Bach’s arias — the chamber music portion of his cantatas — are unique in music literature. They are demanding and rigorous, and to perform them successfully the vocalist or instrumentalist must have the skill of a virtuouso as well as highly-developed ensemble skills. These are compositions that pit divergent vocal and instrumental capabilities against one another, and just the right inflection and balance of timbres are needed to unlock their magic.

Like the music it performs, The Bach Aria Group is also unique. It is the only musical organization in the world whose sole charter is to promote the performance and study of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

William Scheide, a musicologist and philanthropist, founded the group in 1946, a time when Bach’s cantata literature was known and appreciated by relatively few people.

To combat this lack of awareness, Scheide brought together nine vocalists and instrumentalists, and declared that their mission would be to develop Bach audiences around the world by touring, recording and broadcasting.

In 1980 William Scheide retired. In reorganizing, The Bach Aria Group broadened its mission: it would now seek to place the arias in context with the composer’s instrumental and choral pieces, to illuminate all Bach’s works. The group also established the Bach Aria Festival and Institute which was held annually until 1997, attracting musicians and scholars from throughout the U.S.

The Bach Aria Group enters its fifth decade as one of the longest-running chamber music organizations in the country.

In 1517 when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, the Lutheran Reformation began. Two hundred years later in 1723, when Johann Sebastian Bach became cantor at the Saint Thomas Church in Leipzig, Lutheranism had a firm hold in Germany. The Lutheran church calendar remained similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church, centered as it was on the major feasts of Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, and Trinity Sunday. The Sunday services themselves, unlike those of Catholicism, utilized singing by soloists and worshippers, as well as instrumental accompaniments. German Baroque composers evolved a structure for these elements that came to be known as a “cantata, ” normally consisting of arias for one or two voices, some recitatives, an original tune for chorus, then a traditional chorale in which the churchgoers could join since they probably knew the song from childhood.

Every Sunday had its own cantata composed by the church’s paid cantor who utilized Biblical text appropriate to the Sunday (e.g. Easter) or an original text on a religious theme. To churn out the numerous cantatas, each composer borrowed liberally from his own previously used melodies and from other composers whose tunes they may have remembered from attending church services elsewhere.

Bach spent his last 27 years on earth in Leipzig and is believed to have composed some 300 cantatas, about two-thirds of which are known to still exist. It is believed that Georg Philipp Telemann, a contemporary of Bach and the director of music for five churches in Hamburg, composed some 1700 church cantatas! That we are listening today to works by Bach and not Telemann suggests once again the genius of J. S. Bach (as well as the lack of a good 21st Century public relations agency for Telemann, who was hardly a hack composer.)

Lutheranism pervaded the entire political and social community, and often Bach would be sought to compose a “secular cantata” to honor members of the University of Leipzig faculty, a newly appointed Town Council, or some other non-religious item of importance. Some 30 of Bach’s secular cantatas survive. (In the BWV numbering system, all those in the 200s are of the secular variety.) These cantatas use text that is closer to an opera libretto; it tells a story. One of the most famous of the secular cantatas—the Coffee Cantata, BWV 211—is represented by one selection in today’s program. Here Bach took off his wig and poked fun at coffee-crazed Leipzigers.