Gott soll allein mein Herze haben, BWV 169, is the last and most consistently beautiful of Bach’s cantatas for solo alto. It incorporates movements from an earlier instrumental concerto arranged for obbligato organ. The extended opening sinfonia, with three new oboe parts, gives added weight to the cantata, and the writing for organ is assured and convincing. Whether Bach sought out texts suited to solo treatment or had them imposed on him is unclear, but in its devotional lucidity and simplicity the first vocal arioso must have appealed to even the most austere Pietist. It opens with a motto in the continuo, passed to the alto and recurring like a rondo motif, forming an overarching unity flowing from a single rhetorically derived idea – “God alone shall have my heart.”
Its mood of gentle, insistent piety contrasts with Bach’s stern setting of the same commandments in Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben, BWV 77. Hugely impressive is the way Bach adds a new vocal line to his former concerto slow movement, with its theme of farewell to worldly life, supporting the view that the text was specifically adapted for this contrafactum. It is almost as skillful, and every bit as felicitous, as his grafting of new vocal lines onto his D minor harpsichord concerto in Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal, BWV 146. This extended rejection of worldly temptations in favour of God’s love is followed by a brief reminder of the second commandment, “Treat your neighbour well!”, in recitative (No.6), included almost as an afterthought and offering a prelude to a congregational prayer on the same topic, the third verse of Luther’s ‘Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist’ (1524).
The title of Bach’s chorale cantata Herr Christ, der ein’ge Gottessohn, BWV 96, looks at first to be its chief link to the Gospel of the day, Matthew’s account of Jesus’ dispute with the Pharisees on the significance of the epithet “Son of David.” Far closer is its connection to a two-hundred-year-old hymn by Elisabeth Cruciger, a poet close to Martin Luther. In its praise of Christ as the Morning Star it seems better suited to the Epiphany season, and in fact it is not until halfway through the first recitative that the Gospel connection is made. Bach makes the Epiphany link immediately clear by adding a sopranino recorder in F high above his basic orchestra of two oboes, strings, and continuo in the opening chorale fantasia of celestial beauty. The twinkling figuration suggests the radiant Morning Star guiding the Magi through a pastoral landscape. Nothing could prevent the sudden, heart-stopping lift to E major at the mention of the “Morgenstern.”
Two secco recitatives, one for alto and the other for soprano, are exemplary even by Bach’s standards in their economy of means and richness of expression – the first a meditation on the Virgin birth, the second a prayer for guidance along life’s path. Bach requires his recorder player to switch to transverse flute for the tenor aria describing the timid advance of the soul, part of a series of twelve cantatas from autumn 1724 with prominent obbligato flute parts, probably written for the law student Friedrich Gottlieb Wild. Beneath its genial gallant surface one senses Bach’s intention to make profound observations about the soul’s ardour and thirst for faith, portrayed through sighing dissonances and passing appoggiaturas approached by downward sixths and sevenths.
The second aria for bass, with antiphonal accompaniment of oboes and strings, furthers this depiction of inner struggle, those vying pressures “now to the right, now to the left” that dog the pilgrim’s steps as he stumbles along life’s journey. There is a hint of cori spezzati technique here – the practice of setting antiphonal choirs of voices or instruments in mutual combat, pioneered in late sixteenth-century Venice and brought to Germany by Heinrich Schütz. The dotted rhythms, hoisted up and then dragged downwards, suggest another stylistic provenance: Bach’s encounter with the pompous gestures of the French heroic style. With the line “Gehe doch, mein Heiland, mit,” these rhythms are smoothed away, so that what we experience is the soul’s newfound sense of direction under Jesus’ skilful piloting, before the lunging chromaticism returns with the plea not to be engulfed by dangers.
– Excerpted from John Eliot Gardiner’s notes on his Cantata Pilgrimage
