Christoph Birkmann
Mathematician, and librettist of Bach cantatas, 1726-1727.
Blanken’s discovery
In 2015 Christine Blanken of the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig came across a publication of 1728 by Christoph Birkmann (1703-1771) that no one had known about: a complete liturgical year of 71 cantata librettos.1 That this pastor from Nuremberg had studied in Leipzig between 1724 and 1727, and had made music with Bach, was already known. Blanken looked further, and found that the cycle contained a good many cantatas of Bach whose author had until then been listed as Anonymus — among them some of the most famous: Ich habe genug (BWV 82) and the Kreuzstab cantata (BWV 56). Was Birkmann the author?
Birkmann in his own words
First a longer quotation from his autobiographical note, the Ehren-Denkmal of 1738 (p. 22f). The German original is on the Dutch page.
Because I stayed in the house of M[agister] Birnbaum for some time, I took advantage of the fine opportunity offered weekly in speech exercises and the defence of mixed propositions, where it often fell to me to perorate ex tempore. From then on I pursued theology in earnest, hearing Pfeiffer, Carpzov, Bernd, Sibern and other famous teachers from both chairs; I also attempted to preach a few times, but postponed further practice until a more convenient time, finding pleasure in Hoffman’s and Teller’s guidance in exegesi sacra et dispositione textuum sacrorum, as I could enjoy both as I wished. At the same time I did not entirely neglect music, but diligently attended upon the great master, Mr Director Bach and his choir, also visiting the collegia musica in winter, thereby gaining the opportunity to assist several students with the help of the Italian language.
Christoph Birkmann, then, sang and/or played in the cantatas. (‘Choir’ here means the group of singers and instrumentalists performing together, not a choir in our sense.)
The cantata cycle
That connection was known. What was new was the booklet Blanken found in the Nuremberg library, GOtt-geheiligte Sabbaths-Zehnden (1728). It contains a complete annual cycle of cantata texts, including a large number of texts for Bach cantatas whose author had until then been ‘unknown’ — many solo and dialogue cantatas, among them the celebrated Ich habe genug and Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen. Here is the list of the Birkmann sub-cycle, which runs from late October 1726 to early February 1727.
Between 5 January and 2 February, Birkmann’s collection includes four further solo and dialogue cantatas of which no music has survived. What makes that interesting is that no other cantatas by Bach survive for those particular Sundays either. It suggests four lost cantatas, composed and performed by Bach, whose scores we no longer have.
The St John Passion of 1725
A further surprise was that the volume also contains the complete libretto of the second version of the St John Passion, that of 1725. In the preface Birkmann states that he is not only the compiler and editor but also the author of the texts. That makes him a candidate for the three new arias in this version of the Passion — whether written by him outright, or contributed and edited:
- Himmel reiße, Welt erbebe
- Zerschmettert mich, ihr Felsen und ihr Hügel
- Ach windet euch nicht so, geplagte Seelen
In short: he and his book are well worth knowing better. The title page and the opening of the Passion follow — note that it is described there as an oratorio.
A life: Nuremberg, Altdorf, Leipzig
Christoph Birkmann (1703-1771) came from a simple working-class family in Nuremberg, but thanks to a good school system — first the school for the poor (Armenschule), then the Latin school — his gift for languages, mathematics and music was noticed early. In passing: the capable boy singers of the Latin school also made up the church choir. Having no money, he became a working student in his teens, tutoring others to pay for his own education. With some support and the prospect of a scholarship he enrolled at the University of Altdorf in 1723 — a small town with a well-regarded university, where Leibniz took his degree.
Being good at several things, he found it hard to choose between music (as singer and soon as composer), languages (the classical ones, plus English, French and Italian) and mathematics. When the promised scholarship turned out to be meagre, he took the leap to the city in late 1724: Leipzig and its university. He arrived at the beginning of December, penniless — just in time for the start of Advent, and so perhaps for Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (BWV 61) in the Thomaskirche. He stayed in Leipzig until September 1727.
Enrolling just before Christmas 1724, he became a student of physics and mathematics under Professor Christian August Hausen, an astronomer and later an authority on electricity, who had travelled to England to meet Newton. Hausen wanted to keep him and introduced him to the observatories in Dresden and Berlin — but by then rhetoric and theology had caught his interest. That shift owed much to his friendship with Johann Abraham Birnbaum, near his own age and already an enthusiastic young teacher of rhetoric and an advocate of German as a literary language. The destitute student soon moved in with him. Birkmann threw himself into the musical life of the city, joining several collegia musica, and earned money by teaching Italian to fellow students — as the passage above records. Alongside his official studies in the sciences he attended public and private lectures in rhetoric and theology, and the latter gradually became his main pursuit.
Sunspots: the dissertation of 1726
Even so, Hausen (praeses) and Birkmann (respondens) published a dissertation in 1726 entitled Theoria solis motus circa axem propriam (‘theory of the sun’s motion about its own axis’). It set out how telescopic observations of sunspots could be used to calculate the speed of the sun’s rotation and the tilt of its axis — Hausen arrived at 7.25°. Birkmann defended the work publicly. It includes geometrical drawings and mathematical calculations.
Birnbaum, and the turn to theology
Birnbaum (1702-1748) was only a year older than Birkmann but was already making his way. In 1724 he obtained his ius docendi and began as a private lecturer (collegia privata); he also ran disputation clubs for practice in rhetoric. In 1734 he became professor of rhetoric at the university, and emerged as a passionate advocate of Bach and his music, defending him against the attacks of J. A. Scheibe, who thought Bach’s music needlessly complicated. One wonders whether there was contact between Bach and Birnbaum earlier than that.
At any rate Birkmann knew Bach personally. He performed in Bach’s ‘choir’ — that is, in the cantatas — and must have been broadly gifted as a musician, since he also belonged to various collegia musica in Leipzig: semi-professional groups, often centred on the university. Bach took over the direction of one such society in 1730 and performed with it at Café Zimmermann.
Under Birnbaum’s influence Birkmann left his scientific career behind for biblical exegesis and the art of preaching, which probably offered more security — or was it the other way round, and were there well-to-do parishioners willing to support him if he became a pastor? Either way, he clearly meant to become one. In early 1727 he moved to Hersbruck, near Nuremberg, as a private tutor; in 1731 he became an assistant pastor and later senior pastor in Nuremberg, where he stayed until his death in 1771. As he grew older his Pietist leanings became more pronounced, where in his Leipzig years they had been more of an accent.
The Sabbaths-Zehnden of 1728
To the point. After leaving Leipzig and before his ordination, he published in 1728 the librettos of a complete annual cycle of cantatas: GOtt-geheiligte Sabbaths-Zehnden — ‘Sabbath tithes dedicated to God, consisting of spiritual cantatas for all high feasts and Sundays, dedicated to the congregation at Hersbruck for a godly exercise in piety… by Christoph Birckmann, candidate for the ministry, printed at Nuremberg by Lorenz Bieling’.
The preface, together with the autobiography sketched above, gives a rare insight into how these cantatas came about, were performed and were edited — and into how much the performance of Bach’s church music depended on Leipzig students. Birkmann worked with Bach on revising older librettos, probably from the Weimar years, though early Picander versions occur in the collection as well. And he wrote a whole series of cantata texts himself: often in the first person, or dialogue cantatas, the form Bach began composing in October 1726.
The text of the St John Passion in its 1725 version is in the collection too. It is not always clear which parts are revisions and which are original; but given his evident literary gift and his theological grounding, it is not impossible that the new texts of that version are his — three highly expressive arias. He had both the means and the motive: a poet by gift, and a theologian whose interest lay in deeply felt religious emotion. Read the texts and you will notice both the theology and the poetry. The command of style is remarkable, as it is in BWV 56 and 82, which are certainly his.2
Dick Wursten
- Christine Blanken, ‘Christoph Birkmanns Kantatenzyklus „GOtt-geheiligte Sabbaths-Zehnden“ von 1728 und die Leipziger Kirchenmusik unter J. S. Bach in den Jahren 1724-1727’, Bach-Jahrbuch 101 (2015), pp. 13-74.↩
- The full libretto of the 1725 St John Passion, with a Dutch translation: bach.wursten.be.↩