Johann Sebastian Bach
Schauet doch und sehet, ob irgendein Schmerz sei
“Behold and see if any grief is like my grief”

Bach composed at least three cantatas for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity. We have the works he wrote for his Leipzig congregation in 1723, 1724, and 1726. Of the first of these, John Eliot Gardiner has written:

Just once in a while in the course of the Trinity season, with its almost unremitting emphasis on the things every good Lutheran should believe, from the Nicene Creed to the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Catechism and so on, comes a vivid shaft of New Testament history and narrative reference to the life of Christ. Here on the tenth Sunday after Trinity the Gospel (Luke 19:41–48) tells us how Jesus predicted the imminent destruction of Jerusalem, tying the event in the listener’s mind to his own Passion story. That link would have been strengthened in Bach’s day by the practice at the Vesper service on this Sunday of reading aloud Josephus’ account of the actual sacking of Jerusalem by the Roman emperor Titus in AD 70, one that surely resonated in the minds of those whose families had witnessed the razing of German towns during the Thirty Years War. So with his anonymous librettist choosing to open with a passage from the Old Testament narrative (Lamentations 1:12) for Bach’s first Leipzig cantata for this Sunday, BWV 46 Schauet doch und sehet, ob irgendein Schmerz sei, suddenly the separate eras of Jeremiah, Jesus and Josephus appear braced together, a sign of the potency of this particular story with its vivid, unsettling patterns of destruction and restoration, of God’s anger and Christ’s mercy. If any of the faithful of Leipzig gathered in church on a warm Sunday morning in August 1723 were experiencing momentary wobbles of belief, they were in for some bombardment! Josephus’ harrowing eyewitness account crops up again in a contemporary Leipzig chorale collection, the preacher was specifically required to fulminate and deliver a strong-tongued lashing, and Bach, never one to be outdone by a purely verbal harangue, came up with a cantata every bit as startling as the previous Sunday’s Herr gehe nicht in Gericht, BWV 105, with which it shares certain thematic features and its structural outline.

A complete text — German and English with helpful explanatory notes — is here.

In the performance of the complete cantata below, the Netherlands Bach Society is conducted by Hans-Christoph Rademann. The soloists are Franz Vitzthum, alto; Guy Cutting, tenor; and Tobias Berndt, bass.