Bach's Church Cantatas Dated: An Interim Report

Abstract

cantatas [of J. S. Bach] are a field so enormous, and of such uniform excellence, that it is the merest fluke which of them gets exploited first, as far as their beauty is concerned. 1 These words of Tovey are as true now as when he wrote them twenty-five and more years ago. For performer and scholar alike, this vast treasury of sacred music has become more available in recent years, through recordings, through published editions, and not least through Wolfgang Schmieder's detailed index of the works of Bach.2 In one important respect, however, the Schmieder catalogue is already outmoded. The dating of Bach's cantatas has progressed remarkably since the end of World War Two. Only very few of these cantatas bear a date in the composer's hand. Scholars have nevertheless succeeded in most cases in ascertaining at least the approximate time of composition. Changes in Bach's handwriting, certain watermarks in the paper, and the date of publication of the libretto, have offered valuable clues. 3 Karl Geiringer, writing this as late as 1954, then goes on, like Bukofzer,4 to discuss Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen (Cantata 56) as a composition after 1730 and Jesu, der du meine Seele (Cantata 78) as around 1740. But it is now known that 78 was performed as early as 1724, and 56 as early as 1726. There have been several tantalizing references in English to these new discoveries. In the Publisher's Note on page ix of Whittaker's two-volume work on the cantatas published in 1959, one reads: