later, the St. Thomas School deposited the original performance part manuscripts of the chorale cantata cycle in the Bach Archive in Leipzig, for conservation. Carl von Winterfeld's description of the cantata, published in 1847, focuses mostly on the composition's opening movement. Writing in the second half of the 19th century, Philipp Spitta listed 35 Bach chorale cantatas in alphabetical order in the second volume of his biography Johann Sebastian Bach, but assumed that all these works were composed late in Bach's career. He wrote: "In these thirty-five cantatas a series of the most beautiful and the best known Protestant chorales of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is subjected to elaborate treatment." He noted that in , the chorale, which was not originally written for the occasion of the Annunciation, had to be connected by expanded poetry to the topic of the feast. Building on Spitta's educated guesswork about the time of origin of Bach's church cantatas—which was later proven to be largely mistaken—Reginald Lane Poole listed the cantata as the last one composed by Bach, thus ranging it as a very mature work. In the 1906 , the third yearbook of the Neue Bachgesellschaft, Woldemar Voigt wrote about the cantata: The same volume presents an overview of performances of Bach's works between late 1904 and early 1907: two are listed for , one in Leipzig, and one at the Bethlehem Bach Festival in Pennsylvania. Albert Schweitzer, in his book J. S. Bach, published in 1908 and translated in 1911, still dated the chorale cantatas to 1734 and later. Schweitzer wrote in a short passage about the first movement of that Bach's "music converts the text into an expression of mystical exuberance. In the orchestral accompaniment the themes of the separate hues of the chorale are largely employed as motives." In 1950, the cantata was listed as BWV1 in the . Dürr's comprehensive study of the chronology of Bach's cantatas was first published in the late 1950s: in it, the cantata's time of origin was fixed to Bach's second year in Leipzig. In preparation of the 2018 Bachfest Leipzig, three Bach experts were asked to name their favourites among Bach's cantatas: Gardiner, Michael Maul (then the festival's new director), and Peter Wollny, the director of the Bach Archive. 15 cantatas appeared in the lists of all three, including . Publication The Bach-Gesellschaft chose as first composition in the first volume of