"Bekennen Will Ich Seinen Namen": Authenticity, Purpose and Context for the Aria BWV 200. Observations on Johann Sebastian Bach's Reception of Works by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel

Abstract

Johann Sebastian Bach’s engagement with the works of his forebears and contemporaries has occupied Bach research time and again from the very beginning.1 The motivating cause and impetus has always has been the desire to gain deeper insight into the genesis of Bach’s own compositions and, by uncovering biographical, historical and stylistic as well as purely musical lines of connection, to approach a better understanding of the so “idiosyncratic” [“fremden”] and “similar to no other composer” [“keinem anderen Componisten” ähnlich]2 music of the Thomascantor. To be sure, today Bach’s artistic involvement with actual or supposed models is assessed in a more sophisticated fashion than was the case with earlier scholarship. Nevertheless, determining the various “historical and artistic/musical phenomena that had an influence on Bach’s life and work”3 still numbers among the most urgent tasks of Bach scholarship. In her study of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music library published in 1990, Kirsten Beißwenger systematically surveyed the findings of 150 years of scholarship and, on the basis of this