This page was created by James A. Brokaw II.  The last update was by Elizabeth Budd.

Commentaries on the Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach: An Interactive Companion

How to Navigate This Interactive Digital Edition

This interactive digital edition on the IOPN Scalar platform presents all of Hans-Joachim Schulze’s commentaries on the fully preserved cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach known to exist in 2006, when Schulze’s book was first published. 

Schulze's introductions to the Bach cantatas began in 1990 as a series of broadcasts on the German radio network Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk (MDR). Each broadcast treated a single cantata as a freestanding discussion. As such, the broadcasts necessarily repeated background information as to occasion, Gospel reading, and so forth. When he published his book, rather than include the repeated material, Schulze frequently omitted them and included page redirects instead. 

I fully expect that readers will consult these essays singly or in many different combinations, and so I have restored the repetitions, to make the essays entirely freestanding again.

Within each essay my annotations and those of the author appear in a single series of numeric footnotes. My own are labeled with "—Trans."

All essays are accessible through the table of contents. Look for the "bullet-point" icon in the upper left corner of the screen. I've devised several different "ways into" content, ranging from church calendar occasion to chronology, to genre, as well as indexes by title and BWV.

To print any essay, simply right-click on the body of the essay, and select "print" from the context menu that pops up.

Excellent video recordings of the cantatas can be found at Bachipedia.

The Structure of This Digital Edition 

I have worked to create a simple, intuitively obvious structure by which the reader can interrogate and access the essays in a number of different ways. In this digital edition "paths" can link essay pages in a linear fashion like chapters in a book. When following a path, you’ll find a blue button at the bottom of each essay page that will take you to the next page in the path. "Tags" can link essays to one another in a nonlinear fashion, like hashtags in a blog post. Tags can be found in blue font at the bottom of essay pages.

Table of Contents

The Table of Contents begins with four parallel series of nested paths:

Sacred Cantatas for the Liturgical Calendar; Particular Occasions; Oratorios; Secular Cantatas for Patrons, Institutions and Nonliturgical Occasions Courts, Nobility and Citizenry

This set of nested paths classify the cantatas by the church calendar or particular occasion, or, for secular works, the sponsoring court, patron or institution. Within each topic the cantatas appear in chronological order, mirroring the structure of Schulze’s book and the Bach Compendium. Where appropriate, this chronological order is updated according to the latest edition of the Bach-Werke Verzeichnis (BWV3).

Bach's Sacred Cantatas: A Chronological View

Here the essays can be viewed chronologically, in groups according to the cities in which Bach worked. The cantata essays are ordered by date of first performance, EXCEPT for the pre-Weimar cantatas since so little is certain regarding their chronology. Instead, these cantatas are ordered according to their Bach-Compendium number (BC).

Bach's Chorale Cantatas

This rubric includes the Chorale Cantata Annual Cycle, distinguishing those cantatas composed during Bach’s second year at Leipzig before he broke off work on the cycle from those added to the cycle in subsequent years. In addition, the group includes the four chorale cantatas without stated purpose.

Librettists

Since Schulze foregrounds the evolution of the texts used by Bach in his discussions, the third rubric in the table of contents groups cantata essays by librettist, in those cases where the author is known.

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