This Sunday completes a full year of listening to Bach’s Cantatas.
I’ve been doing that week by week through the church year. I started at Advent Sunday 2010 and have worked my way through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost and all those Trinity Sundays. We’re back to joyful Advent again on Sunday.
Each one tends to last more or less than twenty minutes, and usually consists of two or three arias linked by recitative. They often start with a complex choral movement and end with a simpler setting of a German chorale. So soloists, chorus and small orchestra are needed. Each was composed based on the designated Bible texts for that Sunday.
Bach wrote several cycles of church cantatas at different stages of his working life, the earliest in 1707 and the last in 1745. That’s some 180 separate compositions. (There are another 70 or so written mostly for secular occasions that I’ll listen to in coming weeks.)
It’s undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary, still mostly neglected, achievements in the history of Western music. Not that Bach was a great innovator. What he did was to explore the potentialities of the kind of music that existed in his lifetime. He was endlessly creative within those limits.
I have a heard a range of different performers, but mostly recordings directed by Pieter Jan Leusink, Philippe Herreweghe, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt. It’s a collection that I’ve assembled over 35 years.
My pattern has been to listen to one cantata each day, first thing in the morning, before the rest of the house has stirred. And then to have breakfast.
It has been an amazing, life-enhancing journey.
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