Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen, BWV 32
Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen, , is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed the dialogue cantata in Leipzig for the first Sunday after Epiphany and first performed it on 13 January 1726 as part of his third cantata cycle.
Bach composed the cantata in his third year as on a text which Georg Christian Lehms, a court poet in Darmstadt, had published already in 1711. Lehms derived from the prescribed gospel, the finding in the Temple, a dialogue. Instead of a parent missing a son, as in the gospel, an allegorical Soul misses Jesus. The motifs of the story, the loss and anxious search, are placed in a more general situation in which the listener can identify with the Soul. As Lehms did not provide a closing chorale, Bach chose the twelfth and final stanza of Paul Gerhardt's hymn "".
Bach structured the cantata in six movements, first alternating arias and recitative, then uniting the voices in recitative and aria, finally a chorale. The two soloists are supported by an intimate Baroque instrumental ensemble of oboe, strings and continuo. The oboe accompanies the soprano, a solo violin the bass, both play when the voices are united.
History and words
Bach composed the cantata in his third year as Thomaskantor in Leipzig for the First Sunday after Epiphany. The prescribed readings for the Sunday were taken from the Epistle to the Romans, speaking of the duties of a Christian, and from the Gospel of Luke, the finding in the Temple. Bach composed a text written by Georg Christian Lehms, court poet in Darmstadt, who published it in 1711. Bach had set texts by Lehms already when he composed cantatas for the Weimar court from 1714 to 1717. In the 1725/26 Christmas season, he had used mostly librettos by Lehms.Lehms treated the Gospel to an allegorical dialogue of Jesus and the Soul. In the Concerto in Dialogo, Lehms imagined not a parent searching for a missing son, but more generally the Christian Soul "with whom we are expected to identify", as John Eliot Gardiner notes. Bach assigned the Soul to the soprano voice and gave the words of Jesus to the bass as the, the voice of Christ, disregarding that the Jesus in the Gospel is still a boy. The Bach scholar Klaus Hofmann comments that the poet "takes up the general motifs of the story: the loss, the search for Jesus and his rediscovery, and places them in the context of the believer’s relationship with Jesus". The dialogue also refers to medieval mysticism and to imagery of the Song of Songs. Lehms did not provide a closing chorale; Bach added the twelfth and final stanza of Paul Gerhardt's hymn "Weg, mein Herz, mit den Gedanken". It is sung to the melody of "", which was codified by Louis Bourgeois when setting the Geneva Psalm 42 in his collection of Pseaumes octante trios de David. Bourgeois seems to have been influenced by the secular song Ne l'oseray je dire contained in the Manuscrit de Bayeux published around 1510.
Bach led the Thomanerchor in the first performance of the cantata on 13 January 1726 as part of his third cantata cycle.
Music
Structure and scoring
Bach structured the cantata in six movements, four movements of alternating arias and recitatives, then the voices united in a duet and finally a closing chorale. He scored the intimate dialogue for soprano and bass soloist, a four-part choir only in the chorale, and a Baroque instrumental ensemble of oboe, two violins, viola and basso continuo. The duration is given as 22 minutes.In the following table of the movements, the scoring follows the Neue Bach-Ausgabe. The keys and time signatures are taken from the book on all cantatas by the Bach scholar Alfred Dürr, using the symbols for common time and alla breve. The continuo, playing throughout, is not shown.