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]