| Composer: attr. J S Bach | Cello with Piano accompaniment | Tempo: Moderate | Duration: 3 minutes |
| Key: C Major | Easy intermediate | Calm, lyrical song of trust and love | Year: c.1718 |
‘Bist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden’ (If you are with me, I go with joy) is best known as an aria appearing in the 1725 Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach. But in fact it comes from Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s opera Diomedes, first staged in 1718, the full score of which has subsequently been lost. It’s a mystery how ‘Bist du bei mir’ came to be known to the Bach household in Leipzig some years later, or why Anna, Johann Sebastian’s second wife, decided to copy an arrangement of the aria into her second notebook.
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