O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad (O holy bath of Spirit and water), BWV 165, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed it in Weimar for Trinity Sunday and led the first performance on 16 June 1715. It was one in a series of cantatas he had been writing since his promotion to concertmaster at the Weimar court in the ducal palace, one cantata each month over the previous year. The libretto by the court poet Salomo Franck is based on the day's prescribed gospel reading about the meeting of Jesus and Nicodemus (pictured in a contemporary painting). Close in content to the gospel, the text connects the concept of the Trinity to baptism. The music is structured in six movements, alternating arias and recitatives, and scored for a small ensemble of four vocal parts, strings and continuo. The closing chorale is the fifth stanza of a hymn by Ludwig Helmbold which mentions scripture, baptism and the Eucharist. The text, full of Baroque imagery, reads like a sermon set to music, especially in the two recitatives for the bass voice, which are rich in musical contrasts. Bach probably led a second performance on the Trinity Sunday concluding his first year as Cantor at St. Thomas in Leipzig on 4 June 1724. (Full article...)
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