Only a stranger on Earth: capturing Bach’s mood and sonority in BWV 118

Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s concert Bach Family Motets at Portchester Methodist Church on March 14th 2026 opens with O Jesu Christ, mein Lebens Licht BWV 118:

Oh Jesus Christ, my life’s light,
My refuge, my comfort, my hope,
On Earth I am only a stranger ¹
And the burden of [my] sins oppresses me greatly.

Written and first performed in 1736 or 1737, it is the last to have been written of the nine motets that are included in the programme. It was written for a funeral in Leipzig, its unusual scoring for outdoor instruments indicating a processional performance: the regular, walking pace of the music also reinforces this view. Despite its title page being labelled ‘motetto’ by the composer, the old Bach-Gesellschaft edition included it among the cantatas, leading some to consider it the sole surviving movement from a lost funeral cantata. The original scoring indicates that Bach had a specific sound in mind: two litui (curved trumpets used at funerals – more on the lituus below), a cornet and three trombones. Ten years later, Bach re-scored the motet for indoor performance, retaining the litui, woodwind doubling the voice parts ad libitum, the cornetto and trombone parts reassigned to strings and continuo. For our performance in the intimate acoustic of Portchester Methodist Church we will be using three recorders and organ continuo, there being no lituus players to be found hereabouts.

Nor anywhere else in fact, as nobody knows for sure what these instruments were, lost to history some 300 years ago. The term was used in ancient times to denote a curved war-trumpet but in Bach’s day it could be an alternative name for various kinds of bent horn made from wood, such as a shawm or crumhorn. In 2009 a lot of excitement was generated when research at Edinburgh University funded by EPSRC led to the recreation, using software optimisation, of Bach’s “forgotten horn” which was used in an experimental performance in Switzerland. There’s an EPSRC video on YouTube, Engineering Music – recreating Bach’s forgotten horn that includes excerpts from the Swiss performance of the motet in 2009. Evidently the litui were not just unwieldy, but difficult to play in tune] Rather than reach for extravagant claims that Bach had, by his fiftieth year, extended his interest in genealogy to organology, the Bach-Archiv entry for this work opts for horns in B, a more practical and prosaic suggestion based on the catch-all meaning of lituus ².

Instrumentalists performing BWV 118 in Switzerland, 2009.

O Jesu Christ, mein Lebens Licht lacks the vocal acrobatics of the six better-known motets and is much shorter, setting only the first stanza of fourteen from Martin Behm’s hymn “for the dying”. It uses a chorale melody from a Leipzig hymnal of 1625. Despite its brevity and uniformity of tone, this motet epitomises Bach’s style at its most expressive and pressurised, the words Nur ein Gast being singled out for special treatment, harmonically and contrapuntally.

Existential angst for the tenors

The tenors, followed by the altos, lead the sudden intrusion of chromatic angst as the music veers viscerally from major to minor, the litui parts breaking their regular 2-3-4 step with agitated quavers, the only place in this motet where they do so. The tenors take up the growing sense of existential alienation culminating in an octave leap up to a briefly sustained high G, almost an inversion of the choral tessitura. This is an extraordinary gesture even for Bach and it is likely to give tenors palpitations, likewise their conductor if delivered with excess bravura. 

When it comes to high-pressure chorale writing depicting the burden of sin, BWV 118 has a pugnacious sibling, the opening chorale of the cantata Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott BWV 101 written in August 1724, during a time of plague, for the 10th Sunday after Trinity. The scoring is for cornett (Zink), 3 trombones, transverse flute (Querflöte), 2 oboes, taille (an alto oboe in F, similar to the Cor anglais), oboe da caccia, 2 violins, viola, basso continuo. The variety of timbres and tone colors available between the oboe, oboe d’amore, oboe da caccia, and taille gave Bach a greater capacity to explore the affections in his music but in this movement the texture is full-on, relentlessly oppressive in its motivic workings as the chorus beseeches deliverance from a host of woes in addition to sin: war, costly times, plague, fire and great misfortune.

Unlike BWV 101 in its tormented D minor, the pervasive dissonances of BWV 118 do not grind and bruise, the overall sonority and feeling coming across as “tender, dulcet, nobly sweet warmly rich”. ³

So it is understandable that of all the Bach motets, only this one was included in John Rutter’s European Sacred Music, the reason given being that the other six motets were too long. That, I think, is bogus as plenty of space – 22 pages – was found for the tedious repetitions of Allegri’s Miserere and 17 pages for Brahms Warum is was Licht gegeben. But we should be grateful to Rutter for including this one, otherwise its relative neglect and incorrect classification might have continued. As a result, there are many fine recordings of this motet, including the Netherlands Bach Choir with period instruments that resemble the original scorings while the J S Bach Foundation does the same for BWV 101. Alternatively, for a rendition that is even closer to how the first performance might have sounded, there is an amateur video of an outdoor performance by the Monteverdi Choir conducted by John Eliot Gardiner at Iona Abbey on 28th July 2000, the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death.

This is therefore the ideal curtain-raiser for our concert on March 14th that will feature five other motets by J S Bach and three by his forebears, a family album of unsurpassed inventiveness and originality. Get your tickets, £15, £13 concessions, £3 students/U18, on the door or from Ticketsource.

Concert poster March 14 2026