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.