Luogo e data di registrazione		Vienna (Austria) - Mai 1967
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken - SAWT 9515-B - (1 LP) - durata 56' 21" - (p) 1968 - Analogico
	Edizione "Reference" CD		Tedec - 8.43631 ZS - (1 CD) - LC 3706 - durata 56' 21" - (c) 1987 - AAD
	Cover		Foto mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Museums für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
	Note		-

The cantata in the broadest sense of the word - whether as the church cantata or thepatrician academic or courtly work  of musical homage and festivity - accompanied the Arnstade 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 interrptions 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 whatraises Bach as a cantata composer so much higher than all his contemporaries: the ability to analyse even the most feeble test with regard to its form and content, to grasp its theological significance and to interpret it out of its veri spiritual centre in musical "speech" that is infinitely rubele 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 monthlz" 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 these 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 durch cantatas. In the years Bach spent at Köthen (1717-23), on the other hand, it is the composition of works for courtly occasions of hommage and festivity that come to te fore, entirely in kepping with Bach's duties as Court Conductor. It is inly during the last few ,omths he spent ak 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 majority 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 Sunday 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 at 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 silense in a sphere which has evercounted as the central category in Bach's creative outpout. But we only need cast a superficial glance at the more than 200 of the master's cantatas that have come down to us is order to see that this conception of their position in Bach's total output is fully justified. Bach has investifated their texts with regard to both their meraning and their wording with incimparable penetration, piercing intellect and unshakeable faith, wherther they are passages from the Bible, hymns, sacred poems by his contemporaries or sacredly trimmed poertry for courtly occasions. He has transformed and interpreted these texts throygh his music with incomparable powers of invention and formation, he has reealed their essence and, at the same time, translated the imagery and emotional content od each or 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, that 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 his 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.