page_title: Bist du bei mir
section_title: 1860s–1940s
hierarchical_section_title: Bist du bei mir / Reception / 1860s–1940s
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Album Reutlinger de portraits divers, vol. 2. Blanche Marchesi, Cécile Eyreams.
context_page_description: "Bist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden" is an aria from Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's opera Diomedes, which was first staged on 16 November 1718. The aria is best known as "Bist du bei mir", BWV 508, a version for voice and continuo found as No. 25 in the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach.
context_section_description: In 1866, a year after he had published his two-volume biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Hermann Bitter published six songs from Anna Magdalena's second Notenbüchlein, including "Bist du bei mir". Ernst Naumann published the aria separately in 1890, with a keyboard realisation of the accompaniment of his own hand. The Bach Gesellschaft published "Bist du bei mir" twice, both in the voice and continuo version as found in Anna Magdalena's notebook:
  edited by Franz Wüllner, in Vol. 39 (1892) of the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe (BGA). In his preface, the editor names "Bist du bei mir" as one of the most beautiful songs he knows, and attributes it without doubt to Bach.
  edited by Paul Waldersee, in Vol. 43² (1894) of the BGA. This editor is a bit more cautious when attributing the piece to Bach ("... könnte ... wohl eine Composition Johann Sebastian's sein" – transl. "... could ... well be a composition by Johann Sebastian"), while thinking it odd that the lyrics, which rather seem to be spoken by a male character, would be assigned to a female voice.
  Also in 1894, Novello published Three Songs from Anna-Magdalena Bach's Notebooks, among which "Bist du bei mir", with an English translation. A story about Bach's family life, published in the same year for a youthful audience, describes the aria as especially captivating among the songs and dances of the notebooks. After the publication of several anthologies, all the pieces of the second notebook were published in a single volume in 1904. "Bist du bei mir" was recorded in 1906, sung by Blanche Marchesi.
  Around 1915 Max Schneider discovered the orchestral version of "Bist du bei mir", along with four other arias by Stölzel, in an 18th-century manuscript at the library of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. At the time, this source was not further explored. In the 1920s the aria appeared in fictionalised biographical accounts:
  A 1924 story by Kurt Arnold Findeisen depicts Anna Magdalena starting to sing the aria when her husband returns home with the news that the Saxon Electress has died (1727).
  Esther Meynell's The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach (1925) pictures Anna Magdalena as overcome with emotion when she attempts to sing the aria.
  Lotte Lehmann recorded "Bist du bei mir" in 1929. Singers who recorded the aria in the 1930s include Elisabeth Schumann, Paula Salomon-Lindberg and Jo Vincent. Richard Crooks sang "If Thou Be Near", an English-language version of the aria, on a recording that was released in 1938. Another English-language version, "Be Thou with me", was sung by Isobel Baillie on a war-time recording. During the Second World War, the archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie went lost. Otto Klemperer's orchestral version of the aria was recorded in the 1940s.
caption: Blanche Marchesi recorded "Bist du bei mir" in 1906.[71]
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