Tristis est anima mea is a sacred motet for five voices attributed to Johann Kuhnau, Thomaskantor in Leipzig. The text is the second responsory at Tenebrae for Maundy Thursday, one of the Latin texts kept in the liturgy after the town converted to Lutheranism.
Christ and His Disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane (Rembrandt)
Johann Kuhnau
First notes sung by soprano and (first) alto of Lassus' Tristis est anima mea, No. 1 in Drexel 4302
Johann Kuhnau
Videos
Johann Kuhnau was a German polymath, known primarily as a composer today. He was also active as a novelist, translator, lawyer, and music theorist, and was able to combine these activities with his duties in his official post as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, which he occupied for 21 years. Much of his music, including operas, masses, and other large-scale vocal works, is lost. His reputation today rests on his Biblical Sonatas, a set of programmatic keyboard sonatas published in 1700, in which each sonata depicted in detail a particular story from the Bible. After his death, Kuhnau was succeeded as Thomaskantor by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Kuhnau's portrait, from a hand-colored 1689 edition of his Neue Clavier-Übung, erster Theil
Engraving of frontispiece of Musicalische Vorstellung einiger biblischer Historien, the "Six Biblical Sconatas" published by Kuhnau and printed by Immanuel Tietze in 1710. In an idealised music room, the lady can be seen on the right playing a house organ with the motto Dum ludo alludo, a bible by the wall behind. On the left is a clavichord, concealing the tail of a harpsichord.
Title page of Kuhnau's satirical novel Der musicalische Quack-Salber