Luogo e data di registrazione		Hervormde Kerk, Bennebroek (Holland) - 9/13 Giugno 1966
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9496-A | 1 LP - durata 35' 19" | (p) 1967 | ANA
	Edizione CD		Warner Classics "Das Alte Werk | LC 04281 | 2564-64763-2 | 1 CD - durata 66' 44" | (c) 2013 | ADD
	Cover		Princess Eberhardine, Wife of Augustus I, unknown master of the 18th century.
	Note		-

In spite of the widespread interest in and knowledge of Bach’s work nowadays, the “Funeral Ode” still remains one of the least known works of this former Cantor of St. Thomas’ Leipzig. This is understandable if one considers the text on its own - written for a particular occasion in a particular age - but not understandable when one appreciates what Bach did with the text. The work was probably written in Leipzig in the short time of two weeks in October 1727 and was completed on the 15th of that month. A month earlier on the 5th of September 1727 the Electress of Saxony and Queen of Poland, Christiane Eberhardine, had died. Unlike her husband, Frederick Augustus II, she had remained a Protestant, and after his conversion in 1697 withdrew to her Palace at Pretzsch, near Wittenberg. As a defender of her faith she enjoyed the highest esteem and love in predominantly Protestant Saxony and especially in Leipzig. It was only natural then that Leipzig should be the scene of a great Memorial Service. A student of noble descent, Carl von Kirchbach, took the initiative and extracted from the Elector the permission to hold a University service at which he intended to make the funeral oration. Funeral music was a requisite part of such a ceremony. Kirchbach asked no lesser persons than Gottsched to write the text and the Cantor of St. Thomas’ to compose the music. In making this request to Bach he passed over the University Cantor, Johann Gottlieb Görner, the person actually responsible for academical ceremonies. The latter promptly tried to get hold of the commission himself or at least. to be responsible for the performance, however, without success. On the 17th of October the bells of all the city churches tolled as the procession made its way to the University Church where the Memorial Service took place with great pomp and ceremony. Bach conducted the performance of his work from the harpsichord. The cantata in the broadest sense of the word - whether as the church cantata or 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 German traditions. In the works of his Mühlhausen years (1707-08) - psalm cantatas, festive music for the changing of the council and a funeral work (the “Actus tragicus”) - we sense for the first time something of what raises Bach as a cantata composer so much higher than all his contemporaries: the ability 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 turiied 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 hand, 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 Bach’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 mojority 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 ecclesiastical year. But just as suddenly 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, hymns, 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 to 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 contrapunctal, 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 his own and every other age and their historically determined character, and imparts a lasting quality of 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.