The two hundred or so church cantatas that Bach wrote and performed during his early appointments and, later, in Leipzig from 1723 until the 1740s are formally varied. Each is a miniature jewel, and all are fascinating in terms of the way in which words and music enter into a new, more intense and more transcendent relationship in their pursuit of theological interpretation. Bach’s engagement with Luther’s chorales led to the composition of thirteen cantatas that we recorded in their entirety and that were released in 2017 to mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation.
We are now turning our attention to the annual cycle of chorale cantatas that Bach performed between Trinity Sunday 1724 and Easter 1725. Even though it is incomplete, it remains arguably the most comprehensive of his annual cycles. What is beyond doubt is that this second cantata cycle is far more unified than the others in terms of its compositional aesthetic and formal design. These cantatas owe their unity to the way they are structured: as the basis of each of them Bach has chosen a hymn that begins and ends the cantata. The opening movement is set as a large-scale chorale fantasia, while the final movement is a simple harmonization. For the hymn’s intermediary strophes Bach uses musical forms such as recitative and aria that are typical of the cantata as a genre. Here he combines the form of the Central German chorale cantata that had been cultivated by his predecessor as cantor at St Thomas’s with more modern forms inspired by Italian opera. By strictly adhering to this principle, Bach ruled out the possibility of falling back on existing compositional material with
the result that practically all of the cantatas in this particular cycle are newly composed. With regard to their formal variety these cantatas, too, continue to raise questions for their interpreters, questions that we have once again sought to answer by proposing a number of tentative solutions.
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