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• 1 2023-09-26T09:36:19+00:00 Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit BWV 106 / BC B 18 8 Funeral & Memorial Service. First performed June 1707-June 1708 in Mühlhausen. plain 2024-04-24T17:19:23+00:00 BWV 106 Mühlhausen Funeral & Memorial Service BC B 18 Johann Sebastian Bach Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106 / BC B 18" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 608 James A. Brokaw II June 1707-June 1708 Mühlhausen

  Memorial Service, ca. 1707–1708

  The cantata Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit BWV 106 (God’s time is the best time of all), also known as the Actus tragicus, has always been among the most beloved of Bach’s vocal works. In his 1908 biography of Bach, Albert Schweitzer even maintained that “there is hardly an admirer of his who has not felt that we would give the two hundred church cantatas for one hundred works in the style of the Actus tragicus.”¹ Schweitzer formulated his opinion in connection with a critical examination of the range of forms in the church cantatas. Recitatives and da capo arias found little favor here; instead, Schweitzer preferred the “animated alternation between solo and chorus” in the style of Bach’s early cantatas.² With this assessment, he was continuing a conversation that had begun soon after the cantata’s appearance in print in 1830. In March 1835 Felix Mendelssohn wrote to his father: “Incidentally there is one peculiar aspect of this music—it must be either very early or very late, for it differs entirely from his usual style of writing in middle age; the first choral movements and the final chorus are of a kind that I would never have thought to be by Sebastian Bach, but rather some other composer of his era, while no other man in the world could have written a single bar of the middle movements.” A bit later, Thomaskantor Moritz Hauptmann, writing to Otto Jahn, praised the “wundervolle Innerlichkeit” (wonderful interiority) of the work, in which “everything and every detail was so precise and appropriate to the musical meaning and its expression.” Hauptmann continued, very much in keeping with his classicizing view of music, “But if one wanted to and could, for a moment, look beyond his feeling for this aspect of beauty and regard the whole as a work of musical architecture, then it is a curious monstrosity of phrases piled on top of one another, grown into one another, just as the text phrases are thrown together without grouping or high points.” Judgments of this sort had no place in the later nineteenth century. At the time it was composed, the pieced-together or supposedly fractured form of the Actus tragicus was a relic of the seventeenth century; but in the era of Richard Wagner, it was regarded as modern, while the closed form of the da capo aria, preferred by Bach from 1714 onward, was seen as conventional and moribund. From today’s standpoint, we regard the Actus tragicus, along with its few sibling works, as the culmination and conclusion of a development that reaches far back into the seventeenth century—but not at all as an underdeveloped precursor to Bach’s later vocal works.
  
  An assessment of this kind presupposes an extensive chronological understanding of Bach’s musical legacy. But this poses several problems. The earliest copy originated in Leipzig and is inscribed with the date 1768; it thus can hardly provide evidence as to chronology. Stylistic criteria suggest that the work originated in the context of the earliest of Bach’s surviving cantatas. Insofar as these can be dated, they all belong to Bach’s Mühlhausen period from June 1707 to June 1708. The rather unusual term Actus for a cantata—or, rather, a sacred concerto—is not to be seen as a clue to other nonsurviving parts of the work; instead, it implies an independent, coherent sequence of events. One finds work titles of this sort now and again, for example, a work by Bach’s second predecessor as cantor of St. Thomas School, Johann Schelle, his Actus musicus auf Weihnachten. Clearly, it is terminology of the seventeenth instead of the eighteenth century.
  
  We could say more about this if we knew more about the occasion for which our cantata was composed. Although it clearly was composed for a memorial service, there is no reliable evidence.³For the most part, this also applies to the text. As recent research has shown, the text follows a “form” that can be seen, for example, in the Christliche Bet-Schule by Johann Olearius, printed in Leipzig in 1668,⁴ beneath the rubric “Tägliche Seuffzer und Gebet üm ein seliges Ende.” Whether several deviations from the printed text reflect Bach’s choices or perhaps were the last wish of the deceased remains unknown. This applies in particular to the beginning, which has not been found elsewhere, except for a formulation in Acts of the Apostles 17:

  Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit.
      In ihm leben, weben und sind wir, solange er will. In ihm sterben wir zur rechten Zeit, wenn er will. (28)
  
  God’s time is the best time of all.
      In him we live, move, and exist, as long as he wills. In him we die at the right time, when he wills.

  
  Moreover, the continuation is singular, with its slightly modified verse from Psalm 90:12: “Ach Herr, lehre uns bedenken, daß wir sterben müssen, auf daß wir klug werden” (Ah Lord, teach us to remember that we must die in order that we become wise). The rest of the text is found in Olearius, in the order given there:

  ISAIAH 38:1
  Bestelle dein Haus; denn du wirst sterben und nicht lebendig bleiben. 
  Set your house in order, for you will die and not remain living.
  
  SIRACH 13:18
  Es ist der alte Bund: Mensch, du mußt sterben. 
  
  It is the ancient covenant: Man, you must die.
  
  REVELATION OF ST. JOHN 22:20
  Ja komm, Herr Jesu! 
  
  Yes come, Lord Jesus!
  
  PSALM 31:5
  In deine Hände befehl ich meinen Geist; du hast mich erlöset, Herr, du getreuer Gott.
  
  Into your hands I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, Lord, you faithful God.
  
  LUKE 23:43
  Heute wirst du mit mir im Paradies sein. 
  Today you will be with me in Paradise.

  
  Cross-references in Johann Olearius’s prayer book point to both of the cho- rale strophes included in our cantata: the opening strophe of Martin Luther’s German version of the Nunc Dimittis, Mit Fried und Freud fahr ich dahin of 1524, as well as the seventh strophe from Adam Reusner’s only slightly more recent hymn In dich hab ich gehoffet, Herr:

  Glorie, Lob, Ehr und Herrlichkeit 
  Sei dir, Gott Vater und Sohn bereit’, 
  Dem Heilgen Geist mit Namen!
  Die göttlich Kraft 
  Mach uns sieghaft
  Durch Jesum Christum, Amen
  
  May glory, praise, honor, and majesty
  Be bestowed upon you, God Father and Son, 
  [And] to the Holy Spirit by name!
  May the divine power Make us victorious
  Through Jesus Christ, Amen.

  This libretto presented the composer with the task of realizing the diversity of the text as far as possible, on the one hand, while not endangering the coherence of the overall work, on the other. Bach’s solution offers a balanced grouping of movements and their parts around a center that is at once musical, spiritual, and theological. In the section beginning with the words “Es ist der alte Bund: Mensch du mußt sterben,” there are several levels layered on top of one another. The three lower voices begin with a choral fugue that soon breaks off and is answered by the soprano’s “Ja komm, Herr Jesu.” Shortly afterward, the chorale melody Ich hab mein Sach Gott heimgestellt (I have left all that I have to God) is heard in instrumental three-part harmony. This sequence of choral fugue, soprano solo, and instrumental chorale appears four times in total at ever shorter intervals, giving the impression of acceleration and compression. In the fourth and final iteration, this impression is intensified by the simultaneous sounding of choral fugue and instrumental chorale, while the soprano trades places with the latter and, in a lonely solo, unaccompanied at the end, brings the “antithesis . . . between the Hebrew Bible fear of death and the New Testament joy in death” to a preliminary culmination.⁵
  
  Even in the opening measures of the instrumental prelude, it is clear that the other movements of the cantata do not recede behind this central complex. As Albert Schweitzer writes, this “stille musique,” a sonatina for two flutes, two violas da gamba, and continuo, “is based on a motive in E-flat, expressive of transfigured grief; this runs through the whole work. To grasp these harmonies is to be transported far from all earthly pain; the words from the Apocalypse come into one’s mind that Bach probably had in his—‘And God shall wipe away all the tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.’”⁶

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  Footnotes

  1. Schweitzer (1966, 2:127).—Trans.↵
  2. Schweitzer (1966, 2:127).—Trans.↵
  3. Possibilities include Bach’s uncle Tobias Lammerhirt (died August 10, 1707)and Adolf Strecker, mayor of Mühlhausen (died September 16, 1708). See Rathey (2006, 79–84); Maul (2022, 70).—Trans.↵
  4. Steiger (1989).↵
  5. Schweitzer (1966, 2:125).—Trans.↵
  6. Schweitzer (1966, 2:126).—Trans.↵