Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work

by Johann Nikolaus Forkel

APPENDIX II. THE CHURCH CANTATAS ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY

We have the statement of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach,[346] confirmed by Forkel,[347] Bach's earliest biographer, that his father composed five Cantatas for every Sunday and Festival of the ecclesiastical year. Concerted music was sung at Leipzig annually on forty-three Sundays and sixteen week-days.[348] Bach therefore must have written at least 295 Cantatas. Of this number he composed at least thirty before 1723. Hence approximately 265 were written at Leipzig. But Bach's fertility does not appear to have outlived the year 1744. We have reason, therefore, to conclude that the 265 Leipzig Cantatas were written in the course of twenty-one years, that is, between 1723 and 1744. To complete that number Bach must have composed a new Cantata every month, a surprising but demonstrable conclusion.

Of the 295 Cantatas only 202 have come down to us, three of them in an incomplete state.[349] Of those written before 1723 the survivors are too scanty to indicate a rate of productivity. But thereafter we have fuller materials for a calculation. Bach, as Cantor, conducted his first Leipzig Cantata on May 30, 1723, and in the following sixteen months produced twenty-four Cantatas, at the [pg 164] rate of more than one a month.[350] Beginning at the New Year of 1725 he wrote eighteen Cantatas in nine months, some of which, however, may belong to the years 1726-7-8-9. But even so, his monthly average seems to have been maintained. For 1730 we have, perhaps, ten Cantatas. For 1731 about twenty survive, of which half a dozen may belong to 1732, a deduction which still preserves Bach's steady average. In 1735 he produced actually nineteen Cantatas between the New Year and the following November, though not all of them are positively dated. Thereafter his activity is less certainly measured. But from 1736 till the end of 1744 he composed fifty-three Cantatas, at the rate, that is, of at least six every year, without making allowance for Cantatas written and lost.

There are few phenomena in the record of art more extraordinary than this unflagging cataract of inspiration, in which masterpiece followed masterpiece with the monotonous periodicity of a Sunday sermon. Its musical significance has been presented with illuminating exegesis by more than one commentator. But its literary apparatus has captured little attention. Yet Bach's task must have been materially eased or aggravated according as the supply of libretti was regular or infrequent, while the flow of his inspiration must have been governed by their quality. Moreover, the libretto was the medium through which he offered the homage of his art to the service of God. The subject therefore deserves attention. However trivial, measured against the immensities of Bach's genius, the study will at least provide a platform from which to contemplate it.

At the outset the opinion may be hazarded that the provision of his weekly libretti caused Bach greater anxiety than the setting of them to music, a task which he accomplished with almost magical facility. It is [pg 165] true that from the early part of the 18th century cycles of Cantata texts for the Church's year were not infrequently published. Bach was in more or less intimate touch with the authors of four, perhaps five, printed collections of the kind. But he used them with surprising infrequency. Neumeister's published cycles provided him with seven libretti,[351] Franck's with sixteen,[352] Picander's with ten,[353] Marianne von Ziegler's with nine,[354] and Helbig's with two.[355] He took three libretti from the Bible,[356] and the hymn-book furnished him with eleven more.[357] But all these published sources together only account for fifty-eight texts. Bach possessed only one book that could assist his own efforts at authorship—Paul Wagner's eight-volumed Hymn-book—whence he took the stanzas which decorate his Cantatas like jewels in the rare settings he gave them. It was, therefore, mainly upon writers with whom he was brought into occasional or official contact that Bach depended for his texts.

At the beginning of his career Bach was thrown upon his inexperience. His earliest libretti, consequently, are tentative and transitory in their construction. His first Cantata was written at Arnstadt for the Easter Festival of 1704.[358] The core of the libretto is a seven-stanzaed Easter song by an unknown poet, eked out by two passages of Scripture, a Excitativo, Aria, and a verse of a congregational hymn. The Aria and Recitativo are the only original numbers of the libretto, and there is little [pg 166] doubt that Bach wrote them himself.[359] But the whole libretto is stamped by his personality, and reveals the inveterate subjectivity of his religion. For, disregarding the general message of the Festival, the libretto opens on the soul's personal longing for immortality and closes on its song of victory over death. In construction it is archaic, a survival of traditions acquired from central and northern Germany through Bach's earlier residence at Lüneburg and intercourse with Hamburg.[360]

Three years passed before Bach produced his next extant Cantata. In the interval, on 29th June 1707, he resigned his Arnstadt appointment to become organist of the Church of St. Blasius at Mühlhausen.[361] Here, within the space of ten months, he produced three Cantatas, the uniform character of whose libretti points to local and transitory influence upon the composer. The first of them,[362] written in August 1707, is a setting of Psalm 130, with the addition of two hymn-stanzas. The second[363] was performed on 4th February 1708, at the inauguration of the Mühlhausen Town Council, and consists of Old Testament passages, a verse of a hymn, and three original stanzas. The third,[364] a wedding Cantata, was performed at Dornheim, near Arnstadt, on 5th June 1708, at the marriage of Pastor Johann Lorenz Stauber to Frau Bach's aunt, and is set to four verses of Psalm 115.

We can have little doubt regarding the authorship of these singularly austere libretti, so far removed in atmosphere from those of Bach's subsequent periods. In fact, the clue is furnished by Bach himself. A note in his handwriting on the score of the first of the three [pg 167] Cantatas (No. 131) states that he composed it at the request of Georg Christian Eilmar. The man was a close friend, godfather of Bach's eldest daughter, Katharina Dorothea (b. 1708), chief pastor of the Church of the Blessed Virgin, and Consistorial Assessor, at Mühlhausen. He was, moreover, an aggressive foe of Pietism, of which Mühlhausen was the citadel, and Bach's minister, Frohne, the protagonist. Indeed, the two men waged so public and wordy a warfare[365] that Bach's social relations with the one and official connection with the other must have been rendered difficult. To his settled convictions regarding the fellowship of music and worship Pietism offered Puritan opposition. In fact, its lack of sympathy eventually drove him from Mühlhausen, in hope, in his own words, “to realise my views upon the right ordering of Church music without vexation from others.”[366] Eilmar, on the other hand, though he admitted the aesthetic value of music, conspicuously lacked the warmth and emotionalism of Bach's religious temperament. To him undoubtedly we must attribute the cold austerity of the three Mühlhausen libretti and the suppression of the personal note already sounded in Bach's Arnstadt Cantata. Nor did Eilmar's influence pass with Bach's departure from Mühlhausen.[367] It is to be traced in the early libretti of the Weimar period.

The Weimar Cantatas are twenty-two in number, of which all but three were written subsequently to Bach's appointment as Concertmeister early in 1714. He had been organist to the Ducal Court of Weimar since June 1708, a position which did not require him to compose for the Ducal Chapel. On the other hand, three Cantatas are attributed to the early Weimar years. But they [pg 168] cannot be positively dated, and their libretti bear such clear traces of Eilmar's influence that their composition may belong rather to the Mühlhausen period. Their texts display Eilmar's preference for strictly Biblical material and a disinclination to employ secular forms. The first of them[368] is a paraphrase of the Magnificat. The second[369] consists of four verses of Psalm 25, along with three simple rhymed stanzas which we have no difficulty in attributing to Bach himself. The third, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (No. 106), was composed, Spitta conjectures,[370] for the funeral of Philipp Grossgebauer, Rector of Weimar School, in 1711. But more recently, and more probably, Pirro[371] has expressed the opinion that Bach wrote it for the funeral of his uncle, Tobias Lammerhirt, who was buried at Erfurt in September 1707. The theory accords with the suggestion that all three Cantatas belong to the Mühlhausen period. If so, it is probable that the libretto, a very ingenious mosaic of Scripture texts, was written by Eilmar for the occasion. It is the last in which we detect his influence.

Bach's appointment as Ducal Concertmeister at Weimar can be placed between 14th January and 19th March 1714[372] and, it is probable, was nearer the former date. He seems to have produced the first Cantata his new post required him to write on Sexagesima Sunday, which fell on 4th February in that year. From thence to the end of 1716 he produced nineteen Cantatas and collaborated with a writer whose libretti at length gave him a satisfactory literary medium.

The new poet, Erdmann Neumeister, four of whose libretti Bach set to music immediately after his [pg 169] appointment, and a fifth a year later,[373] was considerably Bach's senior.[374] As far back as 1700 he had begun to write a cycle of Cantata texts for the Ducal Chapel at Weissenfels, and pubushed it in 1704, with an explanatory Preface referred to later.[375] In 1708 he issued a second cycle for the Court of Rudolstadt, while in 1711 and 1714 third and fourth cycles were written for the Ducal Chapel at Eisenach. All four cycles were reissued in 1716,[376] with the addition of a fifth and a Preface, which lauded Neumeister as “the first German to give sacred music its fitting position by introducing and perfecting the Church Cantata.”[377]

Spitta has dealt exhaustively[378] with the evolution and construction of the Neumeister libretto. It need only be remarked that it adapted a secular or operatic apparatus to the service of religion, and that the innovation, hateful to many, triumphed because of Neumeister's delicate handling of it. He perfected the new form, however, in stages. “A Cantata,” he insisted in his 1704 Preface, “is simply a fragment of Opera made up of Aria and Recitativo.” But the restriction excluded from the Cantata its most appropriate material. In his 1708 cycle he found a place for the chorus. Finally, he admitted the Bible stanza and congregational hymn. With their inclusion the Cantata libretto assumed the form familiar to us in Bach's use. It represents a combination of secular Opera and ecclesiastical Motet. The free Arias and Recitativi are derived from the one, the Bible stanzas and congregational hymns perpetuate the traditions of the other. Unity of design is stamped on [pg 170] the whole by its general subordination to the Gospel for the Day. Thus, at the moment when Bach was about to devote his genius to the Cantata, Neumeister opportunely provided him with a libretto singularly adapted to the end Bach had in view, and appropriate to the musical expression by which he proposed to secure it. He adhered to it almost to the end of his life, and found unfailing inspiration in Neumeister's sincerity, delicacy, and uniformly religious outlook. Neumeister's Arias, with a single exception,[379] are hymn-like in mood and metre. His Recitativi are reflective and prayerful, rarely oratorical or pictorial, simple communings upon the Gospel themes which the libretto handles.[380]

Bach's early introduction to Neumeister's texts is explained by the close relations between the Courts of Weimar and Eisenach, by his associations with his own birthplace, and his intimacy with Georg Philipp Telemann, Kapellmeister there, for whose use Neumeister's third and fourth cycles were written.[381] Bach set, in all, seven of the libretti—four from the fourth cycle,[382] one from the third,[383] and two from the first,[384] one of which (No. 142) differs so much from the published version as to raise the question whether Bach did not receive it direct from Neumeister in the form in which he set it.[385]

That Bach should have set no more than seven of Neumeister's texts[386] is strange. He shrank, perhaps, from appropriating libretti on which his friend Telemann had a prior claim.[387] But the reason is found rather in the fact that at Weimar Bach discovered in 1715 a local [pg 171] poet of first-rate ability who, with perhaps but one exception, wrote the libretti of all the Cantatas he composed during the last two years of his Weimar appointment.

Salomo Franck, Bach's new collaborator, was Curator of the Ducal Museum of Coins and Medals at Weimar. He was twenty-six years older than Bach. But Spitta's conjecture,[388] that the two men were not acquainted, is hardly tenable. Both resided in the same small provincial town, both were in the Duke's service, and throughout 1715 and 1716 collaborated in at least ten Cantatas performed in the Ducal Chapel. Moreover, though the Preface of Franck's first cycle is dated 4th June 1715,[389] Bach had already set one of its libretti for Easter of that year. A second cycle of texts, of which Bach made little use,[390] was published by Franck in 1717.[391]

Schweitzer, no doubt, is correct in his conclusion[392] that Bach was drawn to Franck by his poetic insight, his mysticism, and innate feeling for nature. It must be remembered, too, that his libretti were, in some degree, official. On the other hand, Franck was Neumeister's inferior in ability to conceive a picture fit to express Bach's larger moods, and on occasion could descend to sheer bathos.[393] But his texts have a rhythmic swing and melody which Bach found agreeable. He set at least sixteen of them, and returned to them even after he settled at Leipzig.

The circumstances which terminated Bach's service at Weimar are familiar, and need not be restated. He received a new appointment at Cöthen on 1st August 1717, and took up his duties there, probably at Christmas, that year.[394] His position was that of Capellmeister to the princely Court. He never styles himself Court Organist,[395] and his duties severed him for five years from the service of the Church, to which he had declared his particular dedication in 1708. The Cöthen Court was unpretentious. The Prince was a Calvinist. Figurate music was not permitted in the Court Chapel, and its Organ was small and inadequate. Hence Bach devoted himself chiefly to chamber music, and only two genuine Church Cantatas belong to this period of his career. Both must have been written for performance elsewhere, possibly in connection with Bach's frequent Autumn tours as a performer.[396]

For both Cantatas Bach employed a librettist, otherwise little known, named Johann Friedrich Helbig, State Secretory to the Eisenach Court. In March 1720,[397] more than two years after Bach's arrival at Cöthen, Helbig published a cycle of “Musical Texts on the Sunday and Saints' Day Gospels throughout the year,” for performance “in God's honour by the Prince's Kapelle at Eisenach.”[398] How they came into Bach's hands we do not know, but can readily conjecture. They are indifferent poetry, judging them by the two specimens Bach made use of, and are uniform in construction. The first movement invariably is a Chorus upon a text from the Gospel for the Day, or a Scripture passage closely related to it. Two Arias separated by a Recitative follow. A Choral brings the libretto to an end.[399]

The first of the two Cantatas written to Helbig's words [pg 173] was designed for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, which fell in 1720 on September 22.[400] Spitta conjectures[401] 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 Cantata[403] 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. Schweitzer[405] expresses the same opinion, and Sir Hubert Parry[406] 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 them[410] it is clear that he was handicapped by the frankly secular metre of the original stanzas. The [pg 174] 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 Cantorship[412] 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 [pg 175] the new writer, and occasionally[413] 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 speaks[417] of one of these texts[418] as a “moralising homily,” a phrase concisely appropriate to them all. Moreover, a remark of his,[419] pointing the significance [pg 176] 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 [pg 177] 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 suggests[426] 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 Cantata[429] 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 [pg 178] is also traced in the libretto used by Bach on the preceding Sunday[430] 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 fruitful 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 Spitta[439] has stated positively that Picander wrote “most” of the Leipzig libretti, and his opinion has been generally [pg 179] 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 Cantatas[440] 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 Spitta[445]and Schweitzer[446] 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. Wustmann[448] [pg 181] 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's[449] 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 three[451] 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 [pg 182] 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 Cantatas[454] are set to the unaltered text of a congregational hymn. In the later Leipzig period only two[455] 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 [pg 183] 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 example[457] 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] [pg 184] 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] Nineteen[462] 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, five[464] in which, perhaps, we detect another, and the last, of Bach's literary helpers.

Wustmann draws attention[465] 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.

Returning, however, to the seventy-two libretti of the later Leipzig period we reach this result: More than half of them (thirty-nine) are congregational hymns, all but two of which are of the paraphrased type in which we detect the work of Picander, Bach himself, and perhaps the younger Weiss. Of the remaining thirty-three original libretti Marianne von Ziegler heads the list with nine, and perhaps ten.[467] Bach follows with a problematical [pg 185] six,[468] Picander with five,[469] the elder Weiss with four,[470] Neumeister with one.[471] One text is taken from the Bible.[472] Another consists of a single stanza of a hymn by Martin Behm.[473] Five are by authors unknown or undetected.[474]

But, as was said at the outset, the attribution of particular libretti to individual writers is conjectural, except in comparatively few cases. Yet, unsatisfying as it is, this guess-work reveals with approximate correctness the extent to which Bach drew upon his own and other people's abilities for the texts he needed. Summarising our conclusions, we discover that about one-quarter (fifty-four) of the 202 libretti set by Bach between the years 1704 and 1744 were provided by the hymn-book. It is shown elsewhere[475] that all but eleven of them are taken from Paul Wagner's volumes. The elder Weiss comes next with thirty-three libretti. Bach follows with thirty, Salomo Franck with twenty-one, Picander with twenty (exclusive of his arrangements of Choral Cantata texts). Marianne von Ziegler contributes ten, Neumeister seven, Eilmar and Helbig two each, Gottsched and Martin Behm one each. Three libretti are taken from the Bible or Church liturgy. Eighteen remain anonymous.

The literary qualities of the libretti are not under discussion here. They have a characteristic, however, on which one cannot forbear from remarking. Indifferent literature as, for the most part, they are—children of their period and blemished with its imperfections—they enshrine an extraordinarily interesting anthology of the religious poetry of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. They expose the evangelical thought of Germany from the age of Luther to that of Bach, [pg 186] and are particularly rich in the lyrical fervour of the Reformation itself. Of the seventy-seven hymn-writers whom Bach includes in his collection, so many as forty-four belong to the sixteenth century. Only thirteen of them touch Bach's own period. And a similar bias to the Reformation epoch is observable in his choice of the tunes of the Chorals, which are absent from only twenty-one of the Cantatas. By far the greater number of them are coeval with the hymns themselves; that is, they date from the Reformation and behind it.

Here clearly is the source of Bach's inspiration, the master-key of his art. He touches Luther, is in a sense his complement, his art builded on the foundations Luther laid, consecrated to the ends Luther vindicated, inspired by a dedication of himself to God's service not less exalted—a great artist, a great Protestant, a great man.[476]

NOTE.—Cantatas distinguished by an asterisk (*) are for Soli voices only (S.A.T.B. unless the particular voices are stated); those marked (†) include, in addtion, simple four-part Chorals: the rest contain concerted Choruses.

[pg 187]