Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170
church cantata for solo alto by Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach composed Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (Delightful rest, beloved pleasure of the soul), BWV 170, a church cantata for the sixth Sunday after Trinity in Leipzig. It is a solo cantata for alto that he first performed on 28 July 1726.
Due to circumstances during Bach's first years as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, the cantata became his first extant contribution for the occasion, as part of his third cantata cycle. He took the text from Georg Christian Lehms' 1711 collection Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opfer, which paraphrases the prescribed Gospel from the Sermon on the Mount. He set it in five movements, alternating arias and recitatives. A small Baroque ensemble features oboe d'amore and an obbligato organ besides strings and basso continuo.
History and words
Bach composed the cantata in Leipzig for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity. The prescribed readings for the Sunday are from the Epistle to the Romans, "By Christ's death we are dead for sin" (Romans 6:3–11), and from the Gospel of Matthew a passage from the Sermon on the Mount about better justice than the justice of merely observing laws and rules (Matthew 5:20–26). The text of the cantata is drawn from Georg Christian Lehms' Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opfer (1711) and speaks of the desire to lead a virtuous life and so enter heaven and avoid hell.
Bach first performed the cantata on 28 July 1726.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.