O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad (O holy bath of Spirit and water), 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.
It was one in a series of cantatas he had been writing since his
promotion to concertmaster at the Weimar court in the ducal palace, one
cantata each month over the previous 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 (pictured in a contemporary
painting). Close in content to the gospel, the text 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 closing chorale is the fifth
stanza of a hymn by Ludwig Helmbold which mentions scripture, baptism
and the Eucharist. The text, full of Baroque imagery, reads like a
sermon set to music, especially in the two recitatives for the bass
voice, which are rich in musical contrasts. Bach probably led a second
performance on the Trinity Sunday concluding his first year as Cantor at
St. Thomas in Leipzig on 4 June 1724.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_heilges_Geist-_und_Wasserbad,_BWV_165>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1223:
Mongol invasions: Mongol forces defeated a combined army of
Kiev, Galich, and the Cumans at the Kalchik River in present-day
Ukraine.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Kalka_River>
1669:
Citing poor eyesight, English naval administrator and Member of
Parliament Samuel Pepys recorded his last entry in his diary, one of the
most important primary sources for the English Restoration period.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys>
1935:
A 7.7 Mw earthquake struck Balochistan in the British Raj, now
part of Pakistan, killing anywhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Balochistan_earthquake>
1981:
An organized mob of police and government-sponsored
paramilitias began burning the public library in Jaffna, Sri Lanka,
destroying over 97,000 items in one of the most violent examples of
ethnic biblioclasm of the 20th century.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Jaffna_library>
2005:
An article in the magazine Vanity Fair revealed that the secret
informant known as "Deep Throat", who provided information about the
Watergate scandal, was former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt
(pictured).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(Watergate)>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
omnishambles:
(UK, chiefly politics) A situation that is bad or mismanaged in every
way.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/omnishambles>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
The words of the true poems give you more than poems, They give
you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace,
behavior, histories, essays, daily life, and every thing else, They
balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, They do not seek
beauty, they are sought, Forever touching them or close upon them
follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death, yet
are they not the finish, but rather the outset, They bring none to his
or her terminus or to be content and full, Whom they take they take into
space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings, To
launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and
never be quiet again.
--Song of the Answerer
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass#Song_of_the_Answerer_.281855.3B_1856.3B_1881.29>