This is an excerpt from the first of the six volumes of the Bach cantatas series.
Trinity Sunday, which falls on June 4 in 2023, is the feast of the Trinitarian actuality: the three persons co-eternal, co-equal, and consubstantial, who are one, uncreated being. The triadic doctrine is intimated in the Scriptures but largely evolved and advanced by the early Christian adherents and overseers of the church.
The epistle is Romans 11:33-36. God Himself, and his sovereignty, methodology, percipience, conduct, and acuity are all entirely inscrutable.
The gospel is John 3:1-15. In which Nicodemus, a learned man, has explained to him what it is, and how it is, to be born again. Despite Christ employing several logical fallacies—false dilemma, hasty generalization, correlation as causation, among them—the Johannine lyricism of the Scripture asserts that if one believes, one will not perish, but gain eternity.
The 1723 cantata BWV 194 began existence as a dedicatory work to celebrate the installation of a church organ.
The old church in the village of Störmthal, in Saxony, was demolished in 1722, and replaced by the new Kreuzkirche. Störmthal is sixteen kilometres from Leipzig. Bach composed this cantata in 1723 for the dedication on November 2nd of the new church and its organ. The organ was built by Zacharias Hildebrandt, a graduate of the workshop of brothers Gottfried and Andreas Silbermann, master builders of Baroque organs and fortepianos. Bach himself approved the instrument upon its completion, and was its inaugural player at the dedication. Both the church and its organ, largely unchanged, still stand.
The cantata is in two parts of six movements each. The first part uses as part of its text the sixth and seventh verses of Silesian poet and hymnodist Johann Heermann’s 1630 Treuer Gott, ich muß dir klagen. The subject matter is divine grace and human faith. The second part employs the ninth and tenth verses of German theologian Paul Gerhardt’s 1647 Wach auf, mein Herz, und singe. The subject matter is the solicitation of God’s approval and blessing before the undertaking the final journey from here to there. Gerhardt’s work also appears in Bach’s cantatas 32, 40, 65, 92, 103, 153, 159, 183, 195, 196, 248 II, and in the two surviving Passions.
The cantata traverses a textual orgy of bland admiration for the Trinity. It begins with a chorus amidst of a festival of joy, which the Lord in His sanctuary allows us to be part of. The second movement, a recitative, brings lips to an offering of song to the limitless Almighty. There is then a succession of movements honouring God’s radiance, purity of brilliance, and holy fire. End of part one.
In part two we remain in the kingdom of glory, the presence of the Lord our sole and inimitable aspiration to joy, which our desolate world and existence cannot diminish, for we wait, with eagerness, for our journey to heaven. It’s all quite vapid, and, given the length of the cantata, tedious.
Although, and as is so very often the case, Bach’s music puts the puerilities of the text to shame.
Well, not always. Sometimes the text is too trivial to overcome. And sometimes the incessant demands of the day are too much, even for Bach.