Bist du bei mir

"Bist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden" (When you are near, I go with joy) is an aria from Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's opera Diomedes. The aria is best known as "Bist du bei mir", BWV 508, a version for voice and continuo found as No. 25 in the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach.

In 1717–18 Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel was for a short time court Kapellmeister in Bayreuth. There his opera Diomedes, a.k.a. Die triumphierende Unschuld (the triumphant innocence), was premiered on 16 November 1718. Apart from a few arias the music of this opera is lost. A version for soprano, strings and continuo of its aria "Bist du bei mir" survives in an 18th-century manuscript owned by the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin.

In 1725 Johann Sebastian Bach started the second notebook for his second wife Anna Magdalena. A version for voice and continuo of "Bist du bei mir" is among the pieces Anna Magdalena wrote down in that notebook. That version, No. 25 in the notebook, is known as BWV 508.

In an essay in the Bach-Jahrbuch 2002, Andreas Glöckner speculates that Anna Magdalena either obtained the song from the inventory of the Leipzig Opera that had gone bankrupt in 1720, or that it was simply a favourite known to nearly everyone in Leipzig that was particularly suitable for Hausmusik.

The continuo part of the BWV 508 version of "Bist du bei mir" is more agitated and continuous in its voice leading than that of the extant orchestral version of the aria. It is unknown who provided the BWV 508 arrangement, but it is usually assumed to have been Johann Sebastian Bach.

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