GENERAL NOTE: This work was first performed by the Leipzig Collegium musicum under Bach’s direction, in honor of the young Saxon Electoral Prince Friedrich, on September 5, 1733, the prince’s 11th birthday. The German text of this libretto is often awkward in expression, and at times grammatically and logically quite clumsy or convoluted or both.

¹ The librettist, Picander, spelled this name with a “c” (not a “k”).

² What the gods have decreed is expressed in the B section (lines 3–7) of this movement. In older-German, “Ratschluss” could be a synonym for “Beschluss” (“decision,” or “[a legal] ruling”); but in the contexts of pagan religion and of Christianity, “der Ratschluss der Götter” and “die Ratschlüsse des Gottes” were employed in the senses of “the will/decree of the gods” and “the will/decree of God.”

³ The opening movement of the libretto from BWV 213 is meant with the use of “Göttersohn” to refer literarily to Hercules and allegorically to the young Saxon Electoral Prince Friedrich (see the General Note, above). In many contexts, the word “Göttersohn” could mean “[divine or semi-divine] son of the [ancient Greek/Roman] gods”; and in other contexts, simply “hero”; but in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German, “Göttersohn” was often also employed, as here, panegyrically for German princes, reflecting an understanding of exalted earthly rulers as “Götter” (“[earthly, not divine,] gods”) and of each of their ruling progeny as a “Göttersohn” (“son of the ‘gods’”). These panegyric usages were derived not so much from classical mythology as they were from one of the particular employments of the expression “ha elohim” (“the gods”) in the Hebrew Bible. In many biblical contexts, “elohim” could mean “God,” “gods,” “divine ones,” “angels,” or “exalted ones.” Especially in Exodus 21:6 and 22:8-9, however, “elohim” refers to earthly rulers, and thus in these contexts the word is often rendered in English Bibles as “judges” or “magistrates.” The Luther Bibles of Bach’s day and earlier rendered Exodus 21:6 and 22:8-9 with “Götter,” understanding the term there as denoting human earthly rulers placed in power by God.

⁴ The words “und Ruhm” (“and renown”) are not found in Picander’s 1737 printing of the libretto.

⁵ The expression “ihr schlanken Zweige” here is often translated as “you slender/narrow crossroads,” but such renderings are most likely inaccurate. Xenophon, who transmits Prodicus’s Hercules story, says that Hercules went out to a quiet place to make his choice. That would appear to be the woods or a grove, a setting provided in many visual depictions of the story. (Note, also, that the first performance of BWV 213 took place outdoors at the garden associated with Leipzig’s Zimmermann coffee-house concerts.) “Die schlanken Äste/Zweige” (“the slender [tree] branches”) was a common expression in older German. Many among Bach’s audience would have been familiar with a Christian version of quasi-Herculean tree-branch imagery from post-reformation Lutheran art in the form of “Gesetz und Gnade” (“Law and Grace”) paintings (e.g., which were found at that time in both the Thomas and Nicholas Churches of Leipzig). In these works a central figure is shown presented with a choice between various depictions of the virtues of redemption and life on the one side and the vices of sin and death on the other; between them is conventionally depicted an extraordinary tree whose right side teems with foliage, while the branches on the left side are completely withered (i.e., it is obvious, from the nature of this tree, what the right choice would be).

⁶ The allegorical characters Wollust (Pleasure) and Tugend (Virtue) are both grammatically feminine in German and are referred to in the cantata’s text with feminine grammatical inflections. In artistic representations they were typically depicted as female. It is not certain whether the singer of Pleasure (a soprano) in Bach’s performance was male or female; Virtue was sung by a (presumably male) tenor. Hercules, an alto, was probably male, given the kinds of voices cultivated in Bach’s environs.

⁷ “Lieber” (“dear”) in Picander’s 1737 print; “Liebster” (“dearest”) in Bach’s own performing materials; both “Lieber” and “Liebster” in Bach’s own score.

⁸ “Lust” (“delight”) in Picander’s 1737 print and in a 1748 reprint. (Presumably a typographical error.) Bach clearly wrote “Last” (“burden”) in his own score, and his original performing part, copied out by an assistant, was corrected to “Last,” apparently from “Lust.”

⁹ The verb “verziehen” is apparently being used here in one of its older-German senses, as a synonym for “wartend verharren” (“to remain waiting,” “to tarry”). In the Luther Bibles of Bach’s day, “nicht verziehen” (“not tarry”) is employed in this way, e.g., in Hebrews 10:37.

¹⁰ The antecedent for the (grammatically masculine) “der” in line 2 is “Wer” (“Who”) in line 1, not the (also grammatically masculine) “Schweiss.”

¹¹ In religious discourse, the fairly common expression “Heil und Wohlergehen” would refer to “[eternal] salvation and wellbeing”; but in secular panegyrics, “Heil und Wohlergehen” typically refers to “[temporal] prosperity and wellbeing.”

¹² “Gib mir doch zur Antwort” (“give me, please, as the answer”) in Picander’s 1737 print.

¹³ “Nah” (“close”) in Bach’s own score and Picander’s 1737 print. The word might possibly be read as “nach” (“in accordance with”) in Bach’s own performing materials in m. 73 (which would ruin the poetry’s rhyme with “ja” [“yes”]). Although messily written, it is apparently given as “nah” in m. 103.

¹⁴ Many translations render the subjunctive “sollt[e] ich” (“would I”) with the indicative “shall I” (and some also incorrectly give the original German text as “soll,” not “sollt”).

¹⁵ Like the English word “hopeful,” the German “hoffnungsvoll” can mean “hopeful” or “full of hope” either in the sense of hope-possessing or of hope-giving. Assuming the latter here, we have rendered the adjective as “promising.”

¹⁶ The word “Held,” in its use in classical mythology, refers to “a man of superhuman strength, courage, or ability, favored by the gods; especially one regarded as semi-divine and immortal” (the definition given as sense 1 in the entry “hero” in the Oxford English Dictionary).

¹⁷ “Folgbar” is an older-German synonym for “nachahmbar/imitierbar” (“imitable,” in the older-English sense of “deserving of imitation”).

¹⁸ In the scholarly Bach literature a variant reading for this line is reported to have appeared in Picander’s 1737 print, but in fact the print’s reading is the same as Bach’s.

¹⁹ Hercules was the semi-divine, illegitimate child of Zeus (the head of the gods), as his mother was Alcmene (a mortal), the wife of Amphitryon (also a mortal). Biblically literate listeners may also readily have heard this line, “Du bist mein echter Sohn” (“You are my true-born son”), as a sort of religious blessing, as it is a near echo (but with the very same scansion) of what God declares to Jesus in Mark 1:11, “Du bist mein lieber Sohn” (“You are my beloved son”).

²⁰ Literally, “Zeugerin” is “(female) begetter,” i.e., birth mother; and “Zeuger” is “(male) begetter,” i.e., birth father. The (logically somewhat convoluted) idea here is that Virtue has not “adopted” Hercules but is in a sense his “real” begetter. Biblically literate listeners may have heard a reference here to Psalm 2:7, where God’s anointed king, understood by Christians to be a foreshadowing of Jesus as God’s messiah, recalls what God had said to the king (according to Luther’s rendering, a passage that is also quoted verbatim in Acts 13:33, Hebrews 1:5, and Hebrews 5:5), “Du bist mein Sohn, heut habe ich dich gezeuget” (“You are my son, today have I begotten you”).

²¹ Biblically literate listeners may readily have heard these lines as a sort of religious blessing, as they draw on what is said in Deuteronomy 32:11 of God as a hovering eagle, bearing his people as a fledgling on his pinion (which is given in the singular in the Luther Bibles of Bach’s day). A similar metaphor is employed in Exodus 19:4.

²² “Kränken” is apparently being used here in its older-German sense of “schwächen” (“to weaken/debilitate”).

²³ “Die Reich und Helden kränkt” would on the face of it seem to mean “which affronts empire[s] and [military] heroes.” But Picander’s “Reich und Helden” is probably a clipped version of “Reiche und Helden,” an expression that was sometimes employed in older German to refer to the “materially/spiritually rich and bodily/mentally strong,” as, e.g., in some renderings of Revelation 6:15, “Die Könige der Erde aber, Fürsten und Heeresführer, Reiche und Helden, alle Sklaven und alle Freien, verbargen sich in Höhlen und Felsenklüften der Berge” (“But the kings of the earth, princes and army commanders, [the materially/spiritually] rich and [the] strong/powerful, all [the] enslaved and all [the] free, hid themselves in caves and rock clefts of the mountains”). Note that in older German “the rich/poor,” in the plural, could be spelled either “die Reichen/Armen” or “die Reiche/Arme.”

²⁴ The use of “denken” as a “bivalent stative verb” with “objective subject” and “dative object” can be employed to express either something that is in one’s memory or something that is someone’s opinion.

²⁵ Bach’s own materials read “mag nicht [dich hören]” (“do not care [to hear you]”) only in mm. 27 and 55.

²⁶ Bach’s own materials read “mag nicht dich wissen” (“do not care to understand you”) only in m. 61.

²⁷ In Picander’s 1737 print, “zerdrücket,” a synonym for “zermalmet” (“crushed”).

²⁸ See fn. 25, above.

²⁹ See fn. 26, above.

³⁰ The adjective “verworfen” is likely meant here to be read both in its sense of “verdorben” (“depraved,” or “[morally] corrupt”) and in its sense of “weggeworfen” (“cast off,” or “rejected”). The penultimate line of the previous movement refers to Pleasure being “verstossen” (“expelled,” or “cast out”) from the band of gods, and the Lutheranism of Bach’s day continually made a distinction between a “vernünftige Wollust” (“reasonable pleasure”) that is of God and a “verderbte Wollust” (“corrupted pleasure”) that is of the world.

³¹ The story was that when Hercules was eight months old, the goddess Hera (wife of Zeus), out of jealousy of Alcmene (the birth mother of Hercules; see fn. 20, above), sent two snakes into Hercules’s chamber, and the infant strangled them.

³² On their own, the sentiments of the B section (lines 3–5) of this movement might seem like something of a non sequitur. Biblically literate listeners among Bach’s audience, however, probably understood Pleasure here to be interpreted as “satanic,” linking this line’s use of “Schlangen” (“serpents”) and “wiegend” (“cradled”) with the standard Lutheran, christological interpretation of the Creation narrative in Genesis 3, where the first humans, Adam and Eve, disobey God in the Garden of Eden by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When confronted by God, Eve says that she was duped by a “serpent” into eating. In Genesis 3:15, God says to the serpent, in the rendering of the Luther’s Bibles of Bach’s day, “Ich will Feindschaft setzen zwischen dir und dem Weibe und zwischen deinem Samen und ihrem Samen. Derselbige soll dir den Kopf zertreten, und du wirst ihn in die Fersen stechen” (“I will put enmity between you and the woman [Eve] and between your seed and her seed. This same [seed] shall trample your head, and you will sting him in the heels”). In traditional Christian reading the “serpent” is the devil/Satan; and in Lutheran reading the “seed” of Eve who tramples Satan’s head is Jesus, God’s promised messiah. The New Testament infancy narratives depict Jesus (who is proclaimed to be the promised “king” that will defeat Satan) as a baby in a “manger” or “cradle.” The gospels go on to depict Jesus in his adulthood as being urged by the devil to make the choice of following the seductive path of Satan rather than the difficult path of God.

³³ A simple “without you and me” would be (the accusative) “ohne dich und mich.” The poet’s dative “ohne dir und mir” (apparently, “without [me with] you and [you with] me”), with “mir” in the second position, accommodates the need for a rhyme with the “dir” of Virtue’s first line here.

³⁴ Ich bin dein und du bist mein” (“I am yours and you are mine”), adapted from Song of Songs 2:16 and 6:3, was an engagement formula, with binding legal power, in Bach’s Germany.

³⁵ This is Picander’s spelling.

³⁶ In modern German, “anfüllen” would mean “to replenish,” but in older German it meant “to fill from top to bottom.”

³⁷ “Raute” is the herb known in English as “rue”; and “Rautensäfte” (literally, “rue juices’), e.g., are extracts that were thought to have protective powers. The various Saxon coats of arms have traditionally featured depictions of the leaves of rue plants.

³⁸ See fn. 15, above.

³⁹ Grammatically, “der Musen frohe Reihen” could mean “the glad ranks of muses,” but in context it is more likely that the “Reihen” refers to ring-dancing. This sense of “Reihen” was usually given as “Reigen” in the Luther Bibles of Bach’s day, but Bach gives “Reihen,” e.g., in his setting of Psalm 149:3 in the motet “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied” BWV 225, at the phrase “sie sollen loben seinen Namen in Reihen” (“they [the saints of God] shall praise his name in ring-dancing”).

⁴⁰ The Leipzig Collegium musicum sometimes styled itself as a “Musen-Chor.”

⁴¹ To fit the poetic meter, Friedrich’s name was rendered in this movement also with three syllables.

⁴² “Schon” is apparently employed here in the sense of “gewiss” (“certainly,” “assuredly”).

⁴³ The sentiments of lines 3–4 are convoluted. Other translators have rendered them into more straightforward-sounding English, but in the process, among other challenges, they have sometimes confused the subject and object. Note that it is the (nominative) “[der] Glanz” (“splendor”) that functions as the subject of the sentence.

⁴⁴ Lines 3–7, scored for the vocal bass line alone, are sometimes editorially labeled as “Merkur” (“Mercury”) in modern editions and translations, but it is unlikely that the bass line within the “Choir of Muses” is meant to be understood as a setting of the declarations of Mercury (who is not one of the muses). The voices of the opening and closing choruses are not those of the characters in the drama, and the 1737 text reprint does not assign these lines to Mercury.