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• 1 2023-09-26T09:33:57+00:00 O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe BWV 34.2 / BC A 84 12 Pentecost. First performed 06/01/1727 in Leipzig (Cycle IV). plain 2024-04-24T16:06:42+00:00 1727-06-01 BWV 34 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 27Pentecost Pentecost BC A 84 Johann Sebastian Bach Hans-Joachim Schulze, "O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, BWV 34 / BC A 84" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 259 James A. Brokaw II

  Pentecost, June 1, 1727

  In its form for the first day of Pentecost, this cantata (BWV 34.2) belongs to Bach’s late period and, by all appearances, was first performed in May 1746 or 1747. It is unlikely that the cantata was first performed in either of Leipzig’s main churches, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, but rather—if we are not completely mistaken—the Church of Our Lady (Liebfrauenkirche), in nearby Halle.¹ These inferences are prompted by several remarkable aspects of Bach’s holograph manuscript.
  
  The Thomaskantor was quite sparing in his use of expensive manuscript paper, and there are over one hundred cases of his using the lower staff systems on a page, left vacant after writing out a complex movement with many voices, to notate a separate piece with fewer parts. Whether these are fair copies or composing scores has no bearing on the situation. In the case of our Pentecost cantata, however, the composer set up a foolproof notational scheme in which he wrote the first recitative on the same page as the middle portion of the first movement, with the instruction “Recitativ so nach dem ersten folget” (Recitative thus follows the first). To drive the point home, there is, at the da capo sign after the end of the middle section just mentioned, the notation “Nach Wiederhohlung des Da Capo folgt sub signo . . . das Tenor Recitativ und die Alt Aria et sic porro” (After repetition of the da capo there follows below the sign . . . the tenor recitative and the alto aria and so forth). It is scarcely imaginable that Johann Sebastian Bach would have used these notes and explanations for a composition of his own with only five movements. More plausibly, the score was to be loaned or given away, and the annotations were meant for the manuscript’s receiver, quite likely Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who added to the score at several places where his father had entered very simple notation.
  
  The evidence for May 1746 as the performance date in Halle is that only a few weeks earlier Wilhelm Friedemann had taken office as organist and music director of the Church of Our Lady, and his father may have wanted to ease his son’s first steps in a new field of activity.² However, there does exist a cantata by Wilhelm Friedemann for the first day of Pentecost in 1746 whose text begins “Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten” Fk. 72 (Whoever loves me will hold my word). One would therefore have to assume that Bach’s son had performed two cantatas on May 29, 1746. However, no new composition by Wilhelm Friedemann is documented for the following year, and this could speak for a performance on May 21, 1747. The memorable meeting between J. S. Bach and the king of Prussia took place only two weeks before the putative performance date.³ Father and son undertook the journey to Potsdam together, and one can easily imagine that Friedemann might have taken the occasion to ask his father for the favor of a cantata dedicated to the quickly approaching high holiday.
  
  The annotations to the score mentioned above also support the conclusion that Wilhelm Friedemann received only the score from Leipzig and had to arrange for the preparation of performance parts himself. Fully copied parts would have required no instructions as to the sequence of movements. It is possible that J. S. Bach may have had parts prepared for his own use, but this question must remain open. In this case, simultaneous performances in Halle and Leipzig would have occurred. A Leipzig performance—if it in fact took place—would have been only in part a first performance. Only the two recitatives were newly composed for Pentecost. All of the other movements go back to a wedding cantata of the same name (BWV 34.1), which Bach seems to have reused several times. The wedding version, only fragmentarily preserved, was evidently first prepared for the nuptials of a clergyman. In any case, its concluding movement is eloquent:

  Gib, höchster Gott, auch hier dem Worte Kraft, 
  Das so viel Heil bei deinem Volke schafft:
  Es müße ja auf den zurücke fallen,
  Der solches läßt an heilger Stätte schallen. . . . 
  Sein Dienst, so stets am Heiligtume baut, 
  Macht, daß der Herr mit Gnaden auf ihn schaut.
  
  Give, Most High God, here too power to the word 
  That creates so much salvation for your people:
  It must indeed redound upon those 
  Who let it resound in holy places. . . .
  His service, ever cultivated in the sanctuaries, 
  Makes the Lord look upon him with grace.

  
  For a reperformance of the wedding cantata, these specific formulations were replaced by more general expressions, such as:

  Ein Danklied soll zu deinem Throne dringen 
  Und ihm davor ein freudig Opfer bringen.
  
  A song of thanks shall reach your throne 
  And bring a joyful offering before him.

  
  Of the seven movements in the first version, three were adopted in the Pentecost cantata: the opening and closing choruses of the first part, to be performed before the ceremony, and the aria at the beginning of the second part, to be performed afterward. Where possible, the unidentified librettist of the Pentecost cantata took characteristic and formative language from the original, thus demonstrating considerable understanding of the connection between text and music. Overall, the new libretto concerns the popular metaphor of the human heart as the dwelling of God. It immediately takes up the beginning of the reading from John 14:23: “Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten, und mein Vater wird ihn lieben, und wir werden zu ihm kommen und Wohnung bei ihm machen” (Whoever loves me will keep to my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him). The juxtaposition of “Tempeln” (temples) of the soul and “Hütten” (refuges) of the heart, long familiar in the early Bach cantatas, is seen once again in this relatively late cantata text.⁴ The opening movement of the wedding cantata begins:

  O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, 
  Entzünde der Herzen geweihten Altar.
  
  O eternal fire, O source of love, 
  Enkindle our hearts’ consecrated altar.

  
  It became:

  O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, 
  Entzünde die Herzen und weihe sie ein.
  Laß himmlische Flammen durchdringen und wallen, 
  Wir wünschen, o Höchster, dein Tempel zu sein, 
  Ach laß dir die Seelen im Glauben gefallen.
  
  O eternal fire, O source of love,
  Enkindle our hearts and consecrate them. 
  Let heavenly flames pervade and seethe, 
  We wish, O Most High, to be your temple. 
  Ah, let our souls please you in faith.

  
  The first recitative then clearly states:

  Drum sei das Herze dein; 
  Herr, ziehe gnädig ein.
  
  Therefore, may my heart be yours; 
  Lord, enter it with grace.

  
  The following aria, “Wohl euch, ihr auserwählten Seelen, / Die Gott zur Wohnung ausersehn” (Blessed are you, you chosen souls, / Whom God has selected for his dwelling), had in its original version the bucolic image of Jacob and Rachel from Numbers, the fourth book of Moses, as its theme:

  Wohl euch, ihr auserwählten Schafe, 
  Die ein getreuer Jakob liebt.
  Sein Lohn wird dort am größten werden, 
  Den ihm der Herr bereits auf Erden 
  Durch seiner Rahel Anmut gibt.
  
  Blessed are you, chosen flock,
  Whom a faithful Jacob loves.
  His reward will be at its greatest, 
  Which the Lord, already on Earth 
  Gives to him, through his Rachel, grace.

  
  The last recitative of the Pentecost cantata also stays with the image of the dwelling of God but translates it to the church:

  Erwählt Gott die heilgen Hütten, 
  Die er mit Heil bewohnt,
  So muß er auch den Segen auf sie schütten, 
  So wird der Sitz des Heiligtums belohnt. 
  Der Herr ruft über sein geweihtes Haus
  Das Wort des Segens aus:
  Friede über Israel.
  
  If God chooses the holy tabernacles, 
  Which he inhabits with salvation,
  Then he must also pour blessings upon them, 
  That the seat of the sanctuary be rewarded. 
  The Lord calls out over his consecrated house 
  These words of blessing:
  Peace upon Israel.

  
  “Peace upon Israel”: this word of blessing from the psalmist is paraphrased differently in the wedding and Pentecost cantatas, but always in accordance with the concern of the work.
  
  Bach’s composition presents a large festive ensemble setting in the broadly executed opening chorus, evoking the image of eternally blazing flames, as well as in the terse, powerful closing movement. As Arnold Schering wrote, its “fiery start and agility of the instruments [free themselves] of the ‘Hurry to those holy steps’ (Eilt zu denen heiligen Stufen) of the original version and meet here, with the feeling of thanksgiving in the highest degree. Earlier, this chorus ended the first part of the wedding cantata, before the sermon. Bach left alone its powerful terseness and homophonic form, which, in the Pentecost cantata, brings the whole to an almost unexpectedly quick conclusion.”⁵ The alto aria in the middle of the cantata is, in Schering’s words, “a world-famous piece, and one of the most beautiful that Bach ever wrote.”⁶ It unites, in the attachment to the original wedding text, “pastoral idyll and devoted shepherd love”: “This lovely mutual swaying of the two-part melody structure above the tranquil bass, the tender, swelling bending of the motive itself, the duetting . . . finally finding one another in thirds and sixths—hardly ever has a lovers’ dalliance been more delightfully represented with sonorous enchantment.”⁷
   

  ---

  Footnotes

  1. Our understanding of this cantata’s date of origin was radically altered by the discovery of a printed text booklet in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg for use by an audience member at St. Nicholas or St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. The date on the booklet’s cover, 1727, shows that the work was composed roughly twenty years earlier than previously thought and only shortly after the secular cantata BWV34.1, on which it is based. See Schabalina (2008, 65–68).—Trans.↵
  2. May 1746 is now understood to be the date of reperformance.—Trans.↵
  3. Schulze here refers to J. S. Bach’s visit to King Frederick II of Prussia at Potsdamon May 7, 1747, when the king presented Bach with a theme upon which Bach extemporaneously improvised a fugue. Bach later composed a collection of fugues (or ricercars), canons, and a trio sonata on the “royal theme,” which he published in September of that year under the title Das musikalische Opfer BWV 1079.—Trans.↵
  4. See note 1.—Trans.↵
  5. Schering (1950, 92).—Trans.↵
  6. Schering (1950, 92).—Trans.↵
  7. Schering (1950, 91).—Trans.↵
• 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 

   

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  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 2023-09-26T09:33:56+00:00 Erschallet, ihr Lieder BWV 172 / BC A 81 10 Pentecost. First performed 05/20/1714 at Weimar. Text by Salomon Franck. plain 2024-04-24T17:38:33+00:00 1714-05-20 BWV 172 Weimar 50.979493, 11.323544 29Pentecost Pentecost BC A 81 Johann Sebastian Bach Salomo Franck Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Erschallet, ihr Lieder, BWV 172 / BC A 81" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 249 James A. Brokaw II Weimar as concertmaster

  Pentecost, May 20, 1714

  With the cantata Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten BWV 172 (Ring out, you songs, resound, you strings) we have what is apparently Bach’s earliest composition for Pentecost, one of the high feasts of the church year. The oldest version was performed on May 20, 1714, in the castle church at Weimar. Further performances followed in 1724 and afterward in Leipzig.¹ All in all, Bach seems to have made a special place in his oeuvre for this work, since for hardly any other work do we have evidence of so many performances. Its textual and musical qualities may have been decisive here. But above all, one must consider that in the course of the church calendar, only Easter and Christmas were as intense a challenge for the Thomaskantor. Three holidays in a row were to be provided with concerted music; on the first two days, the music was exchanged between the two main churches, St. Nicholas and St. Thomas, early in the day in one, then at noon in the other. In addition to these multiple burdens was the task of offering a cantata at St. Paul, the church of the University of Leipzig, and this, of all things, always on the first day of the three high feast days. It is only understandable that Bach, whenever possible in the face of such a workload, drew upon his store of church cantatas and avoided the composition of new works. 
  
  Because of the cantata’s date of origin, the Weimar upper consistory secretary, Salomon Franck, is often assumed to be the poet responsible for our cantata’s text. However, this rests on style studies and conclusions based on analogy and is not backed up by documentation. In his libretto, the unknown poet avoids display of biblical knowledge with obscure arcana and remains fairly close to the Gospel reading for Pentecost Sunday. This is found in John 14; it belongs to the farewell addresses of Jesus and begins with the promise of the Holy Spirit:

  Jesus answered and spoke to him: Whoever loves me will keep to my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him. But whoever does not love me, he will not keep to my words. And the word that you hear is not mine, rather the Father’s, who has sent me. Such things I have been saying to you, as long as I have been with you. But the comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom my Father will send in my name, he will teach you everything and remind you of everything that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Let your heart not be afraid, and let it not be fearful. (23–27)

  
  The central statement of this Gospel reading is found at a prominent position in this cantata text: “Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten, und mein Vater wird ihn lieben, und wir werden zu ihm kommen und Wohnung bei ihm machen” (23; Whoever loves me will keep to my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him). In contrast to the other two cantatas for Pentecost, which place this word of Jesus at the very beginning, in this Weimar composition it follows a song of rejoicing in free poetry:

  Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten!
  O seligste Zeiten!
  Gott will sich die Seelen zu Tempeln bereiten.
  
  Ring out, you songs! Resound, you strings!
  O most blessed of times!
  God wants to prepare our souls to be temples.

  
  The generalized “Seelentempeln” (temples of the soul) anticipate the “Wohnung” (dwelling) in the word of Jesus, and the aria that follows it completes the turn to the individual, whereby the proud “Seelentempeln” shrink to modest “Herzenshütten” (tabernacles of the heart):

  Heiligste Dreieinigkeit,
  Großer Gott der Ehren,
  Komm doch, in der Gnadenzeit
  Bei uns einzukehren,
  Komm doch in die Herzenshütten,
  Sind sie gleich gering und klein,
  Komm und laß dich doch erbitten,
  Komm und ziehe bei uns ein!
  
  Most Holy Trinity,
  Great God of honor,
  Come, though, in this time of grace
  To stay with us,
  Come, though, in the tabernacles of the heart,
  Though they be slight and small,
  Come and let yourself be implored,
  Come and move in with us!

  
  Following this paraphrase of Jesus’s dictum, another aria is based on a later saying of Jesus: “Aber der Tröster, der Heilige Geist, welchen mein Vater senden wird in meinem Namen” (But the comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom my Father will send in my name). The poet’s aria follows:

  O Seelenparadies,
  Das Gottes Geist durchwehet,
  Der bei der Schöpfung blies,
  Der Geist, der nie vergehet;
  Auf, auf, bereite dich,
  Der Tröster nähet sich.
  
  O paradise of the soul,
  Through which God’s spirit wafts,
  That blew at creation,
  The spirit that never dies;
  Arise, arise, prepare yourself.
  The comforter draws near.

  
  Then, in yet another aria, now the third in a row, the unknown librettist deepens these ideas by drawing upon a familiar theme of Baroque religious poetry: the “search motive” (Suchmotif), borrowed from the Song of Songs and usually connected with the metaphor of the lost, beloved Jesus. Here, however, the Pentecost cantata deviates by having the Holy Spirit take the place of Jesus as dialogue partner of the Soul; the two consort in the language of “Jesusminne,” or mystical courtly love for Jesus:

  Komm, laß mich nicht länger warten,
  Komm, du sanfter Himmelswind, 
  Wehe durch den Herzensgarten!
      Ich erquicke dich, mein Kind.
  Liebste Liebe, die so süße,
  Aller Wollust Überfluß,
  Ich vergeh, wenn ich dich misse.
      Nimm von mir den Gnadenkuß.
  Sei im Glauben mir willkommen,
  Höchste Liebe, komm herein! 
  Du hast mir das Herz genommen.
      Ich bin dein, und du bist mein.
  
  Come, let me wait no longer,
  Come, you gentle heaven’s wind,
  Waft through the garden of my heart!
      I refresh you, my child.
  Dearest love, who so sweet,
  The abundance of all delight,
  I shall die if I am without you.
      Take from me the kiss of grace.
  I welcome you in faith,
  Highest love, come within!
  You have stolen my heart.
      I am yours, and you are mine.

  
  A retreat to a familiar realm after this ecstatic high point might seem likely, but the ensuing chorale text does not suit that purpose. It is by Philipp Nicolai, who did so much to shape sacred Baroque poetry as described here with his hymns written shortly after 1600, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (How brightly shines the morning star) and Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Awaken, calls to us the voice). The fourth strophe of the morning star hymn is quite close to the language of the preceding dialogue between the Soul and the Holy Spirit:

  Von Gott kömmt mir ein Freudenschein,
  Wenn du mit deinen Äugelein
  Mich freundlich tust anblicken.
  
  From God to me comes a joyful light
  When you, with your little eye,
  Turn your friendly glance to me.

  
  And at the close:

  Nimm mich
  Freundlich
  In dein Arme,
  Daß ich warme
  Werd von Gnaden:
  Auf dein Wort komm ich geladen.
  
  Take me
  Kindly
  In your arms,
  That I become warm
  From your grace:
  At your word I come invited.

  
  Johann Sebastian Bach’s composition of this substantial, content-rich text features a wealth of melodic invention, an obvious delight in colorful timbres, and a measured tribute to polyphonic ambition. Thus the opening chorus begins with a moderate dialogue between the chorus and a festive orchestral ensemble enriched by trumpets and drums. The beginning does sound a bit odd, with its declamation of text punctuated by rests “Erschallet, — ihr Lieder, — erklinget, ihr Saiten.” For that reason it has been suggested that this portion of the first movement might go back to an older work, perhaps a secular cantata. While this is a possibility, there is a simpler explanation: that the short-breathed exchange between chorus and orchestra in the sense of “Erschallet, ihr Lieder” was intended for the particular acoustics of the small but relatively high chapel in the Weimar castle, perhaps an echo effect. Apart from that, this effect is implemented only at the beginning; otherwise the presentation of the text is well regulated and quite coherent. This applies especially to the fugal central section of the opening movement, in which the voices are led in the manner of a motet, and the instruments simply double them.
  
  The second movement, with the biblical passage from John, is the cantata’s only recitative, in which the concluding phrase “und Wohnung bei ihm machen” broadens in an arioso that takes up more than half of the brief movement. The first of the three arias is also relatively short, in which the invocation of “Heiligste Dreieinigkeit” is adorned with the heraldic symbolism of three trumpets. The movement that follows stands in the greatest conceivable contrast to this aria’s small structure: the mode changes from major to minor, the orchestration changes from trumpets and drums to strings, the voice from bass to tenor, and the meter from 4
  4 to 3
  4 . The greatest difference is the spacious, sonorous timbre of the strings with their “endless melody,” probably meant to symbolize the inexhaustible “long breath” of the Holy Spirit.
  
  The effect of the delicate duet between the soprano (the Soul) and the alto (the Holy Spirit) is rather playful, in contrast to the gathered gravity that precedes it. However, the expenditure of artistic resources is hardly inconsiderable: an oboe (in another version of the cantata, the obbligato organ) carries the Pentecost chorale Komm, Heiliger Geist, Herre Gott in a lavishly ornamented form; and together with it the two voices and the lively, active bass, in whose highest tones the chorale is hidden, form a dense quartet texture whose compositional challenges in many places recall the Orgelbüchlein BWV 599–644, which originated around the same time. The closing chorale movement is not simply in four parts: an obbligato instrumental part stands out above the soprano in elegant counterpoint against the rather modest leading of the voices.
  
  In the first performances in Weimar in 1714 and Leipzig in 1724, the opening movement was repeated as a brilliant conclusion; in a later performance at Pentecost in 1731, Bach avoided this and from then on stuck to this solution. In a performance documented in 1735 in nearby Delitzsch, of which at least the printed text survives, not only is the repetition of the first movement missing, but so is the bridal mysticism of the duet. If this indeed was the Bach composition and not, perhaps, a new composition of the Weimar text, then the Delitzsch cantata of 1735 would be further evidence of the enduring popularity of this, the earliest of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas for Pentecost.

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  Footnotes

  1. A text booklet for Leipzig church music in 1721 surfaced in St. Petersburg; it includes this text, raising the possibility that Johann Kuhnau may have performed works by J. S. Bach before the latter became cantor at St. Thomas School. See Schabalina (2008, 57).—Trans.↵
• 1 2023-09-26T09:34:17+00:00 Gelobet sei der Herr BWV 129 / BC A 93 8 Chorale cantata on hymn by Johannes Olearius. Trinity. First performed 06/08/1727 in Leipzig (Cycle IV). plain 2024-04-24T17:35:38+00:00 1727-06-08 BWV 129 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 30Trinity Chorale Cantata Trinity BC A 93 Johann Sebastian Bach Johannes Olearius Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Gelobet sei der Herr, BWV 129 / BC A 93" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 285 James A. Brokaw II Chorale Cantata Annual Cycle Leipzig III

  Trinity, June 8, 1727

  The Trinity cantata Gelobet sei der Herr BWV 129 (Praised be the Lord) belongs to Bach’s annual cycle of chorale cantatas. However, Bach composed it long after he had prematurely stopped work on the cycle in 1725, clearly intending to fill a gap in the sequence. In contrast to the majority of his chorale cantatas, in this case Bach did not employ a contemporary poet and instead used all strophes of the church hymn as source text without revisions to any of them. The hymn is by Johann Olearius and is first documented in 1665. Olearius is perhaps the best-known member of an extensive Saxon-Thuringian theological family. Born in Halle in 1611 and orphaned at an early age, Johann Olearius nevertheless found so much support that he was able to enter the University of Wittenberg in 1635, having attended gymnasium in Halle and Merseburg. In 1635 he became an adjunct to the philosophical faculty and two years later was appointed superintendent in Querfurt. In 1643 Duke August of Saxe-Weissenfels, administrator of the archdiocese of Magdeburg, appointed him senior court preacher (Oberhofprediger) and confessor at Halle. In 1664 he became general superintendent there, transferring in 1680 to the new royal seat in Weissenfels, where he died four years later. In addition to numerous theological writings, in 1671 he authored a collection of twelve hundred hymns entitled Geistliche Singe-Kunst, whose texts Johann Philipp Krieger frequently drew upon for his vocal works. In 1667 Olearius honored the completion of an organ by Christian Förner for the castle and cathedral chapel by delivering a sermon entitled Das fröhliche Halleluja aus dem 150. Psalm bey Christlicher Einweihung des schönen Neuerbauten Orgelwercks in der Fürstlichen . . . Domkirchen zu Halle (The joyous hallelujah from Psalm 150 for the Christian consecration of the beautiful, recently completed organ in the royal cathedral church in Halle). 
  
  Whether Bach initially conceived his cantata on the chorale strophes mentioned above for the Feast of Trinity cannot be answered with certainty at present. Olearius designated the chorale itself as “Ermunterung aus dem Fest-Evangelio Johannes 3 zur dankbaren Betrachtung des hohen Geheimnisses der Dreieinigkeit” (Exhortation from the Gospel feast John 3 for the grateful consideration of the high mystery of the Trinity); it thus ranks as one of the more important of the chorales assigned to Trinity. On the other hand, certain features of the original performing parts suggest that the work might have been for the Feast of Reformation 1726 and only later transferred to Trinity Sunday.¹ If so, Bach may have fulfilled a long-cherished intention from the beginning, since only Trinity is conceivable as the rightful place for Olearius’s text.
  
  Of the chorale’s five strophes, the first is for God the Father, the Creator; the second is for the Son and Redeemer; the third is for the Holy Spirit; strophes 4 and 5 belong together and sing in praise of the Holy Trinity. The simple, urgent language, the even meter of the verse, and the clear structure with several repetitions give the text its effect. This can be seen in the opening strophe:

  Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott, mein Licht, mein Leben,
  Mein Schöpfer, der mir hat mein Leib und Seel gegeben,
  Mein Vater, der mich schützt von Mutterleibe an,
  Der alle Augenblick viel Guts an mir getan.
  
  Praised be the Lord, my God, my light, my life.
  My creator, who has given me my body and soul.
  My Father, who protects me from the womb onward,
  Who at every moment has done many good things for me.

  
  In similar fashion, the same priorities are made clear in the last strophe:

  Dem wir das Heilig itzt mit Freuden lassen klingen 
  Und mit der Engel Schar das Heilig, Heilig singen,
  Den herzlich lobt und preist die ganze Christenheit:
  Gelobet sei mein Gott in alle Ewigkeit.
  
  To whom we now let “Holy” be heard with joy
  And with the angels’ host sing Holy, Holy,
  Whom the entire Christendom sincerely praises and glorifies:
  Praised be my God in all eternity.

  
  As expected, Bach’s composition places the greatest emphasis on the opening movement, with its festive setting of trumpets and drums, oboes, a flute, strings, and basso continuo. With the very first measure there unfolds an unbuttoned, cheerful performance, led by the violins and flute, coupled together and brightened by brief interjections by the three brass instruments. As usual, the chorale melody is presented by the soprano with long note values, while the other voices support it with a contrapuntal web of highly diverse motivic structure.
  
  In the three movements that follow, the chorale melody for the most part recedes, although it seems constantly to be present, even apart from the occasional quotation or echo of the theme. In the first aria, the bass voice is accompanied only by the basso continuo and thereby allows an urgent, expressive, and subtly varied melody to unfold in the voice. In the second aria, the soprano, flute, solo violin, and continuo unite in an elegiac quartet in whose delicately embossed tissue a seven-tone figure seems to be ever present. After this overcast E minor intermezzo, the third aria, in G major for alto with obbligato oboe d'amore, regains firmer contours through the confident, dance-like gesture of its 6
  8 meter and the unified thematics in instrumental and vocal parts. The concluding chorale does not restrict itself to simple four-part texture with colla parte instruments. Once again, a festive brilliance unfolds as a counterpiece nearly equal in weight to the opening movement. In contrast to the first movement, here the brass instruments take up the scepter, yielding it only for brief episodes in which the chorale melody is heard in a simple setting.

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  Footnotes

  1. The text for BWV 129 appears in a printed booklet for use by the Leipzig congregation for Trinity 1727. See Schabalina (2008, 77).—Trans.↵