The Cantata for Easter Day 1724,(425) is Bach’s earliest setting of an entire congregational hymn. Spitta suggests(426) that he felt the fitness of giving the libretto an antique character to match the hymn’s melody. However that may be, Bach would appear already to have been groping towards the Choral Cantata of the late ’30’s. And though he did not repeat the experiment until the Easter of 1731,(427) he treated three hymn-libretti in the interval in a manner which shows him already to have worked out the essentials of the Choral Cantata form.(428)
Another landmark meets us a year and a half after the Easter experiment. On September 23, 1725(?)—the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity—Bach produced a Cantata(429) whose Arias are set to words which had appeared in print in the preceding year. Their author was a hack writer named Christian Friedrich Henrici, or, as he preferred to style himself, Picander. His hand probably is also traced in the libretto used by Bach on the preceding Sunday(430) and again in that for Sexagesima in the same year.(431) But the evidence is only inferential. That he collaborated with Bach on September 23, 1725 (?), is incontestable, and the work defines the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership.
Spitta,(432) who tells us all that is known of Picander, has sufficiently exposed his superficial literary facility. He commenced to write sacred poetry in 1724, and on Advent Sunday of that year began a cycle of “Profitable Thoughts,” so he termed them, upon the Sunday and Saints’ Day Gospels. He published them in 1725, when the cycle was complete.(433) Three years later he issued a cycle of Cantata texts for 1728-29 in the Neumeister form.(434) That he intended them for Bach’s use is apparent in the fact that he expressly dedicated them to the service of “our incomparable Capellmeister.” But Bach made the sparest use of them and of the earlier “Profitable Thoughts” alike. From the latter he took not one libretto.(435) Of the 1728-29 cycle he used only eight texts.(436) One more libretto can be referred to Picander’s later publications,(437) and of six others we can be sure that they are based upon his texts.(438) In other words, of the original libretti of the Leipzig period we can trace Picander’s hand positively in no more than fifteen.