Cantata 73, for the third Sunday after Epiphany, was premiered in January of 1724, and used again a decade (or more) later. The Gospel of that Sunday is Matthew 8: 1-13, which tells the stories of two healings by Jesus. In both cases, the healings are prompted by an expression of faith – in the first instance, by the man with leprosy himself, and in the second case, by the centurion who is asking Jesus to heal his servant.
The concept of faith in, or submission to, the will of God is picked up by the unknown poet to become the main thread of the libretto. The librettist also selected two fitting chorale texts for the cantata. The first one is from a hymn by Kaspar Bienemann of 1582, which is rendered by the choir in three sections in the first movement, each one followed by a recitative segment assigned by Bach to the tenor, the bass and the soprano respectively. The second chorale, from a 1563 hymn by Ludwig Helmbold, closes the cantata. The libretto also contains original poetry in the form of a tenor aria and a recitative / aria pair for the bass.
The cantata requires a modest orchestra, with the customary oboes, strings and continuo, plus a horn that was replaced with an obbligato part for the organ when the cantata was reused in later years. On the vocal front the piece calls for a four-part choir and three solo voices, soprano, tenor and bass.
Formally, this is one of Bach’s most original cantatas, as he continues to experiment on different approaches to blending chorale material into his musical constructs. As mentioned above, the opening movement is a combination of chorale text with recitative insertions, and it presents such a peculiar structure that it again raises the question of the degree of influence that Bach could have had on his librettist. Bach uses the melody associated with the Bienemann hymn to derive a motif that pervades the entire movement, delivered by the horn (or organ) and the strings: just four staccato eighths, almost like a call. The oboes, meanwhile, decorate the texture by moving in a more agile, undulating way, sometimes in parallels thirds or sixths, sometimes imitatively. The choir delivers the chorale homophonically in four-part harmony, whose text reads like a faithful prayer for grace and patience. The soloists interrupt this delivery three times with their respective recitative segments. Their text depicts the troubled believer exploring the opposing feelings of despair and angst over life’s troubles versus the comforting and healing faith in God’s will. To close the movement, the choir delivers the “call” motif three times in harmony.
The next movement is a tenor aria, accompanied by oboe and basso continuo. The text asks God to put joy into the believer’s heart, who is equated to the sick persons in the Gospel stories. Bach “word-paints” some key words: “Freuden” and “wanken” (“joy” and “waver”) with long strings of moving notes (melismas), “Hoffnung” (“hope”) with long notes reaching up, “zaghaft” (“timid”) with chromatic syncopations in a descending pattern.
The bass “secco” recitative that follows contrasts our own will against God’s, and goes into the aria without interruption. The aria is set with accompaniment of strings and continuo, and is notable for the absence of a ritornello, and for being set, following the structure of the text, in three separate sections with different musical material following the ideas of each stanza. Particularly noteworthy are the pizzicato strings in the third stanza to illustrate the funeral bells, a resource we encountered previously in Cantata 95. The initial verse (“Herr, so du willt”, which are the words of the man with leprosy from the Gospel story) and its associated musical motif is presented three times at the beginning of each section.
The Hembold hymn closes the cantata in plain 4-part harmonization, with the instruments doubling the voices.
