162 As has been pointed out already (supra, p. 14) Bach’s earliest church Cantatas date from the Arnstadt period.
163 The statement certainly needs a caveat. No composer of his period studied his text more closely or reverently than Bach. No one, on the other hand, was more readily fired by a particular word or image in his text to give it sometimes irrelevant expression.
164 Of Bach’s church Cantatas 206 have survived. In only 22 of them does Bach fail to introduce movements based upon the Lutheran Chorals.
165 We must attribute to Forkel’s general ignorance of Bach’s concerted church music his failure to comment upon a much more remarkable feature of the recitatives, namely, their unique treatment of the human voice as a declamatory medium, a development as remarkable as Wagner’s innovations in operatic form a century later.
166 It was not the imperfections of the choir but the indifference of Bach’s successors at St. Thomas’, Leipzig, that was chiefly responsible for the neglect of his Cantatas in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Johann Friedrich Doles (1716-89) was the only Cantor who realised the greatness of his predecessor’s concerted church music.
167 The _Trauer-Ode_ was performed on October 17, 1727. Bach finished the score two days before the performance! A parallel case is that of Mozart, who finished the overture of _Don Giovanni_ on the morning of the first performance of the Opera, and actually played it unrehearsed that evening.
168 It has been pointed out already that Bach used the _St. Matthew Passion_ music, set to other words, for the occasion. No. 26 (“I would beside my Lord be watching”) was sung to the words “Go, Leopold, to thy rest”!
169 Of the 206 surviving Cantatas, 172 were written for the Leipzig choir.
170 Forkel’s knowledge is very incomplete.
171 Elsewhere Forkel mentions only one of the secular Cantatas.
172 There is a tradition that Bach wrote a comic song, _Ihr Schönen, höret an,_ which was widely current about the time of his death (Spitta, iii. 181 n.). The Aria, _So oft ich meine Tabakspfeife,_ in A. M. Bach’s _Notenbuch_ of 1725, should be mentioned. See B. G. xxxix. sec. 4.
173 Bach’s method has come down to us in treatises by two of his pupils, C. P. E. Bach’s _Essay_ and Kirnberger’s _Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik,_ to which reference has been made already.