Bach crowned his career with a 27-year period as Director of Music at St. Thomas’s School in Leipzig. One of his primary responsibilities was providing cantatas for weekly services in the city’s major churches. At that time, a cantata was generally considered a vocal work with instrumental accompaniment, divided into choruses, arias, and recitatives. For Leipzig, Bach planned (and probably completed) a five-year cycle of church cantatas, some 260 works in all. About three-fifths of them have survived. They cover an enormous range of styles, forms, and purposes: jubilant, mournful, and humorous; sacred and secular; straightforward and complex; brief and expansive. He composed this example during his term in Anhalt-Cöthen, intending for it to be performed on the final Sunday of Shrovetide. He may have used it as one of the test pieces for the position in Leipzig.

Program note by Don Anderson.