Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and WorkForkel, Johann Nikolaus
History
Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work
Forkel, Johann Nikolaus
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750; Composers -- Germany -- Biography
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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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