The first of the two Cantatas written to Helbig’s words was designed for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, which fell in 1720 on September 22.400 Spitta conjectures401 that Bach intended it for performance at Hamburg. In fact, his wife’s death postponed Bach’s visit to that town until November, by which date the Sunday appropriate to the Cantata had passed. Spitta holds that the Cantata may have been performed, after all, during the visit. Schweitzer is sceptical.402 But Bach certainly expended great pains upon the score.
The second Helbig Cantata403 is for the Third Sunday in Advent, and the date of it would appear to have been 1721. It is one of the least agreeable of Bach’s works. Spitta 404 declares it a juvenile composition hastily adapted to a new libretto. Schweitzer405 expresses the same opinion, and Sir Hubert Parry406 finds the work “rather commonplace.” Its genuineness is discussed by Max Schreyer in the “Bach-Jahrbuch” for 1912, and more recently Rudolf Wustmann has insisted that it does not bear the stamp of Bach’s genius.407 If it actually was composed in 1721, its production must have coincided with Bach’s second marriage on December 3 of that year.408 In that case, his resort to old material is explicable.
Only these two Cantatas were composed at Cöthen. But later, at Leipzig, two others were manufactured out of secular material written there.409 It is unnecessary to refer to them, except to remark that in each case Bach appears to have been the author of the new libretto. In the first of them410 it is clear that he was handicapped by the frankly secular metre of the original stanzas. The second of them,411 originally a Birthday Ode to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, is a masterly conversion into a Whit-Monday text which, assuming that Bach wrote it, puts his literary facility beyond question.
Bach made the last move in his professional career on May 31, 1723, when he was inducted Cantor of St. Thomas’ School at Leipzig, with particular charge of the Churches of St. Thomas and St. Nicolas. Here by far the greater number of his Cantatas appeared, and 172 of them survive. They are too numerous to be considered individually, and their classification is rendered difficult by the fact that the authorship of most of their libretti is conjectural and not ascertained. They fall, however, into two large categories, each of which exhibits characteristics of its own.
The dividing year, clearly but not arbitrarily, is 1734. Before it and after it Bach was aided by new writers. But the earlier period pre-eminently was one of experiment, out of which emerged the glorified hymn-libretto, or Choral Cantata, of Bach’s last years. That it sprang, in some degree, from the difficulty of finding good original texts in sufficient number may be granted. That it was adopted as an avenue of escape from Picander’s coarser work is a conjecture based, apparently, upon a prevalent exaggeration of Bach’s dependence on that writer. The fundamental reason which led Bach to the hymn-libretto undoubtedly was the fact that it most closely fulfilled the ideals which informed his work.
The first Cantata performed during Bach’s Cantorship412 reveals a new author, whose assistance, if the conclusion is well grounded, was at Bach’s disposal throughout the whole of the earlier Leipzig period. Spitta’s keen insight failed him in this instance. He betrays no recognition of the new writer, and occasionally413 attributes his libretti to Picander. The credit of the discovery belongs to Rudolf Wustmann, though he fails to work it out to its fullest conclusions.414
No one can read the early Leipzig libretti without being struck by the number of them that are not only uniform in structure, but similar in tone and point. They all begin with a Bible text, chosen frequently, but not invariably, from the Gospel for the Day. Every one of them ends with a hymn-stanza. Their Arias, with hardly an exception,415 are written in what, compared with Picander’s rollicking dactyls, may be held hymn-metres. Their Recitativi, almost invariably, are didactic or exegetical.416 They do not display the vapid rhetoric of Picander. Nor do they express the reflective or prayerful mood that reveals Bach. They are essentially expositive and, it is noticeable, are studded with direct or veiled references to Bible passages which expand or enforce the lesson of the initial text. In a word, they suggest the work of a preacher casting his sermon notes into lyrical form, an impression which is strengthened by the fact that the libretto invariably opens with a Scripture passage and frequently blends the Gospel and Epistle for the Day in one harmonious teaching. Spitta detected this characteristic. But he failed to follow up the clue. He speaks417 of one of these texts418 as a “moralising homily,” a phrase concisely appropriate to them all. Moreover, a remark of his,419 pointing the significance of the god-parents chosen by Bach for his children — Eilmar, for instance — as revealing Bach’s intimate associates at the moment, affords another clue to the personality of the new writer.
Among the clergy of St. Thomas’ during Bach’s Cantorate were two men, father and son, each of whom bore the name Christian Weiss. The elder was Pastor of the Church from 1714 till his death in 1737. He was a cultured man, in touch with the University, and possibly formed a link between it and Bach, to whom he showed greater cordiality than the Cantor received from other clerical colleagues. In 1732 his daughter, Dorothea Sophia stood godmother to Bach’s son, Johann Christoph Friedrich, afterwards famous as the “Bückeburg Bach.”420 In 1737 his son stood sponsor to Bach’s daughter, Johanna Caroline.421 Nor can it be altogether without significance that the names Dorothea, Sophia, Christian, are borne by others of Bach’s children by his second marriage. There is sufficient evidence, therefore, that Bach’s relations with the elder Weiss were intimate enough to support a literary partnership. Moreover, circumstances lend weight to the inference. For some years before Bach’s arrival in Leipzig, Weiss suffered from an affection of the throat which kept him from the pulpit. But, during the first year of Bach’s Cantorate, he was able to resume his preaching. If he was, in fact, the author of the libretti, we can have little difficulty in concluding that they and his sermons were built on the same text.
So far as they can be identified — the attempt is somewhat speculative — Weiss provided Bach with at least thirty-three libretti. He set five of them in 1723, three in 1724, nine in or about 1725, one in 1727, two in 1730, six in 1731, three in 1732, and four in the later Leipzig period.422 Fourteen others bear a constructional resemblance to Weiss’s texts,423 but their character refers them rather to Bach or Picander. Even so, if we do not exaggerate his activity, Weiss seems to have written at least one-sixth of the Leipzig libretti and more than a quarter of those of the earlier period. Without a doubt he eased a difficult situation in Bach’s experience before his regular association with Picander began.
Apart from their revelation of Christian Weiss, the libretti of Bach’s first year at Leipzig do not call for comment. Franck and Neumeister appear among them, and we trace Bach’s hand in nine.424 But at Easter, 1724, he broke new ground with a libretto whence developed the Cantata form of his latest period.
The Cantata for Easter Day 1724,425 is Bach’s earliest setting of an entire congregational hymn. Spitta suggests426 that he felt the fitness of giving the libretto an antique character to match the hymn’s melody. However that may be, Bach would appear already to have been groping towards the Choral Cantata of the late ‘30’s. And though he did not repeat the experiment until the Easter of 1731,427 he treated three hymn-libretti in the interval in a manner which shows him already to have worked out the essentials of the Choral Cantata form.428
Another landmark meets us a year and a half after the Easter experiment. On September 23, 1725(?) — the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity — Bach produced a Cantata429 whose Arias are set to words which had appeared in print in the preceding year. Their author was a hack writer named Christian Friedrich Henrici, or, as he preferred to style himself, Picander. His hand probably is also traced in the libretto used by Bach on the preceding Sunday430 and again in that for Sexagesima in the same year.431 But the evidence is only inferential. That he collaborated with Bach on September 23, 1725 (?), is incontestable, and the work defines the beginning of a long and fruit
ful partnership.
Spitta,432 who tells us all that is known of Picander, has sufficiently exposed his superficial literary facility. He commenced to write sacred poetry in 1724, and on Advent Sunday of that year began a cycle of “Profitable Thoughts,” so he termed them, upon the Sunday and Saints’ Day Gospels. He published them in 1725, when the cycle was complete.433 Three years later he issued a cycle of Cantata texts for 1728-29 in the Neumeister form.434 That he intended them for Bach’s use is apparent in the fact that he expressly dedicated them to the service of “our incomparable Capellmeister.” But Bach made the sparest use of them and of the earlier “Profitable Thoughts” alike. From the latter he took not one libretto.435 Of the 1728-29 cycle he used only eight texts.436 One more libretto can be referred to Picander’s later publications,437 and of six others we can be sure that they are based upon his texts.438 In other words, of the original libretti of the Leipzig period we can trace Picander’s hand positively in no more than fifteen.
It is necessary to emphasise this point. For Spitta439 has stated positively that Picander wrote “most” of the Leipzig libretti, and his opinion has been generally accepted. But its correctness may be contested. It is suspicious, to begin with, that Picander never published the texts which Spitta asserts him to have poured out in such profusion. “He placed no value,” Spitta answers readily, “on these manufactured compositions, put together hastily to please his friend.” But the argument cannot stand. Why should Picander have thought less of libretti actually used by his “incomparable Capellmeister” than of those published for and rejected by him? — for Spitta does not venture to declare that as literature the rejected were superior to the accepted texts. If out of a published cycle of libretti expressly written for him Bach chose only eight texts, are Picander’s “manufactured compositions,” as Spitta calls them, likely to have attracted him to a greater degree? We can detect his hand perhaps in six Cantatas440 besides those already mentioned, and Bach relied on him exclusively for his secular texts. One concludes, none the less, that Bach rarely accepted an original Cantata libretto from Picander, and employed him chiefly on the Choral Cantatas of his latest period. Excluding them, and adding the probable to the actual original Picander texts, they total only twenty-one, a fraction inadequate to support Spitta’s sweeping statement.
From the advent of Picander in 1725, to the end of the first Leipzig period nine years later, Bach does not seem to have gone outside the circle of familial authors for his regular Cantata texts. On October 17, 1727, however, he produced a funeral Cantata, or “Trauer-Musik,” in memory of the late Queen of Poland, the libretto of which was written by Professor J. C. Gottsched. The partnership, in fact, was accidental: the libretto was supplied to Bach with the commission to set it to music, and, so far as is known, Gottsched and he did not collaborate again.
So, reviewing Bach’s activities during his first eleven years at Leipzig, we find that of the hundred libretti set by him to music Christian Weiss heads the list as the presumed author of twenty-nine. Bach follows him with eighteen.441 Picander’s hand appears in fifteen, Franck’s in eight,442 Neumeister’s and Gottsched’s in one each. Fifteen libretti are congregational hymns in their original or paraphrased form. One is the Gloria in Excelsis of the B minor Mass adapted as a Christmas Cantata (No. 190). Twelve are by authors not identified.
Passing to the later Leipzig period, seventy-two surviving Cantatas are attributed to the years 1735-50. They reveal one, perhaps two, new writers. The first of them, Marianne von Ziegler, was identified by Spitta in 1892. She was the widow of an officer, resident in Leipzig, a cultured woman, in touch with University life, her house a salon for music and musicians.443 There is no reason to suppose Bach to have been of her circle, or that he was acquainted with her literary gifts. Indeed the contrary is to be inferred from the fact that, though she published her poems in 1728,444 he does not seem to have known them until seven years later, when he used them for nine consecutive Sundays and Festivals in 1735, beginning on the Third Sunday after Easter, and ending on Trinity Sunday.
In addition to these nine libretti, both Spitta445and Schweitzer446 attribute to her the text of Bach’s Cantata for the Second Sunday after Easter in the same year.447 It is uniform in construction with the authentic nine, but is not among the authoress’s published works. Wustmann448 finds the tone of the libretto less ardent and its rhythm rougher than those published under her name. Admitting the soundness of Wustmann’s criticism, one hazards the opinion that the challenged text was written at the period when Bach set it, namely, in 1735, eight years after the poetess published her earlier texts. The difference of time may account for the difference of texture to which Wustmann draws attention, but leaves undecided the question whether Bach was drawn to the earlier through the later and unpublished texts or vice versa. It is quite probable that he set other libretti by the same writer, though Schweitzer’s449 attribution to her of a second text for Ascension Day, 1735, must be rejected.450
It is worth noticing, since it certainly reveals Bach’s preference, that Marianne von Ziegler’s libretti are constructed almost invariably in the Weiss form. Every one of them but three451 opens with a Bible passage, invariably taken from St. John’s Gospel, which provides the Gospel for the Day from the First Sunday after Easter down to Trinity Sunday, excepting Ascension Day. All but one (No. 68) of the libretti conclude with a Choral, and their Arias are hymn-like in metre. The tone of them, however, is warmer, more personal, less didactic than the Weiss texts. That Bach regarded them with particular favour is apparent in the circumstance that he took the trouble to revise all but one of them.452 That they stirred his genius deeply is visible in the settings he gave them.
After 1735 the chronology of the Cantatas is not certainly ascertained. Of those that fall after the Ziegler year, as we may term it, the majority can only be dated approximately as circa 1740, that is, anywhere between 1735 and 1744. Nor, except rarely, can we detect in their libretti the work of those on whom Bach elsewhere relied. Weiss, who died late in 1737, is only an occasional contributor. The texts of this period, in fact, are the outcome of Bach’s own experiments in libretto form. Thirty-three of them are Choral Cantatas, whose evolution it remains to trace concisely.
That Bach should have turned to Lutheran hymnody, chiefly of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that the Cantatas built upon it should be his most perfect religious work is not surprising. The hymns and their melodies were the foundations upon which the temple of German Protestantism had been reared. They appealed vividly and powerfully to Bach’s spiritual nature, and profoundly influenced his musical utterance. His whole career, as Sir Hubert Parry points out,453 was an effort to widen his means for self-expression. And the Choral Cantata, in effect, was the reconciliation or blending of this self-discipline. It was the supreme achievement of Bach’s genius to assert the faith and idealism of Lutheran hymnody with the fullest resources of his technique.
It is not our task to consider the hymn libretto in its relation to the structure of Bach’s latest Cantatas. Necessarily it tied him to a stereotyped design, which he clung to with greater persistency because it exactly fulfilled his devotional purpose. But experience compelled him, after a brief trial, to discard the simple hymn libretto. In the earlier Leipzig years as many as eight Choral Cantatas454 are set to the unaltered text of a congregational hymn. In the later Leipzig period only two455 libretti are of that character. Bach, in fact, soon realised that, while the unaltered hymn-stanza, with its uniform metre and balanced rhyme, was appropriate to the simple Choral or elaborate Fantasia, it was unmalleable for use as an Aria or Recitative. Hence, retaining the unaltered Hymn-stanza for the musical movements congruous to it, he was led to paraphrase, in free madrigal form, those stanzas which he selected for the Arias and Recitativi.
As early as September 16, 1725,456 Bach was moving towards this solution. And it is significant that Picander’s hand is visible in the libretto. The next example457 occurs three years
later, and again reveals Picander’s authorship. Two other instances also occur in the early Leipzig period.458 To that point, however, it is clear that Bach was not satisfied as to the most effective treatment of the hymn-libretto. But in the second Leipzig period, after his collaboration with Marianne von Ziegler, he arrived at and remained constant to a uniform design. Of the thirty-nine Choral Cantatas of the whole period only two exhibit the earlier form. Of all the others the libretto consists partly of unaltered hymn-stanzas — invariably used for the first and last movements, and occasionally elsewhere — but chiefly of paraphrased stanzas of the hymn, whose accustomed melody, wherever else it may be introduced, is associated invariably with the hymn when the text is used in its unaltered form. We, to whom both words and melody are too frequently unfamiliar, may view the perfections of the Choral Cantata with some detachment. But Bach’s audience listened to hymns and tunes which were in the heart of every hearer and a common possession of them all. The appeal of his message was the more arresting because it spoke as directly to himself as to those he addressed.
It would be satisfactory and interesting to point positively to Bach’s own handiwork in these libretti, of which he set fifty-four in the period 1724-44. Unfortunately it is impossible to do so, except, perhaps, in a single case,459 where we can reasonably infer that the libretto is his. Of the rest, one is by Franck.460 In eighteen of them the hand of Picander is more or less patent.461 Nineteen462 we can only venture to mark “anonymous,” though Picander is probably present in most of them. Ten are unaltered congregational hymns.463 There remain, however, five464 in which, perhaps, we detect another, and the last, of Bach’s literary helpers.
Wustmann draws attention465 to the libretto of Cantata No. 38, a paraphrase of Luther’s Psalm 130. He finds in it, and reasonably, an expression of “Jesus religion” very alien to Picander’s muse, and suggests the younger Christian Weiss as the author of it. Like his father, he was Bach’s colleague, the godfather of his daughter, and undoubtedly on terms of close friendship with him. But if he wrote the libretto of Cantata No. 38, probably it is not the only one. The same note rings in four more of the Choral Cantatas,466 which may be attributed tentatively to Weiss, though their ascription to Bach would be equally congruous.
Delphi Masterworks of Johann Sebastian Bach Page 28