Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 33: Kantate zum 13. Sonntag nach Trinitatis (komponiert zum 3. September 1724) = Cantata for the 13th Sunday after Trinity (review)

The item under review here is a facsimile edition of the original sources for a church cantata that received its premiere in Leipzig's Thomaskirche on 3 September 1724, the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 33) was composed when Johann Sebastian Bach was thirty-nine years old. Fifteen months earlier, in May 1723, the composer relocated from Köthen, where he had served for five-and-a-half years as Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold. During the first few years of his tenure as music director in Leipzig, where he remained until his death in 1750, Bach immersed himself in the task of creating an inventory of cantatas for performance in the liturgies at the principal churches on Sundays and other feasts. Since it was possible to adapt several works that had originated in Köthen, and others from the period when he was Konzertmeister in Weimar (1714-16), it was necessary for Bach to write about forty new cantatas during his first year in Leipzig. Thereafter, beginning in June 1724, he embarked on the most ambitious project of his entire career: the composition of fifty-two additional works in as many weeks (though not evenly distributed throughout the year), most of them based on traditional Lutheran chorales (i.e., hymns dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The result was more than sixteen hours of complex and nuanced music for four voices with instrumental ensembles of varying sizes. BWV 33 is the twelfth cantata of this second cycle (the so-called chorale cantata Jahrgang), an ordinary work for an ordinary Sunday but produced within the context of an extraordinary creative enterprise.

The decision to publish a facsimile of the sources for this particular composition was influenced by the convergence of several factors. The original performing parts were sold shortly after Bach's death by his widow, Anna Magdalena, to the city of Leip zig, where they remain to this day as part of the Thomana Collection at the Bach-Archiv Leipzig. The autograph score was inherited by Bach's eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. After his death in 1784, it came into the possession of several collectors, including Felix Mendelssohn's friend Julius Schubring, before being acquired in 1965 by the Scheide Library in Princeton, New Jersey. William H. Scheide, who also holds the 1748 version of Elias Gottlob Haußmann's famous portrait and other important Bachiana, is a Bach scholar of long standing and a member of the board of the Bach Archive Foundation. Cooperation between the owners of the two primary musical sources is therefore not surprising. The decisive event, however, was the recent discovery of a booklet containing the texts of BWV 33 and four other cantatas dating from September 1724 (BWV 78, 99, 8, 130) among the holdings of the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (see Shabalina, " 'Texte zur Music' in Sankt Petersburg—Weitere Funde," Bach-Jahrbuch 95 [2009]: 11-48, esp. 16-20...