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• 1 2023-09-26T09:37:19+00:00 Laßt uns sorgen, laßt uns wachen BWV 213 / BC G 18 15 Laßt uns sorgen, laßt uns wachen BWV 213. . Birthday celebration cantata for Friedrich Christian, Crown Prince of Saxony/Poland. First performed on Sep 05, 1733 in Leipzig. Text by CF Henrici (Picander). plain 2024-04-24T14:55:13+00:00 1733-09-05 BWV 213 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 Birthday celebration BC G 18 Johann Sebastian Bach CF Henrici (Picander) Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Lasst uns sorgen, lasst uns wachen, BWV 213 / BC G 18" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 672 James A. Brokaw II Saxony-Poland Friedrich Christian, Crown Prince of Saxony/Poland

  Dramma per musica, Hercules auf dem Scheide-Wege

  Members of Princely Houses: Saxony/Poland, September 5, 1733

  Laßt uns sorgen, laßt uns wachen BWV 213 (Let us care for, let us watch) belongs to a series of festival pieces that the Thomaskantor performed at functions with his Collegium Musicum, all of which celebrated birthdays and name days of the family of the prince elector of Saxony in Dresden. It is certainly no coincidence that the large number of these in close succession overshadows Bach’s previous activities of this kind. A likely explanation is that Johann Sebastian Bach hoped for a quick approval of the petition he sent in July 1733 for a title at the court of Dresden and that he wanted to strike while the iron was hot.
  
  One month after the outdoor performance of an homage cantata, now sadly lost, for the name day of the elector-prince, the Leipzig press once again announced a concert: “Tomorrow, the fifth of September of this year, in the Zimmermann garden before the Grimma Gate, the Bach Collegium Musicum will most humbly celebrate the high birthday of the Most Serene Elector-Prince of Saxony with a solemn musical work in the afternoon from four until six o’clock.”¹ “Elector-Prince” refers to Friedrich Christian, born in 1722, the son of Elector Friedrich August II of Saxony and his wife, Maria Josepha, born archduchess of Austria and daughter of a German emperor. A weak and sickly child according to a contemporary report, Friedrich Christian lived only forty-one years, dying in 1763 shortly after his father. Even so, for the young successor to the throne, Bach’s librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici chose the famous myth of the young Hercules who must choose between the easy path of “Wollust” (sensuality) and the steep, rough path of “Tugend” (virtue).
  
  The dedication to an eleven-year-old was certainly not record-breaking: on one occasion a librettist at the court of Gera drafted Tafelmusik (table music)—probably for composition by the Kapellmeister Emanuel Kegel—entitled Herculis Jugend und Tugend . . . für Heinrich [den] I., Reuß jüngerer Linie, als Selbiger am 10. März 1700 das Fünfte Jahr zurücklegte / mit eben so viel Sinn-Bildern (Hercules’s youth and virtue . . . for Heinrich [the] First, Reuß of the younger line, who completed his fifth year on March 10, 1700 / with just as many allegorical tableaux). This was probably an extreme case; normally such things were dedicated to adults. For example, on August 24, 1725, in Arnstadt, table music composed by Johann Balthasar Christian Freislich was performed for the birthday of Prince Günther: Der siegende Hercules als Bild eines sich selbst beherrschenden Regenten (Victorious Hercules, as the image of a self-governing regent). A few weeks earlier, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel in Gotha celebrated the birthday of Duke Friedrich with a “drama” entitled Hercules Prodicius oder die triumphirende Tugend (Hercules, or virtue triumphant); two years later he presented this work on the Hamburg stage but without the homage scenes.² In the summer of 1750, immediately upon his return from his last trip to Germany, George Frideric Handel composed his musical “Interludium” The Choice of Hercules and performed it in March of the following year in Covent Garden in connection with Alexander’s Feast. In early September 1773, exactly forty years after Bach’s homage cantata, princely virtues were again exemplified by the “Choice of Hercules”: the librettist and composer were Christoph Martin Wieland and Anton Schweitzer, and the honoree was the then sixteen-year-old Crown Prince Carl August of Saxe-Weimar. Here again, the frail health of the dedicatee was papered over with pithy language. Yet Carl August was granted a happier fate than his Saxon forerunner: he enjoyed a long regency; Goethe’s appointment to Weimar at its beginning was a good omen, as it were.
  
  In a composition by the famous Hamburg opera composer Reinhard Keiser, entitled Concerto a tre Voci con Stromenti / Hercules auf dem Scheide-Wege, wo zur Rechten die Tugend, zur lincken Hand aber die Wollust sitzet (Concerto for three voices with strings / Hercules at the crossroad, where virtue is at the right, but sensuality is at the left hand), arias and recitatives are arranged rather schematically, one after the other,³ a hazard Bach and his librettist Henrici skillfully avoided. Instead, the heart of the action is framed by two tutti movements, declared as “Rathschluß der Götter” (Decree of the gods) at the beginning and “Chor der Musen” (Chorus of the Muses) at the end. Thus Hercules wrestles with his fate in solitude, with an echo as his partner in colloquy, and the alliance finally struck between Hercules and Virtue gives rise to an extended love duet. Finally, the trio of Hercules, Sensuality, and Virtue, in a somewhat unconventional interpretation of mythology, is joined by Mercury, messenger of the gods and patron deity of commerce—unmistakably a “broad hint” in the direction of Leipzig, the trade fair city.
  
  For the most part, Bach composed the extensive, thirteen-movement libretto in the summer of 1733, admittedly including several older movements. The closing chorus, similar to a gavotte, goes back to a Köthen secular cantata perhaps from 1721 (BWV 184.1/6).⁴ In a texture typical of Bach’s Köthen years, the vocal component is scored only for soprano and bass. In 1724 Bach used it in a Leipzig cantata for the third day of Pentecost (Erwünschtes Freudenlicht BWV 184.2), expanding it to four parts. The duet between Hercules and Virtue and the “echo aria” are based on an as yet unidentified model. For the duet, Bach had another idea in mind; he planned to use a duet that would later serve as the model for the duet “Et in unum Dominum” of the Mass in B Minor BWV 232. 
  
  The opening chorus and all four arias have become well known by virtue of their borrowing by the first four cantatas of the Christmas Oratorio in 1734–35. There has been much discussion and speculation over what is called parody procedure, that is, providing an existing work with new text or occasionally reworking it. In contrast to earlier interpretation, today it is undisputed that librettists devised the new texts with great circumspection, sensitivity, and understanding of the work.⁵ Even the incorporation of the echo aria into the oratorio, long misunderstood, is now regarded as legitimate once its theological motivation could be investigated. Virtue’s aria can be seen as characteristic of the procedure followed by Bach and his librettist: 

  Auf meinen Flügeln sollst du schweben,
  Auf meinem Fittich steigest du
  Den Sternen wie ein Adler zu.
  
  On my wings you shall hover,
  On my pinions you shall climb
  To the stars like an eagle.

  
  The beginning of Picander’s text alludes to Bible verses in Exodus and Deuteronomy 32:11: “Wie ein Adler ausführt seine Jungen und über ihnen schwebt, breitete er seine Fittiche aus und nahm ihn und trug ihn auf seinen Flügeln” (As an eagle carries out its young and hovers over them, he spread his wings and took him and carried him on his pinions). Bach sets the “steigen” (climb) and “schweben” (hover) with an appropriate figure; and for the figure of Virtue and the perfection it promises in the later course of the text, he judges fugue to be the only appropriate means. An aria so constructed could only be moved into the Christmas Oratorio by virtue of the skill of the librettist, who supplied the new text with the equally suitable keywords “Ehre” (honor), “Kraft” (strength), and “Mut” (courage). Admittedly, the long-standing question remains open whether Bach had the multisectional Christmas Oratorio in mind while at work on the homage cantata in 1733 and 1734 and whether this goal guided his effort, consciously or unconsciously.

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  Footnotes

  1. “Das Bachische Collegium Musicum wird Morgen als den 5. September anni currentis im Zimmermannischen Garten vor dem Grimmischen Thore den hohen Geburtstag des Durchlauchtigsten Chur-Prinzen von Sachsen mit einer solennen Musick von Nachmittag 4. Bis 6. Uhr unterthänigst zelebrieren” (BD II:241 [no. 337]).—Trans.↵
  2. Böhme (1931, 113).↵
  3. Petzoldt (1935, 56 ff.).↵
  4. Neither the music nor the text has survived. The cantata’s existence is evidenced only by five surviving instrumental parts.—Trans.↵
  5. Schulze (1989); Schulze (1997).↵