Bach's original score is lost. The music survives in a copy made by
C F Penzel, one of Bach's last pupils, after the composer's death. The date of composition is not known, and sources differ as to when and where Bach composed the work. However, the balance of opinion has moved towards a date at the beginning of Bach's career. It is not currently in dispute that it is one of Bach's earliest surviving cantatas. Suggestions for the place of composition have been: •
Weimar, where Bach worked from 1708. The conductor and academic Jonathan Green dates the work c. 1708–1710; the Bach scholar
William G. Whittaker dates it c. 1712. •
Mühlhausen, where Bach worked in 1707/1708. The
Zwang catalogue (which attempts to list the cantatas chronologically) dated it as the sixth of the surviving cantatas by Bach, and placed
Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir, BWV 131, as the earliest.
Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir is known to have been composed in Mühlhausen in 1707/1708. •
Arnstadt, where Bach worked until his move to Mühlhausen in the summer of 1707. Late 20th-century scholarship suggests
Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich could have been composed at Arnstadt. In 2010, the scholar
Hans-Joachim Schulze identified a remarkable
acrostic in movements 3, 5 and 7 (which he described in the 2010
Bach-Jahrbuch, the journal of the
Neue Bachgesellschaft). Adjusting for transposition errors by the
copyist, the initial letters should spell DOKTOR CONRAD MECKBACH and plausibly therefore the work was composed to mark this Mühlhausen councillor's 70th birthday in April 1707. On this basis the cantata may date from Bach's time in Arnstadt. Possibly the cantata was heard a few weeks later after the end of
Lent, and thus it may have formed a test-piece for the Mühlhausen appointment, composed in Arnstadt with Bach's supporter Meckbach in mind. The cantata is, as
John Eliot Gardiner notes, "generally accepted to be Bach's very first church cantata." In 2000, Gardiner conducted the
Bach Cantata Pilgrimage and performed the cantata in the church for which it was then probably composed, at Bach's time called
Neue Kirche (new church), now the
Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Kirche. The cantata was first published in 1884 in the
Bach-Gesellschaft-Ausgabe, the first edition of Bach's complete works. The composer
Johannes Brahms, who served on the editorial board of the Bach-Gesellschaft-Ausgabe, took an interest in the cantata as it was being published. He used an adapted version of the bass line of the closing
chaconne for a work he completed in 1885, his
Symphony No. 4. == Structure and scoring ==