Lost council election cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach
church cantata composed by Johann Sebastian Bach
In Johann Sebastian Bach's time, the election or inauguration of a new town council, normally an annual event, was celebrated with a church service. A cantata written for such occasion was indicated with the term Ratswahl (council election) or Ratswechsel (council change). Bach composed such cantatas for Mühlhausen and for Leipzig. Five of these cantatas (BWV 71, 119, 120.1, 29 and 69.2) are entirely extant. One further cantata, BWV 193.2, lost part of its music, and there are another five that have only been known to exist (two for Mühlhausen), or for which only the text is extant (three for Leipzig).
Bach worked in Mühlhausen from 1707 to 1708. His first council election cantata for that town was performed and printed in 1708. Two further works for council election in Mühlhausen, BWV 1138.1 (in 1709) and 1138.2 (in 1710) are documented. These latter works are entirely lost, in contrast to the first, BWV 71, of which both Bach's autograph and the contemporary print survive. During Bach's tenure as director musices in Leipzig, from 1723 to 1750, there were 27 instances where he had to provide music for the council election occasion.
“Lost council election cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach” enters the record as church cantata composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lost, council and election can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lost council election cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.