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• 1 2023-09-26T09:33:56+00:00 Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen BWV 43 / BC A 77 9 Ascension. First performed 05/30/1726 in Leipzig (Cycle III). plain 2024-04-24T16:13:19+00:00 1726-05-30 BWV 43 Leipzig 51.340199, 12.360103 27Ascension Ascension BC A 77 Johann Sebastian Bach Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen, BWV 43 / BC A 77" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 240 James A. Brokaw II Leipzig III

  Ascension, May 30, 1726

  The Ascension cantata Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen BWV 43 (God goes up with exultation) was heard for the first time in late May 1726 in Leipzig. Its text takes up the Gospel reading for this high feast day, the conclusion of the Gospel of Mark at the end of its sixteenth chapter: 

  At last, as the eleven sat at table, he revealed himself and scolded their unbelief and their hardness of heart, that they had not believed those that had seen him resurrected. And he spoke to them: go forth in all the world and preach the Gospel to all creatures. Whoever believes and is baptized, he will be blessed; whoever does not believe, he will be damned. The signs, however, that will follow those who believe are these: in my name they will cast out devils, speak with new tongues, cast out snakes; and should they drink anything harmful, it will not injure them; upon the sick they will lay their hands so that it will become better with them. And the Lord, after he had spoken with them, was taken up to heaven and sits at the right hand of God. But they went forth and preached in all places; and the Lord worked with them and confirmed the Word with signs following. (14–20)

      
  The text of our cantata adopts one of the verses literally, albeit only in the middle of the libretto. On the other hand, an Old Testament passage stands at the beginning. This procedure is characteristic of a small group of cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach—as well as of a large part of the works of his Meiningen cousin, Johann Ludwig Bach. Recent studies have shown that the source of texts used by both composers was an annual cycle of cantata libretti printed in Meiningen in 1704. Who the author of this obviously popular and often reprinted collection might be remains uncertain. Certain indications point to Ernst Ludwig, duke of Meiningen, but a definitive proof has yet to be made. In 1726, our cantata’s year of origin, these texts were performed not only in Leipzig but also in Rudolstadt in Thuringia.¹ While the composer of the Rudolstadt cantatas has not been determined, it is firmly established for the Leipzig performances of 1726 that some of the works performed were older cantatas by Johann Ludwig Bach, works that had originated at least ten years earlier, while others were newly composed cantatas by the cantor of St. Thomas School.
  
  At the beginning of his text for the Feast of the Ascension of Christ, the author placed two verses from Psalm 47, which praises God as king: “Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen und der Herr mit heller Posaune. Lobsinget, lobsinget Gott, lobsinget, lobsinget unserm Könige!” (5–6; God is gone up with jubilation, and the Lord with bright trumpets. Sing praise, sing praise of God, sing praises, sing praises of our king!). The two freely versified texts that follow, a recitative and aria, are also related to the Psalter. They paraphrase verses from Psalm 68, which read: “Der Wagen Gottes sind vieltausendmal tausend; der Herr ist unter ihnen am heiligen Sinai. Du bist in die Höhe gefahren und hast das Gefängnis gefangen; du hast Gaben empfangen für die Menschen, auch die Abtrünnigen, auf daß Gott der Herr daselbst wohne” (17–18; The chariots of God are many thousand times a thousand; the Lord is among them on holy Sinai. You have ascended on high and lead captives in your train; you have received gifts for the people, even the apostates, that God the Lord might dwell among them). The recitative begins with the lines “Es will der Höchste sich ein Siegsgespräng bereiten, / Da die Gefängnisse er selbst gefangen führt” (The Most High would prepare himself a victory parade, / As he leads captivity itself captive). The development of this thought takes place shortly afterward in the aria:

  Ja tausendmal tausend begleiten den Wagen,
  Dem König der Kön’ge lobsingend zu sagen,
  Daß Erde und Himmel sich unter ihm schmiegt
  Und was er bezwungen, nun gänzlich erliegt.
  
  Yes, a thousand times a thousand accompany the chariots,
  Singing praises to the King of Kings, saying
  That earth and heaven bow down beneath him,
  And what he has conquered now entirely succumbs.

  
  In the Meiningen text collection of 1704, these two movements appear beneath the heading “Die aufmerksame Seele” (The watchful soul); correspondingly, the two freely versified strophes after the New Testament dictum appear beneath the heading “Die preisende Seele” (The soul singing praises). Bach evidently made no use of either epithet. The aria follows the second biblical passage of the cantata, taken from the Gospel of Mark: “Und der Herr, nachdem er mit ihnen geredet hatte, ward er aufgehoben gen Himmel und sitzet zur rechten Hand Gottes” (16:19; And the Lord, after he had spoken with them, he was taken up into heaven and placed at the right hand of God).
  
  In view of the text structure of similar works described earlier, one would expect only another recitative-aria pair between the New Testament scripture and the concluding chorale. Instead, the Ascension text presents a series of six identically formed strophes, which may have originally existed as a free-standing poem, drawn upon later by the librettist to fill out the cantata text. The first strophe of this series relates to the situation between Resurrection and Ascension:

  Mein Jesus hat nunmehr
  Das Heilandwerk vollendet
  Und nimmt die Wiederkehr
  Zu dem, der ihn gesendet.
  Er schließt der Erde Lauf, 
  Ihr Himmel öffnet euch und nehmt ihn wieder auf.
  
  My Jesus has now completed
  The work of salvation 
  And makes his return
  To him who sent him.
  He closes his earthly journey,
  You heavens open and take him up again.

  
  The strophes that follow apostrophize Jesus as “Helden Held” (hero of heroes), as “des Satans Schrecken” (the terror of Satan), as “Keltertreter” (winepress treader); they speak of the place reserved for him at the right hand of God and of his help for the oppressed. The turn to the individual believer occurs at the end of the sequence:

  Er will mir neben sich
  Die Wohnung zubereiten,
  Damit ich ewiglich
  Ihm stehe an der Seiten,
  Befreit von Weh und Ach!
  Ich stehe hier am Weg und ruf ihm dankbar nach.
  
  He will prepare for me 
  A dwelling next to him
  That I may in eternity
  Stand at his side
  Freed from woe and grief!
  I stand here on the path and call to him thankfully.

  
  At the conclusion of the libretto stand two strophes from a hymn written by Johann Rist in 1641, Du Lebensfürst Herr Jesu Christ (You prince of life, Lord Jesus Christ).
  
  The layout of Bach’s composition is clearly influenced by his avoidance of any alteration or, in particular, any abbreviation of the extremely extensive text. Strictly speaking, only the opening movement was spared the pressure to shorten and concentrate. It unfolds with the instrumental brilliance appropriate to the high feast day, including trumpets and drums. Its musical form corresponds to the meaning and dignity of the psalm text, with a structure of several sections in which fugal textures predominate. 
  
  The texts between this entrance portal and the concluding chorale are all composed as recitatives and arias, almost without regard for their idiosyncrasies. All four voices are included: tenor, soprano, bass, alto. Only in the penultimate movement, a recitative, does the soprano enter for a second time in a kind of supernumerary fashion.² In the first aria, the tenor is accompanied by an obbligato part comprising two violins, whose energetic repeated pitches, spacious broken chords, and sweeping passages indicate an “aria with heroic affect” in spite of the 3
  8 meter that would otherwise be characteristic of a dance type. The simple recitative with the passage from Mark that follows seems a bit forlorn, although the simple narrative form offers little alternative. The introverted and strikingly sympathetic soprano aria “Mein Jesus hat nunmehr das Heiland-Werk vollendet” (My Jesus has now completed the work of salvation) closes the first part of the cantata, before the sermon.
  
  The second part of the cantata opens, once again, with a recitative. The bass voice is here accompanied by the string instruments, which depict the contrast-rich text with powerful broken triads and soft, anxious pitch repetitions:

  Es kommt der Helden Held,
  Des Satans Furcht und Schrecken,
  Der selbst den Tod gefällt.
  
  Now comes the heroes’ hero,
  Satan’s fear and terror,
  Who felled death itself.

  
  The excitement of this movement spreads to the bass aria “Er ist’s der ganz allein die Kelter hat getreten” (It is he who, quite alone, has trodden the winepress), the rolling figures of the basso continuo evoking the biblical image of treading the winepress, while a high trumpet, led at a wide interval above the between voice, symbolizes the solitariness of the victor. As in the first part of the cantata, a restful movement follows one charged with tension. The tranquil parallel thirds and sixths of the two oboes do not seem to accord entirely with the text performed by the alto:

  Ich sehe schon im Geist,
  Wie er, zu Gottes Rechten,
  Auf seine Feinde schmeißt,
  Zu helfen seinen Knechten.
  
  I see already in the spirit
  How he, at God’s right hand,
  Smashes his enemies
  To help his servants.

  
  As expected, the cantata concludes with a four-part chorale movement. It is unusual, however, that the setting of the melody Ermuntre dich, mein schwacher Geist (Cheer yourself, my weak spirit) is only minimally the work of Bach. Rather, the composer took it from the 1682 Leipzig hymnal by Gottfried Vopelius with only slight revision. The oldest source for the hymn would scarcely have been at Bach’s disposal; it went back to the Guben cantor Christoph Peter and was published in 1655 under the title Andachts Zymbeln (Devotional cymbals) in Saxonian Freiberg.³ What caused Bach to adopt the artless setting almost completely devoid of dissonance in his cantata in place of his own unmistakable harmonization of the chorale remains his secret. The context, however, deserves attention: the cantata Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen was Bach’s first composition after a period of three months, during which he exclusively performed cantatas by his Meiningen cousin Johann Ludwig Bach in Sunday services for the main churches of Leipzig.

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  Footnotes

  1. Blankenburg (1977); Schulze (2002a).↵
  2. Schulze here refers to the extra or “supernumerary entry” (überzähliges Einsatz) in fugue technique, where a fugal exposition is extended to include an extra entry by one of the voices after all have already sounded the theme.—Trans.↵
  3. Platen (1975).↵
• 1 2023-09-26T09:37:44+00:00 Amore traditore BWV 203 / BC G 51 5 Solo cantata. Various occasions. First performed before 1730, possibly in Köthen. plain 2024-04-24T15:23:10+00:00 BWV 203 Köthen BC G 51 Johann Sebastian Bach Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Amore traditore, BWV 203 / BC G 51" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 736 James A. Brokaw II 1718-1719

  For Various Occasions: Köthen, 1718 or 1719

  According to long-standing tradition, the cantata Amore traditore BWV 203 (Treacherous love) is the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. But the reliability of this attribution is by no means undisputed. Style analysts struggle with the question of authorship, and source studies run up against obstacles that are insurmountable at the moment. A copy from the first half of the nineteenth century refers to an “old handwritten notebook with cantatas by various composers” as its exemplar; another transmission names “an old notebook at Breitkopf & Härtel in which cantatas by Heinichen, Conti, Telemann, Linicke are to be found.” This notebook, of indeterminate age, was last documented in 1861; its contents can be described only hypothetically. The constellation of composer names—Johann David Heinichen, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Johann Georg Linicke—points to the period around 1715 and thereby raises the question whether the cantata ascribed to Johann Sebastian Bach should be placed near this time period. Moreover, a connection was recently found between Conti and a copy/arrangement by Bach of a solo cantata with Latin text by Conti; the copy bears the date 1716. Thus the suspicion cannot be entirely discounted that the “old notebook” that once was owned by Breitkopf could indeed go back to a source written out by Bach but might not actually contain a work composed by him.
  
  The Italian text of our cantata offers scarcely any clues to the answers of these questions. The author is unknown. Its content concerns a rejection of the chains of love, a healing of the deadly pain that vain hope has inflicted on one’s heart. The rhyme scheme is skillfully devised; only the title line lacks a rhyme partner. Among the works found in the library collection of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin after its repatriation from Kiev in 2001 is a parallel composition by a contemporary of Bach in Naples, Francesco Nicola Fago. This would indicate that the text, often disparaged because of perceived linguistic inadequacies, actually does come from Italy after all.¹
  
  With its movement sequence aria–recitative–aria, the cantata adheres to principles that Johann Christoph Gottsched, in his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, would have found acceptable:

  A cantata must properly begin and end with an aria, so that it may be heard in a good manner at the beginning, and also make a good impression at the end: however, one finds many in Italian that have a recitative right at the beginning. The shortest of these have only a recitative in the middle, and thus consist of only three parts. . . . Now, these arias may be iambic, trochaic, or dactylic as the poet finds to be good. However, to make the recitative anything other than iambic is not usual. The poet must, however, take care that he continue the meter with which he begins an aria to the end and not mix short and long lines together, if he wishes to please the composer. Even making the lines in the recitative very unequal, that is, several of two, several of twelve syllables: this is not pleasant. To throw the rhymes too far apart from one another, that is just as bad as making none at all. . . . Indeed, one cannot determine the length of a recitative: but the shorter it is, and the shorter the phrases it contains are, the better it is; because it is often so badly set that one must soon grow weary of it.²

  
  One certainly cannot maintain that the recitative of our cantata is too long; it comprises exactly eight lines of admittedly different lengths, however, with densely layered rhymes. Musically it proceeds without incident. Of the two arias, the first one in A minor approximates Bach’s familiar writing style fairly closely. The opening section is dominated by an expansive theme that provides a perfect example of mastery and use of tonal space, with its subtle and superior handling of alternating rising and falling; diatonic and chromatic passages; quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes; and scalar motion, leaps, and broken chords. Imitation and other sorts of contrapuntal writing are found in abundance, but the interweaving of voice and continuo is not so extreme that the singer is expected to perform figuration typical of accompaniment in exchange with the instrumental part. The middle section is similar and has no noticeable contrast with the framing sections. Instead, the contrast is essentially limited to the theme’s beginning again in a new key.
  
  In view of these features of style, the final aria seems that much more strange and exceptional. For long stretches it is dominated by a mostly two-part toccata-like obbligato cembalo texture but time and again changes over to a freely voiced accompaniment with full-handed chords. The inconsistent and arbitrary texture of the obbligato cembalo is combined with a bass voice part that is led in a strangely ambitious fashion; it is, so to speak, detached from the course of the instrumental accompaniment. This wayward, idiosyncratic togetherness is hardly enough to decisively dispel the doubts as to the cantata’s authenticity raised at the beginning of this essay. Hypotheses regarding an early or late origin of the work do not lead any further. For the moment, the cantata will preserve its secrets. From today’s perspective we can agree only partly with the overwhelmingly positive view expressed by the Bach biographer Philipp Spitta in 1880:

  In another [cantata], “Amore traditore,” a bass voice is accompanied by the harpsichord, which is treated in parts as an obbligato instrument. This is not, we believe, an innovation of Bach’s, but it is found moderately often both in the Italian composers of that time and in the Germans who formed themselves on the Italian style; thus it occurs in Porpora, Conti, Heinichen, and others. The fact is rather that even Bach appears to form himself on the pattern of the Italians in the harpsichord accompaniment that he appends to the second aria in his cantata. In other circumstances it was not his manner to write an obbligato part chiefly in broken harmonies, nor was he especially fond of using the obbligato treatment except now and then. The breadth of form exhibited in the work points to the time of his fullest maturity; he first came to a thorough knowledge of Italian vocal music through the intercourse that was kept up between Dresden and Leipzig.³

  
  In our view, whether Spitta is right with his “fullest maturity” must be left aside. If there is a kernel of truth in Spitta’s conjecture, which would be no wonder, given his sure sense of style, one could consider the possibility that the second aria might be Bach’s arrangement of a foreign exemplar, for example, perhaps, his adding a voice to an existing composition. The cantor of St. Thomas was not indisposed to projects of this kind in his later years at Leipzig. The supposed early origin of the “lost manuscript” mentioned at the beginning, however, stands in the way of such a hypothesis.

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  Footnotes

  1. Schulze (2002a).↵
  2. “Eine Cantate muß sich ordentlicher Weise mit einer Arie anheben und schließen; damit sie theils im Anfange mit einer guten Art ins Gehör falle, theils auch zuletzt noch einen guten Eindruck mache: doch findet man im italienischen viele, die gleich von Anfang ein Rezitativ haben. Die kürzesten darunter, haben nur ein einzig Rezitativ in der Mitte; und bestehen also nur aus dreyen Theilen. . . . Diese Arien können nun jambisch, trochäisch oder daktylisch seyn, nachdem es der Poet für gut befindet: das Rezitativ aber anders als jambisch zu machen, das ist nicht gewöhnlich. Nur merke sich der Poet, daß es bey der Versart, womit er eine Arie anfängt, bis ans Ende bleibe; auch nicht kurze und lange Zeilen durcheinander menge, wenn er dem Komponisten gefallen will. Selbst die Zeilen im Rezitativ an Länge sehr ungleich, das ist etliche von zwey, etliche von zwölf Sylben zu machen, das ist nicht angenehm. Die Reime gar zu weit von einander zu werfen, das heißt eben so viel, als gar keine zu machen. . . . Die Länge eines Recitativs kann man zwar nicht bestimmen: aber je kürzer es fällt, und je kürzer die Perioden dachrinne sind, desto besser ist es; weil es insgemein so schlecht gesetzt wird, daß man es bald überdrüßig werden muß.”—Trans.↵
  3. Spitta (1899, 2:637 ff.).—Trans.↵