I’ll state right at the beginning that it was the Gardiner recording that opened my ears to the joys of this cantata, and it is one of those discs which I consider indispensable.  His incandescent third-movement gigue absolutely  crackles with life!

Clearly, the dance idiom, for me, takes center stage, and at least one List member agrees:

“As to the dance element, the time signatures alone of the three movements lend themselves to such possibilities: 3/4, 2/4, and 12/8 respectively. The third movement chorale fantasia is classified as a gigue in Little-Jenne Dance and the Music of Bach and Finke-Hecklinger Dance Character in the Music of JSB. Imagine, dancing hymns! Why not. Bach sacred and secular cantatas are replete with dance elements, not just because they make good music but, I think, as Bach thumbing his nose at the Pietists, having his cake and eating it too! Remember all those dancing choruses and arias finding their way from dramma per musica to the parodied feast day oratorios, as well as those great closing choruses in the Leipzig Oratorio Passions: sarabande in BWV 244, minuet in BWV 245, and gigue in BWV 247, uniting a time to mourn and a time to dance.
As for Bach spicing up his cake with a little hanky-panky, that's quite possible. Virtually all of Bach's sacred and secular wedding cantatas, according to Finke-Heckling, have dance movements: BWV 196/4, 216/5,7; 202/3,7,9; 195/1, 117/3,7; 120a; 97/2,7; 100/3-5; 210/2,4,8; 197a/3, and 195/1. Caveat amoritus et musicantus!”

And continuing with the exploration of the dance element, another list member picked up on earlier comments and submitted this marvelous post: “[T]his led me to think about the dance rhythms in Bach, generally speaking.
My discussion takes a bit of a circuitous route here, but while I have been letting the topic free float in my mind I have been working on two projects. The first is the decoration of a bushel gourd - and thinking about the use of musical instruments in primal religion and society made from these objects of nature. A few weeks ago I had the unique but brief opportunity to visit with a Native American Indian medicine woman. She happened to be at the gourd farm in Casa Grande, Arizona, when we took our granddaughter to explore the bins of vegetables that are nature's canvas. This lovely woman about my age was purchasing gourds to make instruments for the Native American Indian ceremonials. To just add a word about these events, they are designed as healing festivities which bring restoration and harmony to the people. That being a very brief comment, I have also been studying a book on Navajo (American Indian) philosophy, and the combination of these factors and thinking about J. S. Bach using dance rhythms reminded me that he often selected dance rhythms as a basis for his many organ works, and they are often found in the cantatas. (Buxtehude, too, I believe.) I don't know if people will think my analogy goes too far here, but I have an idea Bach found life and healing in these rhythms.
To come a little more into context, the rhythms of the dance, though varied are well documented in the Hebrew worship in scripture directly or indirectly as one looks at the cadence of verses and stories. The people of God danced...but we also have the fateful story of the dance before the golden calf so the dance matters but discretion is a factor. I will bear correction on this if warranted. By the time [of] the Christian scriptures I can't recall worship in this fashion, but maybe this is a senior moment.
Were Bach's rhythm's libidinous, as has been suggested, or were they a product of the wholeness of life and creation in a healing fashion?
Incidentally, though the topic hasn't really come up in a while, the matter of Bach's twenty children surfaces from time to time. This discussion has largely come from the male contingent in our group, but I got to thinking about the fact that Bach also happened to marry women who were perhaps for that time unique in their capacity for bearing so many children. It takes two to tango, as the expression goes, and birth, maturation, marriage and children all fall ((neatly)) into the plan of creation. I think Bach was awfully smart and ever so aware—and certainly not afraid to use the common meter for communication musically.”

A third correspondent returned to the gender question and its specific overtones of homoerotic confusion, and then extended it to implications of the erotic impulse in the cantatas in general: “In many cantatas, there is a real question of eroticism and its musical expression. 'Komm in mein Herzenshaus' from Cantata 80 is full of unavoidable double-entendres despite its allegorical dress. Even more ‘shocking’ are the two duets in Wachet Auf. This is music of full-blown eroticism (no pun intended) — the opening duet is as sexy as the closing duet of Monteverdi's Poppea. And then add to the mix that this is a schoolboy soprano singing to an adult bass and you are right in the centre of this Baroque fascination. At modern performances of Wachet Auf, I've seen female sopranos and male basses hamming it up as if it was an opera performance. That's not what Bach's congregations saw or heard. I suspect we can never recover how Bach's listeners heard music like this.”

Understandably, perhaps, there are those who stubbornly adhere to the ‘stylized’ interpretation of Bach’s dance movements, i.e., “I personally think that the 'dances' under consideration are so stylized that it is often questionable whether they meet the requirements of the eponymous dance, much less remind the listener of same...”

That’s a sentiment which I clearly do NOT share, as is evident by my response —

“But does the fact that a dance form is ‘stylized’ mean that one now has license to rob the music of the rhythmic pulse that is the essence of dance? Certainly, there may be other factors that might dictate such a choice, but in the absence of those factors, I see no justification for stripping the music of its vigor.  One doesn't have to be able to actually physically dance the piece, but there is nothing wrong with communicating a sense of the potentiality for movement. One qualification of that, I guess, might be with respect to dance movements in the cantatas, where the church fathers might want to discourage eighteenth-century Lutherans from dancing jigs in the aisles at Sunday services!”

The issue unresolved (surprise! surprise!), a List member left us with the following thoughts:

“There are really two questions here:

1) Was actual courtly dance music performed with the same tempos, articulation and dynamics as the ‘dance’ movements in the Brandenburg Concertos? If I’m not mistaken, we don't have any Bach scores for music which accompanied dancing. It's interesting to look at Mozart's orchestrated marches and dances which were clearly practical dance music with very little artfulness — not too many notes! When these forms appear in the operas and symphonies, they are given a degree of refinement and development which just doesn't exist in the sock hop music. Without Bach's dance music to compare, it's impossible to be conclusive, but the dance forms in the keyboard works have become sophisticated art forms.

2) What were the practical performance differences between sacred music and secular music? Was the secular cantata, Tonet Ihr Pauken, played differently when it became ‘Jauchzet Frohlocket’ in the Christmas Oratorio? Were tempos slower and more ‘solemn’, was there less frivolous ornamentation, was articulation smoothed out to sound like antique polyphony? I find it hard to believe that Bach performed the same music in two different ways. And this is where I think that Mattheson and his contemporaries over-emphasized differences in the two styles — differences which didn't exist practically — in order to deflect criticism from non-musicians that impious secular music was creeping into the church and displacing traditional music.”

This same post closed with an intriguing image:

“Dance sidebar: At last year's Toronto International Bach Festival under Helmut Rilling, the intern conductors were treated to a morning of practical dance instruction in gavottes, minuets and the like by the period choreographer of Opera Atelier. I hope they conduct better than they dance.”