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.
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”!
Of the 206 surviving Cantatas, 172 were written for the Leipzig choir.
Forkel's knowledge is very incomplete.
Elsewhere Forkel mentions only one of the secular Cantatas.
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.
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.
Supra, p. 60.
Bach wrote eighteen Preludes for Beginners. They are all in P. bk. 200.
Most of these movements, which Bach called indifferently “Inventions” (ideas) and “Praeambula” (Preludes), were written in 1723. They are in P. bk. 201.