Like so many composers of his day, J.S. Bach was not at all afraid to reuse good musical material. Sometimes he plundered the same source more than once; this is the case with the music from which he drew the Cantata No. 169, Gott soll allein mein Herz haben, BWV 169, of 1726—a now-lost oboe (or possibly viola) concerto. It is the source not only for two of the numbers in BWV 169 but also for the Harpsichord Concerto in E major, BWV 1053 from about ten years later. Gott soll allein mein Herz haben was composed for the eighteenth Sunday after Trinity (which fell on October 20 in 1726) and is a setting of an anonymous text.

Bach uses a medium-sized ensemble in BWV 169: solo alto, two oboes (really oboes d'amore), oboe da caccia (or taille), strings, organ obbligato, and four-part chorus. The opening sinfonia and No. 5, the aria "Stirb in mir" ("Die in me"), are the two portions of music extracted from the lost oboe/viola concerto; each is a whole step lower than its counterpart in the later Harpsichord Concerto (E and C sharp minor in the harpsichord work are D and B minor, respectively, in the cantata). In the sinfonia, the organ obbligato is honored with the task of reproducing the original solo part. In "Stirb in mir," things are not quite so simple: the organ and the alto soloist offer, simultaneously, slightly different versions of the original solo line—sometimes their two versions line up note-by-note, but sometimes, usually so that the alto might better carry the text, they diverge and become counterpoints to one another. Bach sets a new text to an old melody, that of the Lutheran hymn "Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist," in the final chorale, "Du süsse Liebe."

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