Secular Works
Bach also wrote a few secular vocal works. Among these are several birthday, wedding and funeral cantatas—odes for important personages; some “Dramme per Musica,” two of which, the “Choice of Hercules,” and “Tönet ihr Pauken” are taken bodily from the Christmas Oratorio, other words being adapted to the music; a cantata for the dedication of a new organ at Störmthal, a comic cantata in praise of coffee. Some of the secular cantatas were composed for the Concert Society which met once a week about 1736 in a coffee-house in the Katharinen-strasse at Leipsic, and of which Bach was the director. Among these was “The strife between Phœbus and Pan.”
Smaller Masses and Magnificat
Besides the B minor Mass Bach wrote four “short” masses of much smaller calibre, four “Sanctus,” and a “Magnificat” in D major of great power and beauty. This work appears in two forms, of which one is much finer than the other, and is therefore considered to be the latest. It was the custom to intersperse the singing of the Latin Magnificat with four chorales, but this custom not coinciding with Bach’s sense of the fitness of things, he added the chorales as an appendix to his score.
The work is for a five part choir, with arias, a duet, and a trio. The trio is a remarkable canon, or rather piece of canonic imitation in the voice parts, to the words “suscepit Israel puerum suum,” to which the strings play an accompaniment, while the oboes play in their highest register the chorale “meine Seel’ erhebt den Herren” (“my soul doth magnify the Lord”). And, as showing Bach’s sense of form, the whole work is welded together by a fresh working of the material of the opening chorus, at the words “sicut erat in principio et nunc.... Amen.” We have remarked on this kind of construction in the second cantata of the Christmas Oratorio,[75] and it is not at all infrequent with Bach.
Except opera and oratorio Bach wrote every kind of work that was known in his day. The Bach Gesellschaft completed the publication of his works in full score in 1898 in some sixty large quarto volumes. Complete editions of the vocal works in pianoforte score and the instrumental in full score have been published by Peters, and by Breitkopf and Härtel of Leipsic, while the editions of selected portions published from time to time since the beginning of the nineteenth century are innumerable.
But when we say “complete edition” it must be understood as referring only to the works that have been preserved, for a large number seem to have been lost when the great man died: before his property was valued for probate there was an unseemly scramble for his manuscripts among his elder sons.
The “year courses”
Mizler, in his “Necrology,” tells us the bare fact that there were five “year courses” of cantatas, i.e. sets of cantatas for each Sunday and holy day throughout the year. The Lutheran ecclesiastical year contains fifty-nine such days (six Sundays in Lent and three in Advent are excluded). The five courses would therefore require no less than 295 cantatas. Of these W. Friedemann took three “year courses,” since he could use them in his post of organist at Halle, but his wretched circumstances forced him afterwards to part with them one by one.