Baroque sacred music - part two - Bach's Cantatas

Cantata, the Lutheran Church music to be performed during religious ceremonies, often on each Sunday. Cantata (from Italian word, cantare=to sing) was written to Bible words, in native language, so that all people could sing it in the Church. This is obviously contrasting with the preceding tradition of Latin words used exclusively in the Church singing. The Cantata was not only about Bible words singing, it was like a sermon contained within music, since each particular Sunday in the life of the Church had special themes to deliberate upon. So, a Cantata was a good way to convey the interpretation of Bible words chosen for the special occasions, since people sung these words and they were thus engraved firmly in their minds. Cantata was then a sort of a community opera. And even if most of the people didn't sing too good (!) it connected them together in the spiritual realm. A good functional music, in other words.

One of the most famous Cantata writers during the Baroque era was, not unsurprisingly, Johann Sebastian Bach. His work accomplishment when it comes to the amount of cantatas is staggering. Was this his wish, to write so many church operas? Not really, it was simply his job, and he might have been forced to write cantatas for each Sunday service. Indeed, he wrote about 350 cantatas in total, but many of them have been lost, used for wrapping food by the bakers or other strange purposes way other than musical performances. And he not only wrote sacred Cantatas, as some of them are secular, e.g. Coffee Cantata or Peasant Cantata (BWV 211 and 212 respectively). Other Baroque composers who wrote cantatas include G.P. Telemann, C. Graupner, and J. Mattheson.

A special thing about cantatas was to harmonize the traditional coral melodies, and they are studied by probably all composers and music composition students. They are simply very good, and one can learn a lot from them, so if you are going to study music harmony don't get surprised if the book or the course you are taking contains a section about Bach's coral harmonization. They are there because they are good to study, and they are just superb. Fine art at its best. Use it to your advantage.

Bach's cantatas are composed of several movements, although there is no general pattern that he followed. However, his cantatas commonly included sinfonias (kind of musical interludes), choruses on Biblical texts that all people sung (or, were supposed to), arias, recitatives, and duets. Cantatas could be sung in parts, both before and after the spoken sermon of the priest. For an individual treatment and introduction to all Bach's cantatas look in these places:

http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/works/bachjs/cantindx.html
http://www.bach-cantatas.com/

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