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Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben, BWV 8
Church cantata by J.S. Bach / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben? (lit. 'Dearest God, when will I die?'), BWV 8, is a church cantata for the 16th Sunday after Trinity by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is a chorale cantata, part of Bach's second cantata cycle. Bach performed it for the first time on 24 September 1724 in St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig. The cantata is scored for SATB singers, four wind instruments, strings and continuo.
Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben? | |
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BWV 8 | |
Chorale cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach | |
![]() Obbligato transverse flute part for the first performance of the cantata | |
Occasion | 16th Sunday after Trinity |
Based on | "Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben" (setting by Daniel Vetter) |
Performed | 24 September 1724 (1724-09-24): Leipzig |
Movements | 6 |
Vocal | SATB choir and soloists |
Instrumental |
The text of the cantata is a reflection on death, based on "Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben", a Lutheran hymn in five stanzas which Caspar Neumann wrote around 1690. Bach adapted Daniel Vetter's setting of this hymn, composed in the early 1690s and first printed in 1713, in the cantata's first and last movements. The opening movement is a chorale fantasia, an extensive instrumental piece, punctuated by the four-part choir, who sing line by line from the first stanza of Neumann's hymn. The last movement, the closing chorale, is a version of Vetter's 1713 four-part setting Liebster Gott, borrowed and reworked by Bach. The four other movements of the cantata, a succession of arias and recitatives, were composed by Bach for vocal and instrumental soloists. The anonymous libretto for these movements is an expanded paraphrase of the second to fourth stanzas of Neumann's hymn.
Bach revived the cantata in the 1730s, and, after transposing it from E major to D major, in the late 1740s. After Bach's death, the cantata was revived again in Leipzig, in the mid 1750s. The vocal parts of its closing chorale were published in the second half of the 18th century, in Birnstiel's and Breitkopf's collections of four-part chorales by Bach. The Bach Gesellschaft (BG) published the cantata in 1851, in the first volume of their collected edition of Bach's works. John Troutbeck's translation, When will God recall my spirit?, was published in a vocal score a few decades later. Both the E major and D major versions of the cantata were published in the New Bach Edition (NBE) in 1982.
Commentators have agreed in their praise for the cantata: William G. Whittaker wrote that, "Few cantatas are so wholly attractive and so individual as this lovely work"; Alfred Dürr has written that, "The opening chorus presents the listener with a sublime vision of the hour of death"; and Arnold Schering states that, "The opening movement of the cantata must be ranked as one of the most arresting tone-pictures ever penned by Bach." There have been many recordings of the cantata, starting with that by Karl Richter in 1959. In the 1970s there were "period instrument" recordings of all the cantatas by Helmuth Rilling and by Gustav Leonhardt–Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Later recordings include those by Joshua Rifkin, Philippe Herreweghe, Ton Koopman and John Eliot Gardiner.