Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750. Nur jedem das Seine

Nur jedem das Seine (To each his own!), BWV 163, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed the work in Weimar for the twenty-third Sunday after Trinity and first performed it on 24 November 1715. This work was part of Bach's sequence of monthly church cantatas for the Weimar court, which he began in 1714. It was the first piece performed after a mourning period of several months for Prince Johann Ernst. The text, written by the court poet Salomon Franck, is based on the prescribed gospel reading for the Sunday, "Render unto Caesar...", and includes several allusions to money and gold. The cantata has six movements, beginning with an aria for tenor, followed by two pairs of recitatives and arias, one for bass and the other for the duet of soprano and alto, and a concluding chorale. Similar to other cantatas on words by Franck, the work is scored for a small Baroque chamber ensemble of two violins, viola, two cellos and continuo. Bach composed a unique aria with a dark texture of a bass voice and two obbligato cellos. A duet has been described as a love duet and compared to operatic duets. The music of the closing chorale is lost, except for the continuo part. It is not clear if Bach set the stanza printed in the libretto from Heermann's "Wo soll ich fliehen hin", or instead his "Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht" by Christian Keymann, in a tune that appears as a cantus firmus in movement 5.