It is necessary to emphasise this point. For Spitta(439) has stated positively that Picander wrote “most” of the Leipzig libretti, and his opinion has been generally accepted. But its correctness may be contested. It is suspicious, to begin with, that Picander never published the texts which Spitta asserts him to have poured out in such profusion. “He placed no value,” Spitta answers readily, “on these manufactured compositions, put together hastily to please his friend.” But the argument cannot stand. Why should Picander have thought less of libretti actually used by his “incomparable Capellmeister” than of those published for and rejected by him?—for Spitta does not venture to declare that as literature the rejected were superior to the accepted texts. If out of a published cycle of libretti expressly written for him Bach chose only eight texts, are Picander’s “manufactured compositions,” as Spitta calls them, likely to have attracted him to a greater degree? We can detect his hand perhaps in six Cantatas(440) besides those already mentioned, and Bach relied on him exclusively for his secular texts. One concludes, none the less, that Bach rarely accepted an original Cantata libretto from Picander, and employed him chiefly on the Choral Cantatas of his latest period. Excluding them, and adding the probable to the actual original Picander texts, they total only twenty-one, a fraction inadequate to support Spitta’s sweeping statement.
From the advent of Picander in 1725, to the end of the first Leipzig period nine years later, Bach does not seem to have gone outside the circle of familial authors for his regular Cantata texts. On October 17, 1727, however, he produced a funeral Cantata, or “Trauer-Musik,” in memory of the late Queen of Poland, the libretto of which was written by Professor J. C. Gottsched. The partnership, in fact, was accidental: the libretto was supplied to Bach with the commission to set it to music, and, so far as is known, Gottsched and he did not collaborate again.
So, reviewing Bach’s activities during his first eleven years at Leipzig, we find that of the hundred libretti set by him to music Christian Weiss heads the list as the presumed author of twenty-nine. Bach follows him with eighteen.(441) Picander’s hand appears in fifteen, Franck’s in eight,(442) Neumeister’s and Gottsched’s in one each. Fifteen libretti are congregational hymns in their original or paraphrased form. One is the _Gloria in Excelsis_ of the B minor Mass adapted as a Christmas Cantata (No. 190). Twelve are by authors not identified.