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 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.