Antonio Lotti was an Italian composer of the Baroque era.
In 1724 Johann Sebastian Bach composed the church cantata Meine Seel erhebt den Herren, BWV 10, as part of his second cantata cycle. Taken from Martin Luther's German translation of the Magnificat canticle, the title translates as "My soul magnifies the Lord". Also known as Bach's German Magnificat, the work follows his chorale cantata format.
Johann Sebastian Bach's Magnificat, BWV 243, is a musical setting of the biblical canticle Magnificat. It is scored for five vocal parts, and a Baroque orchestra including trumpets and timpani. It is the first major liturgical composition on a Latin text by Bach.
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.
The Prelude in C Minor, BWV 999, is, according to its only extant 18th-century manuscript, a composition for lute by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the manuscript, conserved as Fascicle 19 of Mus.ms. Bach P 804 at the Berlin State Library, Johann Peter Kellner wrote the piece down in keyboard notation. The time of origin of the work is not known: possibly Bach composed it in his Köthen period, that is, between 1717 and 1723, or the early years of his ensuing Leipzig period. Kellner's copy was produced after 1727, but before Bach's death in 1750.
Uns ist ein Kind geboren, BWV 142 / Anh. II 23, is a Christmas cantata by an unknown composer. In the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis it is listed among the works with a doubtful attribution to Johann Sebastian Bach. The text is based on a libretto by Erdmann Neumeister first published in 1711. Although attributed to Bach by the Bach-Gesellschaft when they first published it in the late nineteenth century, that attribution was questioned within thirty years and is no longer accepted. Johann Kuhnau, Bach's predecessor as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, has been suggested as the probable composer, but without any certainty.
Most of Johann Sebastian Bach's extant church music in Latin—settings of the Mass ordinary and of the Magnificat canticle—dates from his Leipzig period (1723–50). Bach started to assimilate and expand compositions on a Latin text by other composers before his tenure as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, and he continued to do so after he had taken up that post. The text of some of these examples by other composers was a mixture of German and Latin: also Bach contributed a few works employing both languages in the same composition, for example his early Kyrie "Christe, du Lamm Gottes".
The concerto for two harpsichords in C minor, BWV 1060, is a concerto for two harpsichords and string orchestra by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is likely to have originated in the second half of the 1730s as an arrangement of an earlier concerto, also in C minor, for oboe and violin. That conjectural original version of the concerto, which may have been composed in Bach's Köthen years (1717–1723), is lost, but has been reconstructed in several versions known as BWV 1060R.
Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde, BWV 53, is an aria for alto, bells, strings and continuo. It was likely composed in the early 18th century, although its date of first performance is unknown. From the second half of the 18th century until the early 1950s the aria was attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1955, it was suggested by the Bach scholar Karl Anton that the aria's composer was more likely to be a member of Melchior Hoffmann's circle.
In Johann Sebastian Bach's time, the election or inauguration of a new town council, normally an annual event, was celebrated with a church service. A cantata written for such occasion was indicated with the term Ratswahl or Ratswechsel. Bach composed such cantatas for Mühlhausen and for Leipzig. Five of these cantatas are entirely extant. One further cantata, BWV 193.2, lost part of its music, and there are another five that have only been known to exist, or for which only the text is extant.
BWV Anh., abbreviation of Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis Anhang, is a list of lost, doubtful, and spurious compositions by, or once attributed to, Johann Sebastian Bach.
Performances of Johann Sebastian Bach's Magnificat come in three formats:
- D major version, BWV 243 with the twelve movements of that version;
- D major version, with the Christmas interpolations from the earlier version BWV 243a transposed and inserted after movements 2, 5, 7 and 9.
- E flat major version, BWV 243a. The difference with the previous format is not only the key signature, there are also differences in orchestration, e.g. in the earlier version flutes are not part of the tutti, so do not play in the choral movements 1, 7 and 12, and a trumpet solo in movement 10 instead of the later unison oboes. Other differences are minor, but there is for instance a slightly harsher harmony near the end of movement 4 in the earlier version.
The first major biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach, including those by Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Philipp Spitta, were published in the 19th century. Many more were published in the 20th century by, among others, Albert Schweitzer, Charles Sanford Terry, Christoph Wolff and Klaus Eidam.
Nekrolog is the name with which Johann Sebastian Bach's obituary, which appeared four years after the composer's death, is usually indicated.
Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work is an early 19th-century biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, written in German by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and later translated by, among others, Charles Sanford Terry.
The Kyrie–Gloria Mass for double choir, BWV Anh. 167, is a mass composition in G major by an unknown composer. The work was likely composed in the last quarter of the 17th century. The composition has two sections, a Kyrie and a Gloria, each subdivided in three movements. It has twenty-two parts for performers: twelve parts for singers, and ten for instrumentalists, including strings, wind instruments and organ. Johann Sebastian Bach may have encountered the work around 1710, when he was employed in Weimar. In the 1730s he produced a manuscript copy of the Mass.
The Triple Concerto, BWV 1044, is a concerto in A minor for traverso, violin, harpsichord, and string orchestra by Johann Sebastian Bach. He based the composition on his Prelude and Fugue BWV 894 for harpsichord and on the middle movement of his Organ Sonata BWV 527, or on earlier lost models for these compositions.
The Magnificat in A minor, BWV Anh. 21, TWV 1:1748, is Melchior Hoffmann's musical setting of a German version of the Song of Mary from the Gospel of Luke. The composition originated around 1707, when the composer was director musices and organist of the Neue Kirche in Leipzig. Composed in A minor, the Magnificat is scored for soprano and small orchestra. The work was first published in the 1950s, and it was recorded by Magda László, by Joshua Rifkin, by Wolfgang Helbich, and by Deborah York, among others.
