Christiana Mariana von Ziegler


Christiana Mariana von Ziegler was a German poet and writer. She is best known for the texts of nine cantatas, which Johann Sebastian Bach composed after Easter of 1725.

Biography

Christiana Mariana Romanus was born in Leipzig, where her father served as mayor in 1701. She began her literary career after the death of her second husband, Captain von Ziegler in 1722. She returned to Leipzig, where she lived in the family home, the Romanushaus, with her mother. Her father had received a long-term prison sentence for financial irregularities. Despite the difficult family circumstances, the house became a literary and musical salon. Johann Christoph Gottsched encouraged her poetic activity. She became the first woman member of Gottsched's literary society, the Deutsche Gesellschaft.
In 1741 she married for the third time and her literary activity ceased.
She died in Frankfurt an der Oder.

Libretti

Bach moved to Leipzig in 1723 to take up the post of Thomaskantor. In this role he set about composing a large number of cantatas for performance in the city's churches. There is some uncertainty about who was writing Bach's libretti in his first couple of years in Leipzig.
Whoever his original librettist was, Bach appears to have been looking for a new librettist in 1724, and this may be when he met Ziegler.
The nine cantatas set by Bach to texts by Ziegler are:
The question arises why Bach turned to other librettists. There were still texts by Ziegler unset. She published a cyle of cantata texts in 1728, the texts set by Bach and others not set by him.
John Eliot Gardiner suggests that the relationship between the two may have been strained by Bach's habit of amending her texts to suit his purposes. There also seem to be some examples of lack of communication when Bach sets Ziegler's words by adapting music he had composed earlier.