page_title: O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad, BWV 165
section_title: Movements
hierarchical_section_title: O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad, BWV 165 / Music / Movements
caption_attribution_description: Christ talking with Nicodemus at night (Christus onderwijst Nicodemus)
context_page_description: O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad, 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.
  Bach had taken up regular cantata composition a year before when he was promoted to concertmaster at the Weimar court, writing one cantata per month to be performed in the Schlosskirche, the court chapel in the ducal Schloss. O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad was his first cantata for Trinity Sunday, the feast day marking the end of the first half of the liturgical 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. It is close in content to the gospel and 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 voices are combined only in the closing chorale, the fifth stanza of Ludwig Helmbold's hymn "Nun laßt uns Gott dem Herren", which mentions scripture, baptism and the Eucharist, in a summary of the cantata's topic.
context_section_description: The cantata consists of solo movements closed by a four-part chorale. Arias alternate with two recitatives, both sung by the bass. John Eliot Gardiner summarizes: "It is a true sermon in music, based on the Gospel account of Jesus' night-time conversation with Nicodemus on the subject of 'new life', emphasising the spiritual importance of baptism." He points out the many musical images of water.
caption: Jesus teaches Nicodemus (seen here in a seventeenth-century painting) was a theme used by both composers and artists.
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