Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, BWV 110
Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, 110, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed the Christmas cantata in Leipzig for Christmas Day and first performed it on 25 December 1725.
When Bach wrote the music, he was in his third year as, the church music director of Leipzig. After months with only a few cantata compositions, he embarked on a set of five cantatas for Christmas occasions. In four of these, he used earlier texts published in 1711 by Georg Christian Lehms. The text for this cantata has no pairs of recitative and arias as is common in Baroque opera and contemporary Bach cantatas. Using an older style, it instead features three biblical quotations – verses from Psalm 126, a verse from the Book of Jeremiah about God's greatness, and the angels' song from the Nativity according to the Gospel of Luke – alternating with arias. The closing chorale is from Kaspar Füger's hymn "Wir Christenleut".
Bach composed the work in seven movements and scored it festively for four vocal soloists, a four-part choir and a Baroque instrumental ensemble with trumpets and timpani, flutes and several kinds of oboe. The outer movements are given to the choir and the full orchestra; the inner movements are chamber music for solo voices and solo instruments. Bach derived the first chorus, which is in the style of a French overture, from the first movement of his fourth Orchestral Suite. He embedded vocal parts in its fast middle section, illustrating the laughter mentioned in the psalm verse. The song of the angels is based on the Christmas interpolation Virga Jesse Floruit from his Magnificat in E-flat major, BWV 243a. He chose obbligato instruments to differentiate the character of the three arias: two flutes with the tenor expressing the "lowly birth", oboe d'amore with the alto, representing God's love, and trumpet, oboes and strings with the bass for his call to sing songs of joy together. Bach led the Thomanerchor in the first performances on Christmas Day in two Leipzig churches.
History
Background
Bach was appointed in 1723 in Leipzig. There he was responsible for the music at four churches, and the training and education of the boys singing in the . He took office on 30 May 1723, performing his church cantata Die Elenden sollen essen, BWV 75, for the first Sunday after Trinity. In the new position, Bach decided to compose church cantatas for almost all liturgical events for the first twelve months; they became his first cantata cycle. These were for Sundays and feast days of the Christian liturgical year, except for the "silent times" of Advent and Lent, including feasts of saints, of Mary, and several days of celebrating the high holidays. The following year, Bach went on to write a second cantata cycle, now basing each on a Lutheran hymn. In his book Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff described the endeavour as "a most promising project of great homogeneity, whose scope he was able to define himself".In 1725, his third year in the post, Bach slowed down his composing and began to perform cantatas by other composers. Until Christmas, cantatas from that year are only extant for four occasions, three Sundays and Reformation Day on 31 October. He was thus able to use the month of November to prepare the cantatas for the Christmas season, and could still take a vacation during Advent, together with his wife, Anna Magdalena, to perform a birthday cantata at the Köthen court where he had worked previously. He seems to have planned to set a complete liturgical year with texts from a cycle of cantata texts by Georg Christian Lehms.
Christmas
When Bach worked in Leipzig, Christmas, Easter and Pentecost were celebrated for three days, and each day required festive music for church services. On the first day, the cantata was performed in the morning at the Nikolaikirche and in the afternoon in a vespers service at the Thomaskirche. On the second day, a different cantata was performed in the morning at the Thomaskirche and in the afternoon in the Nikolaikirche. On the third day, a third cantata was performed only in the morning in one of the churches. The Bach scholar Hans-Joachim Schulze noted that Bach was also required to serve the Paulinerkirche of the Leipzig University, and therefore a third performance of the cantata there in the late morning of the same day was not impossible.In 1723, Bach had composed no new Christmas Day cantata, but revived Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, BWV 63, a work dating back possibly to 1713 that sets a text of free poetry without any biblical text or chorale He composed new works for the second and third feast day that year. In his second year, he composed three chorale cantatas for the three feast days, beginning with Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 91.
In 1725, Bach composed cantatas for five occasions of the Christmas season, utilising texts by Lehms. The librettist was librarian and court poet for the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. He published a collection of Andachten for the occasions of the liturgical year in 1711, entitled Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer. It is a double annual cycle, providing for all Sundays and church feast days devotions for both the mornings and afternoons. The morning devotions contain biblical quotations, arias and chorales; the afternoon devotions consist of arias and recitatives. Bach set nine texts from the afternoon cycle, some of which he had already used when he worked for the Weimar court; Unser Mund sei voll Lachens is his only cantata text from the morning cycle.
The five cantatas that Bach composed for the 1725/26 Christmas season have more unified texts than the cantatas in the two previous years, four of them to texts from the Lehms collection; only the text for the Sunday cantata was written by Erdmann Neumeister:
- 25 December : Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, BWV 110
- 26 December : Selig ist der Mann, BWV 57
- 27 December : Süßer Trost, mein Jesus kömmt, BWV 151
- 30 December, Sunday after Christmas : Gottlob! nun geht das Jahr zu Ende, BWV 28
- 1 January, New Year's Day : Herr Gott, dich loben wir, BWV 16
Text
Two Bible readings were prescribed for Christmas Day, as epistle either "God's mercy appeared" or "Unto us a child is born", and for the Gospel an excerpt from the Nativity, the annunciation to the shepherds and the angels' song.The librettist began this text with a quotation of two verses from Psalm 126, which deals with the hope for the delivery of the Israelites from Babylonian captivity. The psalm opens: "When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.", but Lehms ignored the context and only used the joyful reaction, in the King James Version: "Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The Lord hath done great things for them.". The musicologist Walther Vetter assumed in his 1950 book Der Kapellmeister Bach that the change of the Bible wording from conditional to unconditional joy was Bach's intention and work.
The poet included for a recitative a verse from the Book of Jeremiah, praising God's greatness, and he quoted from the Christmas story the singing of the angels. Each of the three biblical quotations is followed by an aria; the second reflects a thought from Psalm 8:4, "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?". The closing chorale is the fifth stanza of Caspar Füger's hymn "Wir Christenleut".
Performances
Bach led the Thomanerchor in the first performance in the morning of Christmas Day in the Nikolaikirche, with a sermon by Salomon Deyling, and repeated it in a vespers service at the Thomaskirche, with a sermon by Johann Gottlob Carpzov. He performed the cantata at least one more time between 1728 and 1731.Music
Structure and scoring
Bach structured the cantata in seven movements. The outer movements—the opening chorus and the closing chorale—are sung by the choir, and frame a sequence of arias, a recitative and a duet. The work is scored for four vocal soloists, alto, tenor, bass ), a four-part choir and a festive Baroque instrumental ensemble of three trumpets and timpani, two flauti traversi, three oboes and oboe da caccia ), two violins, viola, and basso continuo including bassoon. The heading of the original parts reads: "J.J. Feria 1 Nativitatis Xsti. Concerto. a 3 Trombe, Tamburi. 3 Hautb. / Baßon. 2 Violini e Viola, 4 Voci è Continuo.", which means "Jesus help. First feast day of the birth of Christ. Concerto for 3 trumpets, timpani, 3 oboes, bassoon, 2 violins and viola, 4 voices and continuo". Dürr gave the duration as 27 minutes.In the following table, the scoring follows the Neue Bach-Ausgabe. The keys and time signatures are taken from Alfred Dürr's Die Kantaten von Johann Sebastian Bach using the symbols for common time and alla breve. The continuo, playing throughout, is not shown.