♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
There are two extant versions of this cantata; one from the Weimar period (around 1713) and a re-instrumented version from his Leipzig days (after 1723). The Leipzig version includes parts for recorders -so the main audio samples provided above are from the Weimar version, since they lack them- and transposed the piece into a new key. [...]
The opening Chorale uses words from Psalm 50, verse 23 (so the translation here is lifted straight out of the King James version for that verse). The fourth movement is likewise a direct quotation from Luke 17, v. 15-16. [...]
Trumpets! (You can write practically anything and have it sound wonderful if you throw in a few Baroque trumpets!) [...]
This is a late cantata (written around 1735, according to the manuscript). It has a good first chorus, in which the hunting horn sustains the notes of the chorale melody, making for a very distinctive sound… and then it all seems to go slightly off the boil a bit. [...]
Lord, it must have been a miserable existence in early-eighteenth century Leipzig! The poetry alone will have you taking an overdose by the third movement. This one is unrelenting in its gloomy view of life’s sorrows. The gospel for the day was about the (supposedly happy?!) wedding at Cana, at which Jesus performed his first miracle and turned water into wine. The best our librettist can make of this is a passing reference to God being able to turn wormwood gall into a ‘wine of joy’: happy celebrations there are none. [...]
Note that in the recording used to provide audio samples, the 8th and 9th movements are included in the same track as the 7th movement. There are thus no independent audio samples for those two movements. [...]
I did wonder what a ‘Tränenbrot’ (bread of tears) was first time I read this, thinking it might be perhaps an 18th Century culinary delicacy from Saxony of some sort. But it turns out to be much more ordinary than that: turn to Psalm 80, verses 4 and 5: [...]
The Visitation is described in the gospel Luke (chapter 1): it is the visit of Mary (pregnant at the time with Jesus) to her cousin, Elizabeth (pregnant at the time with St. John the Baptist). On arriving, Elizabeth's baby leapt in her womb, recognising the presence of Christ. Elizabeth responds by uttering the words of the Hail Mary: "Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb". Mary responds by exclaiming the Magnificat ("My soul doth magnify the Lord"), one of the core and earliest canticles of the Christian faith. Until 1969, the Feast of the Visitation was celebrated on July 2nd (so that's when Bach would have celebrated it); in that year, it was moved to May 31st. [...]
This is a slightly unusual cantata in that it's very late: it dates from around 1732-5. We know that on the appropriate Sunday in 1724 (when he first began writing a cantata cycle for St. Thomas' church in Leipzig) that Bach was visiting and giving performances in Cöthen -so it would seem he missed his chance to compose a Sixth-Sunday-after-Trinity cantata then and only caught up with his lapse some ten years later. The cantata is based on a hymn by Paul Speratus, dated 1523, which deals with the highly theological (and rarified!) doctrine of justification by faith alone. That is, good deeds cannot save you, but only faith. The original hymn is long (14 verses!) and the anonymous librettist has condensed it down into 7 movements. [...]
There are two versions of this cantata extant: an E major one (which was first performed in September 1724) and a D major one (first performed around 1746/7). The NBA therefore publishes two versions as well, and I've referenced both in the 'NBA' heading for this cantata as a result. The librettist is anonymous, but has taken the words of a hymn by Caspar Neumann verbatim in the outer movements and by paraphrase in the inner movements. It is an anxious questioning about death: when it will happen, what will come after. Very human questions, of course; and naturally Bach has the answer in the form of Jesus, who will take all matters associated with death and make them of no account. [...]
This cantata was written for performance on 24th June 1724, the Feast of St. John the Baptist -so, inevitably, a lot of baptism and water-based references follow! It was based on a 1541 hymn of Martin Luther's, and the text from that hymn is included, verbatim, in the first and seventh movements of the cantata. The inner hymn verses were then paraphrased (by an unknown librettist) to make up the cantata's other movements. [...]
This Easter Monday cantata was written in 1725 and would have been performed that year on April 2nd. Bach's text (by an anonymous librettist) opens with a quote from St. Luke's gospel concerning the journey of two disciples on the road to Emmaus, during which an unknown man joins them on their walk. The disciples do not recognise him, but as the evening draws on, they ask him to stay with them (uttering the phrase which gives this cantata its title and opening chorus words). As he breaks bread with them, they suddenly realise who he is, the risen Christ, who promptly disappears the moment they recognise him. The librettist draws on the story's setting of approaching evening to provide the metaphor of encroaching darkness (i.e., sin) and Jesus as the light in the darkness (i.e., forgiveness). [...]