das Licht der Seligkeit zuwege bracht.
  
  You dear son of God,
  Now you have opened heaven for me 
  And through your lowliness
  Brought about the light of salvation.

  
  The eighth strophe of Nikolaus Herman’s Christmas chorale Lobt Gott, ihr Christen allzugleich (Praise God, you Christians all as one) concludes the cantata text:

  Heut schleußt er wieder auf die Tür
  Zum schönen Paradeis,
  Der Cherub steht nicht mehr dafür,
  Gott sei Lob, Ehr und Preis!
  
  Today he again throws open the door
  To fair paradise.
  The cherub stands in front no more,
  To God be glory, honor, and praise!

  
  With the possible exception of this closing chorale, the librettist seems to have conceived his first-person recitatives and arias, which he calls “Andacht auf den 3. Weihnachtsfeiertag” (Devotion on the third day of Christmas), as text for a solo cantata. Instead of granting him this favor, Bach’s composition instead deploys all four voices. In this regard, the soprano clearly enjoys the lead role, especially in the large three-part aria “Süßer Trost.” In the slow opening section, which is repeated at the aria’s close, voice and oboe d’amore move together, gently rocking above static basses. The gentle balance of 12
  8 meter, tender melody, and simple harmonies can be taken to evoke the very image of rocking the infant’s cradle. Yet this is enriched and illuminated by the prominent flute part, which might symbolize inward rejoicing over “Süßer Trost, mein Jesus kömmt”—in accordance with a long tradition in which the word “süß” (sweet) is associated with the sound of the flute. A more energetic tone is struck by the middle section. Here again the flute takes the lead, but the voice, with long coloraturas, takes up the challenge of the woodwind’s extended garlands of triplets and successfully holds its own. 
  
  In following this imposing beginning, the other movements have a difficult job. The second aria, following a brief bass recitative, is given to the alto as well as to an instrumental obbligato part comprising violins, viola, and the oboe d’amore. The voice and obbligato instruments move primarily in downward-directed intervals and passages, symbolizing the “Demut und Armut” (humility and poverty) sketched out by the text. The rigor and austerity of the three-part texture and the sharpness of the intervallic leaps scarcely allow the players to take a breath and, even less, gain any relief from the “imperative mandate” of the libretto.
  
  The brief tenor recitative and the cheerfully relaxed mood of the closing four-part chorale combine for a pleasant conclusion.

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  Footnotes

  1. Noack (1970).↵
• 1 2023-09-26T09:34:18+00:00 Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust BWV 170 / BC A 106 11 Cantata for alto solo. Sixth Sunday After Trinity. First performed 07/28/1726 in Leipzig (Cycle III). Text by GC Lehms. plain 2024-04-24T17:41:05+00:00 1726-07-28 BWV 170 Leipzig 50.979493, 11.323544 05Trinity06 Cantata for alto solo Sixth Sunday After Trinity BC A 106 Johann Sebastian Bach GC Lehms Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170 / BC A 106" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 328 James A. Brokaw II Leipzig III

  Sixth Sunday after Trinity, July 28, 1726

  Without question, this cantata is among the most challenging compositions of its kind. Who it was who had to master the difficult solo alto part at the first performance under Bach’s direction is not documented. It may have been Carl Gotthelf Gerlach, who is known to have occasionally served as an alto. A student in Leipzig, Gerlach was at the St. Thomas School earlier under Bach’s predecessor as cantor, Johann Kuhnau. 
  
  The cantata was heard for the first time on July 28, 1726. Another cantata must also have been performed on the same day: Ich will mein Geist in euch geben JLB-7 (I will put my spirit within you), by Bach’s Meiningen cousin Johann Ludwig Bach. It is likely that one cantata was performed before the sermon during the main worship service, the other afterward. It is not known which work received the preferred position before the sermon. It may have been the cantata by Bach’s Meiningen cousin, because it alone makes direct reference in its text to the Gospel reading of the Sunday. While Bach’s source text is indeed designated as “Andacht auf den sechsten Sonntag nach Trinitatis” (Devotion for the sixth Sunday after Trinity), a relation to the Gospel reading is more difficult to make out than for the cantata by Johann Ludwig Bach. Therefore, the cantata Vergügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust BWV 170 (Contented rest, beloved pleasure of the soul) would have been performed on this initial occasion only after the sermon, during Communion. 
      
  This work is one of the few flawless examples in Bach’s oeuvre of the cantata as it is exemplified by Erdmann Neumeister in his collection Geistliche Cantaten statt einer Kirchen-Music (Sacred cantatas instead of a church music), prepared in 1702 and reprinted in 1704. That is, traditional church music with its mixture of biblical text, chorale strophes, and a few freely versified portions was to be replaced—according to Neumeister’s initiative—by subjective expressions of piety exclusively in free poetry.¹ This effort achieved only partial success, although it was widely imitated. Who wrote the exclusively free poetry for this Bach cantata long remained a mystery to Bach research. On several occasions it was even suggested that Bach himself might have authored the text. In the 1950s it was proven not only that Bach had set this text to music in Leipzig but also that—fifteen years before Bach—Christoph Graupner had done so in Darmstadt, where he was court music director; he had also been among Bach’s competitors in 1723 for the Leipzig cantorate.² With this, attention was focused on the Darmstadt court librarian Georg Christian Lehms as author of the text. But it was only as recently as 1970 that final confirmation came with the discovery of a copy of Lehms’s text collection Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer (Church offering pleasing to God), published at Darmstadt in 1711. It turned out that when he was at Weimar, before 1717, Bach had used two texts for composition from this volume and at Leipzig eight further texts in 1725 and 1726.³
  
  For the era, it was not at all unusual to draw upon a relatively old collection of texts. It was an inaccurate premise of older scholarship that a close temporal relationship necessarily existed between the appearance of a printed collection and an associated composition—a premise that led to a number of disastrous errors. In the case of the Lehms texts, it is clear that they, with their powerfully elemental Baroque manner of expression, stood diametrically opposed to the galant sensibilities of the age. Whether Bach prized them for exactly this reason and deliberately adopted a backward-looking attitude is impossible to say. 
  
  The Andacht (devotional) text authored by Lehms comprises five movements: three arias and two recitatives. The language is characterized by the frequent use of compound nouns, a feature that betrays a proclivity to powerful Baroque expression. On the one hand, this may have to do with the collection’s relatively early origin; on the other hand, it could point to the author’s background and spiritual home. Although he finished his career in Darmstadt, Lehms came from Liegnitz in Lower Silesia. It was the Silesian schools of poetry, in particular, the Second Silesian School of the late seventeenth century, that the early eighteenth century regarded as the stronghold of harsh, crude, overladen, overblown expression. Bach himself had to endure such a comparison when in May 1737 Johann Adolph Scheibe in Hamburg launched an attack against Bach’s compositional style, calling his works turgid and confused and comparing them to the works of the Silesian playwright Daniel Casper von Lohenstein.
  
  With “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust” (Contented rest, beloved pleasure of the soul), Lehms begins his hymn of praise to “wahren Seelenfrieden” (true peace of the soul)—the “Stille und Ruhe des Herzens” (heart’s quiet and ease). He continues:

  Dich kann man nicht bei Höllensünden,
  Wohl aber Himmelseintracht finden;
  Du stärkst allein die schwache Brust.
  Drum sollen lauter Tugendgaben
  In meinem Herzen Wohnung haben.
  
  You cannot be found amid the sins of hell
  But rather in heavenly concord;
  You alone strengthen the weak breast.
  Therefore should true gifts of virtue
  Have their dwelling in my heart.

      
  But this gentle entreaty is only a prelude. Like a preacher thundering from the pulpit against the gathered throng of sinners, Lehms holds forth in his first recitative:

  Die Welt, das Sündenhaus,
  Bricht nur in Höllenlieder aus
  Und sucht in Haß und Neid,
  Des Satans Bild an sich zu tragen.
  Ihr Mund ist voller Ottergift,
  Der oft die Unschuld tödlich trifft,
  Und will allein von Racha! sagen.
  
  The world, that house of sin,
  Breaks forth only in songs of hell
  And seeks, through hate and envy,
  To bear Satan’s image.
  Its mouth is full of the poison of asps,
  Which often strikes innocence mortally
  And would only speak of Raca!

  
  With this, the poet builds a bridge to the Gospel reading for the sixth Sunday after Trinity, found in Matthew 5, not far from the Sermon on the Mount. It focuses on the message of justification with the words of Jesus: “For I say to you: Unless your righteousness is better than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. You have heard what is said to the ancients: ‘You shall not kill; whoever kills, he shall be guilty before the law.’ I, however, say to you: Whoever is angry with his brother, he is guilty before the law; whoever, though, says to his brother: Racha! He is guilty before the council; however, he who says: You fool! He is guilty before the fires of hell” (20–22). In long, powerfully expressive verses, the second aria laments the misguided ways of the human heart:

  Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen,
  Die dir, mein Gott, so sehr zuwider sein;
  Ich zittre recht und fühle tausend Schmerzen,
  Wenn sie sich nur an Rach’ und Haß erfreun.
  
  How the wayward hearts afflict me
  That against you, my God, are so sorely set.
  I truly tremble and feel a thousand pains
  When they delight only in vengeance and hate.

  
  “Gerechter Gott” (righteous God), cries the poet, “Was magst du doch gedenken” (What might you think), and concludes with the lines “Ach, ohne Zweifel hast du so gedacht: / Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen!” (Ah, without doubt have you thought: / How the wayward hearts afflict me!). Thus the return to the aria’s beginning is accomplished by a simple artifice, and the train of thought is closed. The last recitative continues the lament “Wer sollte sich demnach / Wohl hier zu leben wünschen” (Who should therefore / Wish to live here) but returns to “Gottes Vorschrift” (God’s injunction), namely, to love even the enemy as a friend. The final chorale closes the circle to the “Vergnügte Ruh” of the beginning:

  Mir ekelt mehr zu leben,
  Drum nimm mich, Jesu, hin.
  Mir graut vor allen Sünden,
  Laß mich dies Wohnhaus finden,
  Wo selbst ich ruhig bin.
  
  I am sickened to live longer;
  Therefore, take me, Jesus, away.
  I shudder before all my sins.
  Let me find this dwelling place
  Wherein I can find peace.

   
  In spite of its rather overwrought language, the text is quite well suited for composition. It provided Bach the opportunity to draw on all registers of his art and to put an unusual wealth of invention on display. For the first aria, the song of praise to contented repose, the 12
  8 meter, at peace within itself and complete, and the soft gleam of the key of D major provide ideal foundations. Here, the richness of tone of the strings and the warm timbre of the oboe d’amore unfold just as does the self-possessed singing voice. With the beginning of the first recitative, this ideal world is left forever. Indeed, the image of the world itself is put in question, for in the second aria, “Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen,” the world itself is—musically speaking—turned on its head. The otherwise obligatory bass foundation is omitted, violins and violas join to form a foundation in a high register, and singing voice and organ give themselves over to a harmonic and melodic adventure tantamount to the path through a maze. Only rarely did Bach employ this bassetto effect—the omission of the basso continuo—but on each occasion with particular intent. In this case, the “irregular” procedure characterizes the extraordinary, incomprehensible, not understandable rationally, or only in irregular fashion—in other words, the “wrong paths” of the “wayward” hearts. A parallel example of something not rationally explicable and hence set the same way in music would be the soprano aria from the St. Matthew Passion “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” BWV 244, 49.
  
  With its thematic invention and dance-like verve, the third aria of the cantata could pass as a song of praise of the joys of earthly existence were there not, at the very beginning, an augmented step from D to G-sharp—a tritone, the diabolus in musica. It represents the revulsion against the pharisaical existence, the necessity of reversing course.
  
  In 1750 Bach’s oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, performed the first aria of our cantata in Halle as part of a pasticcio (BR-WFB F 20), in which still another cantata movement⁴ by Johann Sebastian and a recitative of unknown origin were included. The second and third arias were not included; they were probably too challenging technically or, with their musical symbolism, would not have been understood.

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  Footnotes

  1. Hobohm (2000); Rucker (2000); Krausse (1986).↵
  2. Schulze (1959).↵
  3. Noack (1970).↵
  4. The first movement of Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben BWV 147.↵