For both Cantatas Bach employed a librettist, otherwise little known, named Johann Friedrich Helbig, State Secretory to the Eisenach Court. In March 1720,(397) more than two years after Bach’s arrival at Cöthen, Helbig published a cycle of “Musical Texts on the Sunday and Saints’ Day Gospels throughout the year,” for performance “in God’s honour by the Prince’s Kapelle at Eisenach.”(398) How they came into Bach’s hands we do not know, but can readily conjecture. They are indifferent poetry, judging them by the two specimens Bach made use of, and are uniform in construction. The first movement invariably is a Chorus upon a text from the Gospel for the Day, or a Scripture passage closely related to it. Two Arias separated by a Recitative follow. A Choral brings the libretto to an end.(399)
The first of the two Cantatas written to Helbig’s words was designed for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, which fell in 1720 on September 22.(400) Spitta conjectures(401) that Bach intended it for performance at Hamburg. In fact, his wife’s death postponed Bach’s visit to that town until November, by which date the Sunday appropriate to the Cantata had passed. Spitta holds that the Cantata may have been performed, after all, during the visit. Schweitzer is sceptical.(402) But Bach certainly expended great pains upon the score.
The second Helbig Cantata(403) is for the Third Sunday in Advent, and the date of it would appear to have been 1721. It is one of the least agreeable of Bach’s works. Spitta (404) declares it a juvenile composition hastily adapted to a new libretto. Schweitzer(405) expresses the same opinion, and Sir Hubert Parry(406) finds the work “rather commonplace.” Its genuineness is discussed by Max Schreyer in the “Bach-Jahrbuch” for 1912, and more recently Rudolf Wustmann has insisted that it does not bear the stamp of Bach’s genius.(407) If it actually was composed in 1721, its production must have coincided with Bach’s second marriage on December 3 of that year.(408) In that case, his resort to old material is explicable.
Only these two Cantatas were composed at Cöthen. But later, at Leipzig, two others were manufactured out of secular material written there.(409) It is unnecessary to refer to them, except to remark that in each case Bach appears to have been the author of the new libretto. In the first of them(410) it is clear that he was handicapped by the frankly secular metre of the original stanzas. The second of them,(411) originally a Birthday Ode to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, is a masterly conversion into a Whit-Monday text which, assuming that Bach wrote it, puts his literary facility beyond question.