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Subject Area: Music
Subject Area: Religion

Cantata XXVI.: Ach wie Flüchtig. Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity ( c. 1740) - Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach’s Chorals, vol. 2 The Hymns and Hymn Melodies of the Cantatas and Motetts [1917]

Edition used:

Bach’s Chorals. Part I: 2 The Hymns and Hymn Melodies of the Cantatas and Motetts, by Charles Sanford Terry (Cambridge University Press, 1915-1921). 3 vols. Vol. 2.

Part of: Bach’s Chorals, 3 vols.

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Cantata XXVI.

Ach wie Flüchtig. Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity (c. 1740)

lf1393-02_figure_099

Melody: “Ach wie fluchtig”

Michael Franck 1652

lf1393-02_figure_100

Melody: “Ach wie fluchtig”

Johann Cruger’s (?) reconstruction 1661

A Choral Cantata, on Michael Franck’s funerary Hymn, “Ach wie flüchtig,” first published, with the melody, in Franck’s Die Eitelheit, Falschheit und Unbeständigkeit der Welt” (Coburg, 1652).

Franck was born at Schleusingen in 1609 and in 1628 became a master baker there. In 1640 poverty drove him to Coburg, where he taught in the town school. In 1659 Johann Rist crowned him as a poet and received him into his Order of Elbe Swans. He died in 1667.

The melody, which Bach uses in the opening and concluding movements of the Cantata, was composed by Franck and published, in four-part harmony, with the Hymn, in 1652. The Hymn was republished in the 1661 (Berlin) edition of Crüger’s Praxis Pietatis Melica and in the Brunswick Neuvermehrtes vollständiges Gesangbuch (Brunswick, 1661), with a reconstruction of Franck’s melody which may be attributed to Johann Crüger. The melody does not occur elsewhere in the Cantatas. Organ Works, N. xv. 121.

(a)

The words of the opening movement are the first stanza of Franck’s Hymn:

  • Ach wie fluchtig,
  • Ach wie nichtig
  • Ist der Menschen Leben!
  • Wie ein Nebel bald entstehet,
  • Und auch wieder bald vergehet,
  • So ist unser Leben, sehet!

  • B.G. v. (i) 191.

Translations of the Hymn into English are noted in the Dictionary of Hymnology, p. 387.

Form. Choral Fantasia (Flauto, 3 Ob., Corno, Strings, Organ, Continuo)1 .

(b)

The words of the concluding Choral are the thirteenth stanza of Franck’s Hymn:

  • Ach wie flüchtig,
  • Ach wie nichtig
  • Sind der Menschen Sachen!
  • Alles, Alles, was wir sehen,
  • Dass muss fallen und vergehen;
  • Wer Gott fürcht’t, bleibt1 ewig stehen.

  • B.G. v. (i) 216.

Form. Simple (Flauto, 3 Ob., Corno, Strings, Organ, Continuo). Choralgesange, No. 11.

[1 ] The movement should be compared with the Prelude upon the melody in the Orgelbuchlein (N. xv. 121).

[1 ] 1652 wird.