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Subject Area: Music
Subject Area: Religion

Cantata CXLIX.: Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg 2 . Feast of St Michael the Archangel (1731) - 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 CXLIX.

Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg2 . Feast of St Michael the Archangel (1731)

lf1393-02_figure_189

Melody: “Herzlich lieb hab’ ich dich, O Herr”

Anon. 1577

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The melody, “Herzlich lieb hab’ ich dich, O Herr,” which Bach uses in the concluding Choral, was first published in Bernhard Schmidt’s Zwey Bücher Einer Neuen Kunstlichen Tabulatur auf Orgel und Instrument (Strassburg, 1577). The germ of it had appeared six years before in Newe Symbola etlicher Fürsten (Nürnberg, 1571), where it is set to the Hymn whose name it bears1 .

The melody occurs also in Cantata 174 and in the “St John Passion,” No. 37. There is another harmonisation of it in the Choralgesange, No. 152. Bach’s treatment of the tune is not uniform in the four places in which he employs it. There does not appear to be earlier authority for the F sharp which he substitutes for F natural at the fifth and thirteenth notes (supra) in this movement, nor does he repeat it elsewhere.

The words of the concluding Choral are the third stanza of Martin Schalling’s Hymn for the Dying, “Herzlich lieb hab’ ich dich, O Herr,” first published in 1571 (supra):

  • Ach Herr, lass dein’ lieb’ Engelein
  • Am letzten End’ die Seele mein1
  • In Abraham’s Schoos tragen:
  • Den Leib in seim Schlafkammerlein
  • Gar sanft, ohn’ ein’ge Qual und Pein,
  • Ruh’n bis am jungsten Tage!
  • Alsdann vom Tod erwecke mich,
  • Dass meine Augen sehen dich
  • In aller Freud’, O Gottes Sohn,
  • Mein Heiland und mein Gnadenthron!
  • Herr Jesu Christ, erhore mich,
  • Ich will dich preisen ewiglich!

  • B.G. xxx. 299.

Translations of the Hymn into English are noted in the Dictionary of Hymnology, pp. 1004, 1648.

Form. Embellished (3 Trombe, Timp., 3 Ob., Fagotto, Strings, Continuo). Choralgesange, No. 155.

[2 ] An English version of the Cantata, “Let songs of rejoicing be raised,” is published by Novello & Co. See Spitta, ii. 445, on the source of the Cantata.

[1 ] See Bach’s Chorals, Part I, p. 39.

[1 ] 1571 An meinem end mein Seelelem.