Penetrating to the heart of J.S. Bach

Popular opinion concerning those two great lights of the late Baroque — George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach — tends to land upside down. A lot of folks think of Handel as a great writer of religious music (primarily due to the oratorios "Israel in Egypt", "Saul", and above all, "Messiah"). Folks also tend to think of Johann Sebastian Bach primarily as a secular writer, based on the keyboard works like the Well-Tempered Clavier, the chamber music, and the big orchestral works like the Brandenburg Concertos.

But it's actually the other way around. Handel's output is by and large secular, mostly cantatas, operas, and oratorios based on religious subjects but not in and of themselves actually religious works. Even "Messiah" is a theatrical display piece, religious in the same sense that Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" is a religious movie, which is to say, not at all.

 Bach, on the other hand, was a writer of sacred music down to his toes. He was a church kapellmeister (music director) for most of his career, highly educated in Lutheran theology, and a man for whom the practice of music was just another facet of a life spent in pious observation. His secular music makes up a fairly small part of his overall output.

The lion's share of Bach's compositional output is in the form of medium-length works scored for voices and instrumental ensemble, intended for performance as part of a church service and generally contemplating the gospel message for that particular day of the church calendar. In the Lutheran tradition these were referred to only as the musik — not the most descriptive label around. Later generations have chosen the reasonably well-fitting term "cantata", typically applied to short poetic works for voice and instruments.

Bach wrote his first cantata during his earliest days as church musician, in the tiny town of Mühlhausen. Later, employed at the wealthy court of Weimar, Bach wrote a fair number of cantatas for church services. However, it wasn't until 1723 that he went into full power as a cantata composer, when he was hired as the Kapellmeister for the city of Leipzig, where he was responsible for church music at four churches, headed by the Thomaskirche, or St. Thomas Church.

Among his duties was the composition of cantatas for services, and from 1723 to about 1730 his output was staggering. He aimed to produce complete cycles of cantatas — that is, a separate cantata for each service on the church calendar. He managed to write two complete cycles, and a good part of a third. Combined with the products of his previous years, it came out to about 300 sacred cantatas.

Not all of them have survived to the present; fully 100 are irretrievably lost, thanks to the irresponsibility of Bach's oldest son Wilhelm Friedemann, who sold his share of his father's inheritance to a nobleman who then destroyed the lot. That's disheartening, to say the least. But nevertheless we have a full 200 sacred cantatas (and about 20 some-odd secular ones), and they stand as one of the glories of Western music.

Exploring the Bach Cantatas is not a trivial undertaking, but fortunately none of the individual cantatas are particularly long. It's the sum total of the thing that can seem overwhelming. Think of it as a musical twelve-step program: take it one cantata at a time. Fortunately, you can find the cantatas in either complete sets or individual recordings quite easily, and live performances are becoming much more common these days. (Check out the American Bach Soloists to see when they're next programming some cantatas.)

In the millennium year 2000, the English conductor John Eliot Gardiner took his crack ensembles, the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir, on a year-long pilgrimmage in which every single one of Bach's 200 cantatas were performed on the proper day of the church calendar. The journey took them all around Europe and America, including performances in Bach's own churches.

Happily, the entire pilgrimage was recorded. Unhappily, the original record company (Deutsche Grammophon) cancelled distributing the albums after about the first 10 or so. But Gardiner rallied, formed his own record company (Soli Deo Gloria) and is making the pilgrimage recordings available.

In addition, we've got a work-in-progress from Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan, at this point about halfway through, on Swedish label BIS. Dutch Baroque specialist Ton Koopman has completed his traversal of the cantatas, made available, like Gardiner's set, on an independent label once the parent label was no longer able to handle the distribution.

There are also numerous recordings of individual cantatas, as well as older sets (either complete or partial) from Gustav Leonhardt, Karl Richter, Helmut Rilling, and Piet Jan Leusink.

Here are some links:

• Soli Deo Gloria is the home page for the Gardiner set. The recordings may be ordered from there (including a subscription offer), or you may download them online. They are offered as iTunes Plus downloads on the iTunes Music Store, meaning better sound quality and no digital rights restrictions. CDs are available from the usual sources. (See the links to the left of this article.)
• Masaaki Suzuki's set with the Bach Collegium Japan is also available as iTunes Plus downloads on iTunes Music Store, and as CDs from standard sources.
• Ton Koopman's set can be purchased from Antoine Marchand records, or from standard online sources. iTunes Music Store offers them as iTunes Plus downloads.
• Helmut Rilling's set is on Hanssler Classic; iTunes Music Store offers some of the volumes as iTunes Plus downloads.
• The older Karl Richter set is available from Amazon on CD; overall, it seems to be falling out of print.
• The entire Leonhardt set can be had in a big boxed set on Amazon.
• Leusink's set is part of the Bach Complete works set, available from Amazon at an unbelievably low price.