Born: 1684 - Liegnitz (now Legnica, Poland)
Died: May 15, 1717

The poet, Georg Christian Lehms, studied at the University of Leipzig and afterwards went to the ducal court of Saxe-Weißenfels before he was appointed poet and librarian at the Darmstadt court. In this position he wrote a great number of cantata texts which were composed by two of his Leipzig fellows, Christoph Graupner and Gottfried Grünewald (1675-1739), who were then active as Kapellmeister and vice- Kapellmeister at the Darmstadt court. In Weißenfels Lehms would have met the new cantata ideas developed by Erdmann Neumeister and Johann Philipp Krieger (1649-1725).

Almost certainly J.S. Bach possessed a copy of Georg Christian Lehms's cycle of cantata texts printed in 1711, since he drew on it at various times. In Weimar in 1714, or even earlier, he composed Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut BWV 199 and Widerstehe doch der Sünde BWV 54, and most of the cantatas written at, and immediately after, Christmas 1725 are on texts by Lehms: BWV 110, BWV 57, and BWV 151 for Christmas; BWV 16, BWV 32, and BWV 13 in January 1726. J.S. Bach's two remaining Lehms cantatas are solo alto works, BWV 35 and BWV 170, written during the following summer.

Some of J.S. Bach's cantatas to texts by Georg Christian Lehms are solo or dialogue works. This results from the fact that Lehms had published larger texts for morning services and more intimate ones for afternoon services; among J.S. Bach's settings only BWV 110 stems from the first part, all the others belonging to the second. Their intimate character is thus reflected occasionally in the vocal scoring.

Source: Oxford Composer Companion - J.S. Bach, edited by Malcolm Boyd (1999)
Contributed by Aryeh Oron (May 2003)

Texts of Bach Cantatas & Other Vocal Works

BWV 13, BWV 16, BWV 32, BWV 35, BWV 54, BWV 57, BWV 110, BWV 151, BWV 170, BWV 199

Links to other Sites

Georg Christian Lehms: Artikel zu Sibylla Schwarz [German]

Bibliography