Cantata BWV 60 - Provenance

Cantata BWV 60
O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort
Provenance

The original set of parts still exists, probably having been part of CPE Bach’s inherited portion of the cantatas. These were not mentioned in the enumeration of items in his possession at the time of his death (1790) as were also all the cantatas from the 19^th Sunday after Trinity until the end of the church year. For a while he simply gave them away. [What a contrast with WF Bach, who extracted a pretty penny just to have a look at them!] Some were located in the Radowitz collection, then in the Voß-Buch collection and finally, in 1851, they became the property of the German State Library (Deutsch Staatsbibliothek), now in Berlin-Dahlem.

No record whatsoever exists regarding the original score, but there must have been one.

Text:

Unknown librettist
Mvt. 1 – Text of the tenor (Hoffnung): Psalm 119, 166
Mvt. 1 – Chorale text “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort” vs. 1 of the chorale by Johann Rist 1642
Mvt. 4 – Text of the bass: John 14, 13
Mvt. 5 – vs. 5 of the chorale “Es ist genug, so nimm, Herr, meinen Geist” by Franz Joachim Burmeister (1662) [Bach changed the spelling of the word „genug“ which spelling was used in all contemporary hymn books of that period, to “genung,” most likely a dialect form of a particular region.

1^st Performance:

The 1^st performance took place on November 7, 1723 on the 24^th Sunday after Trinity. It seems very probably that Bach performed this cantata more than once, but there is no hard evidence to support this contention.

Original Parts:

Only the original parts have survived. They are located in the SBB (Staatsbibliothek Berlin) and have the call number : St 74

Sources:
NBA: I/27
BWV Bach Werke Verzeichnis: Kleine Ausgabe (Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden, 1998), p. 61

Contributed by Thomas Braatz wrote (November 29, 2001, January 26, 2009)

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Last update: ýJanuary 26, 2009 ý08:37:41