This radiantly joyous work was composed for the twentieth Sunday after Trinity in 1726, being first performed on November 26. As with a number of the cantatas Bach composed for the Trinity season in 1726, BWV 49 ("I go and seek with longing"), is a cantata for solo voices, in this instance set as a dialogue for soprano (the Soul, or bride) and bass (Jesus, the bridegroom). It opens with a substantial instrumental movement in concerto form later revised by the composer to become the final movement of the Harpsichord Concerto in E major, BWV 1053. Here, the solo obbligato part is given to the organ, as it is in the sinfonia (which would eventually form the first movement of the same harpsichord concerto) to Cantata 169 of two weeks earlier. The anonymous librettist bases the theme of the cantata on the mystical marriage between Christ and the Soul, taking as its point of departure the Gospel for the day (Matthew 22:1-14), which relates Jesus' parable of the wedding of the king's son. Much of the text is indebted to the highly perfumed and sensual language of the Song of Solomon, imagery to which Bach responded by writing music of rare expressive ardency as the Soul is called (one might almost say seduced) by Christ. The structure of several of the numbers is unusually flexible, the da capo of the first aria being persistently interrupted by the soprano's questioning that forms the central section, while the following recitative flows without pause into an ecstatic love duet. The final number is another duet in which the soprano's cantus firmus is a strophe from Philip Nicolai's lovely hymn "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern," sung against a freely composed da capo aria for bass.

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