Bach, Graupner, and the Rest of Their Contented Contemporaries

Music scholars have long recognized the value of comparing settings of the same cantata texts by Bach and his German contemporaries. Examining the ways in which multiple musical minds chose to set the same words can throw the styles of each into sharp relief. This chapter presents a second pair of settings by Bach and Graupner that has received only occasional mention in the literature: Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (BWV 170 and GWV 1147/11). The premieres of the two settings took place fifteen years apart; Graupner's setting was first heard on July 12, 1711, in Darmstadt, and Bach's on July 28, 1726, in Leipzig. The chapter discusses the two settings of each of Vergnügte Ruh's five movements in turn. In every case, it presents the text in three versions: (1) the original German, following the orthography and punctuation of Lehms' 1711 text; (2) the author's English, word-for-word translation; and (3) the author's English translation, which mimics the poetic structure and rhyme of Lehms' original.