ABSTRACT

In his 1835 introduction to the “Crucifixus” of Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-minor Mass, the English music editor William Ayrton stated: “[Bach’s] vocal works are much more likely to convey his name to distant ages than those of the instrumental kind…. [They] show he possessed genius as well as science.”1 Indeed, the vocal music of J. S. Bach has long fascinated performers and scholars alike. To cite further just two of the most famous examples, it is through his vocal compositions that we mark moments among the most significant in Bach reception in the past 200 years. Consider first Felix Mendelssohn’s famous 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion, often cited as the beginning of a “rediscovery” of Bach by performers and concert audiences and as the initiation of Bach’s widespread acclaim as one of the greatest composers in the Western art music tradition. Likewise, it is Alfred Dürr and Georg von Dadelsen’s revised chronology of Bach’s vocal music in the 1950s which has inspired-we might even say requiredentirely new considerations of Bach’s compositional output.2 In both cases, new perspectives on Bach’s vocal music have contributed to an outpouring of new interest in, and discoveries about, the composer and his works.