Fall 2014 Offering

Power and Majesty in Music:

The Cantatas of J.S. Bach, Part II

The Leipzig Cycles

(Ten weeks beginning on September 24/25)

Part I of this series, Power and Majesty in Music: The Cantatas of J.S. Bach, traced the development of Bach’s some 200 sacred and 16 secular cantatas, demonstrating the richness of Bach’s extraordinary musical imagination and penetrating union of words and music; in Bach’s hands, the genre of the cantata, already a lyric and even dramatic counterpoint to opera and oratorio, became not only a high pointing 18th century Protestant Germany, but had no rival among Baroque composers for daring and power on every level.

Part II will trace the extraordinary sequence of cantatas Bach wrote in his first two years in Leipzig following his official induction as Thomascantor in 1723.  As John Eliot Gardiner comments, having made his own now famous Bach Cantata Pilgrimage which likewise follows this sequence, “Bach set off at a pace of weekly church-cantata composition so furious that probably no one – not even he, with his extraordinary reserves of creative energy and powers of concentration – could sustain it for more than a couple of years (as indeed he didn’t).”

It is these extraordinary two years of composition that this course will examine, with little or no repetition of works examined in the broader survey of Part I.  As Gardiner continues: “Now approaching the zenith of his powers, Bach poured some of his most striking creative energy into their individual shaping, voicing and content.  What has come down to us …is a procession of gripping musical works of exceptional worth,”- in fact forty new cantatas for Cycle I, fifty-two new cantatas for Cycle II.

Following selected cantatas in their proper yearly sequence will not only illuminate their exceptional worth but also demonstrate something else quite extraordinary – their links to the rhythm of the seasons – or, once again in Gardiner’s words, “the indissoluble connections between the music and its place in the season and often between the music of one week and that of the next, like arcs of a circle being drawn and re-drawn.”

Come join us for this miraculous musical journey.

Register for Power and Majesty in Music: The Cantatas of J.S. Bach, Part II

The Leipzig Cycles