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The village Pomßen was probably established by Serbians, at least the place name has a Slavic origin. When the village was founded, is unknown. The first written mention dates back to 1255, where in a document called the Ritter Fridericus de Pomzin (Knights Fridericus de Pomzin). Since 1391 the village was written Pomssen although still not up to the 18th Century, other spellings were common.
Pomssen was one of the most important mansions in Saxony. Several hundred hectares of land belonged to the manor, and in the 16th century there were around 40 farmers' hooves. In 1439 Nikel von Pflugk received Pomßen from Burggrafen Georg von Leisnig zu Lehen. Members of the Pflugk family resided until 1534 at the Wasserburg (Moated Castle) of Pomßen. In 1529 first Protestant church visitation took place in the village, and introduced the new faith in the local parish.
In 1536 Hans von Ponickau purchased Pomßen. From then on, the family Ponickau was for almost two and a half centuries in the possession of the village. During the 16th century the Ponickaus had even comverted the Wasserburg into a Schloss, which in the 19th century was modified to a neoclassical building. The last owner of the village Pomßen had been, since the end of the 19th Century, the princes of Schonberg-Waldenburg. The Schönburg were confiscated in 1945 during the land reform.
During the Thirty Years War, the village was looted in 1642 by the Swedes. In the Seven Years War and the time of the Battle of Nations in 1813, there was fighting around the town and the villagers had to suffer from billeting. On October 20, 1943 Pomßen was bombed from the air, leading to the destruction of some houses.
Pomßen in the past was a very large and populous village. Already in 1834 there were nearly 600 people, in 1939 the village had 900 residents in 1950 with 1,145 and reached its highest human population, due to the influx of many refugees. Since then the population has steadily declined. The last official census of independent community Pomßen shows that in 1990 688 inhabitants.
In 1994 Pomßen with some outlying villages united to town Parthenstein. |
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On October 31, 1726, Johann Christoph von Ponickau, chamberlain, court counsellor and appeal judge, died at the age of 75 and a few days later was buried in the family vault at the Church of Pomßen. He had been a personality of high repute and in many ways Saxony had been indebted to him. We do not know whether he had any direct links with J.S. Bach. In Christian Friedrich Henrici (Picander)'s collection of verse, however, we find an extended funeral ode on his death, followed immediately by the text of the cantata Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn!, BWV 157. It thus seems possible that Picander had a hand in commissioning the cantata from J.S. Bach. This work was performed at a solemn memorial service at Pomßen Church on February 6, 1727. According to the commemoration print of the sermon (though not in Picander), this funeral music had a second part, performed 'after the sermon', namely the cantata Liebster Gott, vergiflt du mich, BWV Anh. I 209. That work had been written for the 7th Sunday after Trinity to a text from Georg Christian Lehms's collection Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer, which required only slight alterations for the funeral service.Evidently, then, J.S. Bach reused an existing setting of this Lehms text, presumably one that he had composed himself.
Only the setting of Picander's text ('before the sermon') survives, however, and even then only in later manuscript copies which specify the Feast of the Purification as the occasion of the work. It seems that J.S. Bach revived it, at some time after it had fulfilled its original purpose, as an independent cantata for this Marian feast. The change of occasion was unproblematic, for the Purification.
In February 1727 J.S. Bach came to Pomßen to perform on an obsequies. This took place in the romantic purfied church that was probably built in the 13th century. Here stands the oldest organ of Saxony.
Source: Alfred Dürr: The Cantatas of J.S. Bach, Revised and translated into English by Richard D.P. Jone (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 766-767
Reisewege zu Bach - Travelling Ways to Bach (Michael Imhof Verlag, 2003), p. 105 |
