durr a. the cantatas of j. s. bach

[...]... characterize the most important of them according to their origin 3 A graphic description of these disputes over the introduction of the modern cantata is given in Spitta I, 463–80 (Eng trans., I, 468–86) the cantata before bach 7 For the delivery of the biblical Word by the choir, the most commonly used form from time immemorial was the motet Characteristic of this form since the sixteenth century was the. .. on the Holy Passion of our Redeemer, 1697) The true significance of the madrigal for the development of the Protestant church cantata lies not so much in the genre itself as in the suitability of madrigalian verse for the compositional forms of recitative and da capo aria, both of Italian extraction For the text of a recitative, or even that of an aria, is composed according to the poetic rules of the. .. scattered remains of others Almost two cycles—a good two-fifths of Bach s output of sacred cantatas are lost Even heavier are the losses in the sphere of the secular cantata, where the number of works known to have been lost exceeds the number that survive Any assertions we make about Bach s cantatas must therefore take into account the uncertainty that arises from reduced numbers The earliest Bach cantatas. .. introduction of the Italian cantata form into the Protestant church initiated a lively debate.3 Musicians took up the innovation enthusiastically and found themselves supported by the open enlistment of the orthodox clergy The Pietists, on the other hand, saw in the adoption of opera-like elements of form an inadmissible invasion of worldliness into the divine service, and they waged war on it of the most... the time Bach s Weimar output of cantatas was complete, the forms of the Bach cantata—both those of the individual movement and of the overall work—were, in all essentials, established What was new in Cöthen and Leipzig was, above all, an expansion of the existing forms and variation of the available possibilities A fundamental transformation, however, such as took place in Weimar from the old to the. .. curious how often we find apparently sudden rearrangements and contradictions in relation to the date of the texts (by Salomo Franck) in the sources of many of these cantatas (BWV 199, 182, 172, 21, 31, 185, 161 and 162) This raises the question whether or not Bach might have supplied cantatas not only to the court of Weimar but to some other ensemble elsewhere.8 Klaus Hofmann, however, favours the assumption... culmination is inextricably linked with the name of Johann Sebastian Bach Artistic peaks generally owe their origins to a happy concurrence of various contributory factors Hence a variety of causes may be adduced for the cultivation of the Protestant church cantata Perhaps the most important of these is the theology of Martin Luther The conviction that God’s Word, as laid down in the Bible, is dead and ineffectual... parts of the divine service best suited to assuming a sermon-like character Up to the Reformation, the Ordinary of the Mass had for centuries stimulated composers to ever-new settings But now Bible readings came to the fore: sometimes the Epistle, but more often the Gospel, which had long been prescribed for clerics as the obligatory text of their sermon at the main service Even in the Lutheran Church these... Heinrich Schütz At the heart of the Protestant service lies the sermon Here, according to Luther, the proclamation of God’s Word becomes a reality The history of church music from Schütz to Bach is thus an account of the influx into liturgical singing of sermon-like interpretative and exegetical elements The simplest way of interpreting a text is to repeat parts of it in order to give them special prominence:... fertile development during the seventeenth century and became one of the immediate forerunners of the cantata The first publication in this field was the epoch-making Cento concerti ecclesiastici by the Italian Ludovico Grossi da Viadana (Venice, 1602) The make-up of these sacred concertos is that of the motet with a reduced number of voices The earliest evidence for the reception of this style in German . church cantatas for other purposes or for no fixed occasion, and finally the secular cantatas. As far as possible the commentaries on the individual cantatas are formulated so that each is readable independently. Ideally,. class="bi x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" The Cantatas of J. S. Bach The Cantatas of J. S. Bach with their librettos in german–english parallel text ALFRED DÜRR Revised and translated by RICHARD D. P. JONES 1 3 Great. Aufführungstätigkeit von 1736 bis 1750’, BJ 1988, 7–72 NBA Neue Bach- Ausgabe: J. S. Bach, Neue Ausgabe s mtlicher Werke (Kassel and Leipzig, 1954 ff.). Series I: Cantatas; Series II: Masses, Passions &