Luogo e data di registrazione		Queekhoven, Breukelen (Holland) - 8/9 Febbraio 1964
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9465-B (Stereo) - AWT 9465-C (Mono) | 1 LP - durata 31' 56" | (p) 1965 | ANA
	Edizione CD		Teldec Classics "Secular Cantatas" | LC 6019 | 3984-25710-2 | 11 CDs - [CD 3: Tracks 10-17 | (c) 2000 | ADD Teldec Classics | LC 6019 | 3984-21711-2 | 1 CD - durata 68' 48" | (c) 1998 | ADD | (BWV 209)
	Cover		Canaletto Belotto "Piazetta und Riva degli Schiavoni von der Meerseite" (Ausschnitt).
	Note		-

The cantata in the broadest sense of the word - whether as the church cantata pr the patrician, academic or courtly work of musical homage and festivity - accompanied the Arnstadt and Mühlhausen organist, the Weimar chamber musician and court organist, the Köthen conductor and finally the Leipzig cantor of St. Thomas'-Bach-all through his creative life, although with fluctuating intensity, with interruptions and vacillations that still are problems to musicological research down to this very day. The earliest preserved cantata ("Denn du wirst meine Seele nicht in der Hölle lassen") probably dates, if it really is by Bach, from the Arnstadt period (1704) and is still completely under the spell of North and Central Grman traditions. In the works of his Mühlhausen years (1707-08) - psalm cantatas, festive music for the changing of the cuncil and a funeral work (the "Actus tragicus") - we sense of the first time something of what raises Bach as a cantata composer so much higher than all his contemporaries: the abolity to analyse even the most feeble text with regard to its form and content, to grasp its theological significance and to interpret it out of its very spiritual centre in musical "speech" that is infinitely subtle and infinitely powerful in effect. In Weimar (1708-17) new duties pushed the cantata right into the background to begin with. It was not until the Duke commissioned him to write "new pieces monthly" for the court services that Bach once more turned to the cantata during the years 1714-16, on texts written by Erdmann Neumeister and Salomo Franck. Barely thirty cantatas can be ascribed to these two years with a reasonable degree of certainty. It is most remarkable that, on the other and, no courtly funeral music has been preserved from the entire Weimar period, although there must have been a considerable demand for such works. It is conceivable that many a lost work, supplied with a new text by Bach himself, lives on among the Weimar church cantatas. In the years Bach spent at Köthen (1717-23), on the other hand, it is the composition of works for courtly occasions of homage and festivity that come to the fore entirely in keeping with Bahc's duties as Court Conductor. It is only during the last few months he spent at Köthen that we find him composing a series of church cantatas once again, and these were already intended for Leipzig. It was in Leipzig that the majoritz of the great church cantatas came into being, all of them - according to the most recent research - during his first few years of office at Leipzig and comprising between three and a maximum of five complete series for all the Sundays and feast days of the ecclesiastic year. But just as suddently as it began, this amazing creative flow, in which this magnificent series of cantatas arose, appears to have ended again. It is possible that Bach's regular composition of cantatas stopped as early as 1726; from 1729 at the latest it is evident that other tasks largely absorbed his creative energy, particularly the direction of the students' Collegium Musicum with its perpetual demand for fashionable instrumental music. More than 50 cantatas for courtly and civic occasions have indeed been recorded from later years, but considered over a  period of 24 years and compared with the productivity of his first years in Leipzig they do not amount to very much. We are left with the picture of an enigmatic silence in a sphere which has ever counted as the central category in Bach's creative output. But we only need cast a superficial glance at the more than 200 of the master's cantatas that have come down to us in order to see that this conception of their position in Bach's total output is fully justified. Bach has investigated their texts with regard to both their meaning and their wording with incomparable penetration, piercing intellect and unshakeable faith, whether they are passages from the Bible, hymnus, sacred poems by his contemporaries or sacredly trimmed poetry for courtly occasions. He has transformed and interpreted these texts through his music with incomparable powers of invention and formation, he has revealed their essence and, at the same time, translated the imagery and emotional content of each of their ideas into musical images and emotions. The perfect blending of word and note, the combination of idea synthesis and depiction of each detail of the text, the joint effect of the baroque magnificence of the musical forms and the highly differentiated attention to detail, the skillful balance between contrapuntal, melodic and harmonic means in the service of the word and, not least, the inexhaustible fertility and greatness of a musical imagination that is able to create from the most feeble 'occasional' text a world of musical characters - all this is what raises the cantata composer Bach so much higher than is own and every other age and their historically determined character, and imparts a lasting quality to his works. It is not their texts alone and not their music alone that makes them immortal - it is the combination of word and note into a higher unit, into a new significance that first imparts to them the power of survival and makes them what they are above all else: perfect works of art.