Returning, however, to the seventy-two libretti of the later Leipzig period we reach this result: More than half of them (thirty-nine) are congregational hymns, all but two of which are of the paraphrased type in which we detect the work of Picander, Bach himself, and perhaps the younger Weiss. Of the remaining thirty-three original libretti Marianne von Ziegler heads the list with nine, and perhaps ten.(467) Bach follows with a problematical six,(468) Picander with five,(469) the elder Weiss with four,(470) Neumeister with one.(471) One text is taken from the Bible.(472) Another consists of a single stanza of a hymn by Martin Behm.(473) Five are by authors unknown or undetected.(474)
But, as was said at the outset, the attribution of particular libretti to individual writers is conjectural, except in comparatively few cases. Yet, unsatisfying as it is, this guess-work reveals with approximate correctness the extent to which Bach drew upon his own and other people’s abilities for the texts he needed. Summarising our conclusions, we discover that about one-quarter (fifty-four) of the 202 libretti set by Bach between the years 1704 and 1744 were provided by the hymn-book. It is shown elsewhere(475) that all but eleven of them are taken from Paul Wagner’s volumes. The elder Weiss comes next with thirty-three libretti. Bach follows with thirty, Salomo Franck with twenty-one, Picander with twenty (exclusive of his arrangements of Choral Cantata texts). Marianne von Ziegler contributes ten, Neumeister seven, Eilmar and Helbig two each, Gottsched and Martin Behm one each. Three libretti are taken from the Bible or Church liturgy. Eighteen remain anonymous.
The literary qualities of the libretti are not under discussion here. They have a characteristic, however, on which one cannot forbear from remarking. Indifferent literature as, for the most part, they are—children of their period and blemished with its imperfections—they enshrine an extraordinarily interesting anthology of the religious poetry of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. They expose the evangelical thought of Germany from the age of Luther to that of Bach, and are particularly rich in the lyrical fervour of the Reformation itself. Of the seventy-seven hymn-writers whom Bach includes in his collection, so many as forty-four belong to the sixteenth century. Only thirteen of them touch Bach’s own period. And a similar bias to the Reformation epoch is observable in his choice of the tunes of the Chorals, which are absent from only twenty-one of the Cantatas. By far the greater number of them are coeval with the hymns themselves; that is, they date from the Reformation and behind it.