BWV 140, 'Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme' (Wake up, the voice calls us), composed for the Twenty-seventh Sunday after Trinity on November 25, 1731, is widely regarded as one of the supreme achievements of Bach's cantata output - a work in which theological depth, structural elegance, and melodic beauty converge to an almost miraculous degree. The cantata sets Philipp Nicolai's 1598 hymn 'Wachet auf' in three chorale movements, framing them with two recitatives and two duets, and the whole is organized around Matthew 25:1-13, the Parable of the Ten Virgins.
Nicolai had written his hymn during a plague epidemic in Westphalia, meditating on the parable as a meditation on readiness for death and for Christ's return. The parable concerns ten young women (virgins in many translations; 'bridesmaids' in the NIV) who await the bridegroom at a wedding feast. Five are wise and bring extra oil for their lamps; five are foolish and bring none. When the bridegroom is delayed until midnight and the cry goes out 'Here's the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!' (Matthew 25:6), the foolish virgins find their lamps gone dark and miss the feast. The parable concludes with the solemn warning: 'Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.'
Revelation 21:2 and 21:9 provide the broader eschatological frame that Nicolai used: the image of the New Jerusalem descending 'prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband' identifies the church with the awaiting bride, and Christ with the long-expected Bridegroom. This bridal mysticism - deeply rooted in the Song of Solomon's imagery of the lover and the beloved and mediated through medieval monastic spirituality - informs the duets in Bach's cantata, in which the Soul and Christ exchange loving dialogue in the register of the Song of Solomon.
The middle movement, 'Zion hört die Wächter singen' (Zion hears the watchmen singing), is the cantata's emotional and musical center. The choral tenors carry the ancient chorale melody in long notes while the upper strings weave an independent, dance-like melody in flowing eighth notes. The result is a two-layer musical texture of extraordinary beauty: the steady, ancient hymn tune embodying the certainty of the promise, and the floating string music above it embodying the joy of its fulfillment. Albert Schweitzer described this movement as 'a piece of religious rapture such as few artists in any age have been able to express.'
The aria-duets between Soprano (the Soul) and Bass (Jesus) draw their language from the Song of Solomon: 'Mein Freund ist mein' (My beloved is mine) echoes Song of Solomon 2:16 ('My beloved is mine and I am his'), and the exchange of endearments - Liebster (dearest), Schönstes (most beautiful) - belongs entirely to the erotic-mystical register of the biblical love poem as interpreted through the Christian tradition of bridal mysticism.
Bach's structural care in BWV 140 is itself a theological statement: the architecture of the cantata mirrors the parable's message. The three chorale movements provide the firm frame of watchful readiness; the duets provide the intimate experience of union with the Bridegroom; the whole work embodies in its very form the journey from vigilant waiting to joyful arrival. It has been performed annually since Bach's time and recorded hundreds of times, its middle movement extracted for orchestral concert use throughout the twentieth century - a piece that works as pure music while never losing its theological depth.
Philipp Nicolai's original hymn, written during a plague epidemic in 1598, had been composed as a meditation on preparedness for death - exactly the context Matthew 25's parable addresses when Jesus concludes it with the solemn warning: 'You do not know the day or the hour.' Nicolai watched more than a thousand people die of plague in his parish in a single year and wrote the hymn as an exercise in eschatological readiness: living each day as if it might be the last, maintaining the oil of faith ready for the midnight cry. Bach's setting, performed in Leipzig in 1731 - one hundred and thirty-three years after Nicolai's composition - placed this meditation before a congregation that understood plague, death, and the uncertainty of life's length all too well.
The bridal mysticism that pervades the duets draws on a long tradition stretching from Origen's Commentary on the Song of Solomon in the third century through Bernard of Clairvaux's eighty-six sermons on the same text in the twelfth century to Luther's own reading of the Song as an allegory of the soul's relationship with Christ. Bach's duets stand in this tradition without being enslaved to it: they use the erotic language of the Song of Solomon as a vehicle for expressing the intimacy of the soul's union with the divine, a union that the parable promises will be consummated when the Bridegroom arrives.
BWV 140's final chorale - 'Gloria sei dir gesungen' (Glory be sung to you) - gives the congregation's voice the last word, bringing the professional performance and the communal worship together in a final doxology. The cantata thus enacts its own theology: individual readiness expressed in communal praise, waiting made joyful by the foretaste of arrival.