Bach Cantatas in Leipzig: A Weekly Cycle of Sacred Music

At seven o’clock on a Sunday morning in Leipzig in the 1720s, the main service began, and somewhere inside its three hours came roughly half an hour of new music that had not existed a week before. Week after week, the composer was Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Bach cantatas he produced for Leipzig’s two principal churches remain one of the largest sustained creative efforts in Western music. Understanding how that weekly cycle worked, from the church calendar and the printed texts to the schoolboys and town pipers who performed it, changes how the music sounds. It is also the thread that runs through three nights in Leipzig on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, timed to coincide with the city’s Bachfest.

What a Bach cantata was for

A church cantata in Bach’s Leipzig was not a concert piece. It was a working part of the Lutheran liturgy, written for a particular Sunday or feast day and tied to that day’s appointed Bible readings. The order of the main service set its place: the Gospel was read, the cantata followed, then came the Creed and the sermon. The music was, in effect, a sung meditation on the reading the congregation had just heard, preparing them for the preacher who would expound it.

That is why a single cantata usually moves through several kinds of music in a short space. An opening chorus sets out the theme of the day; recitatives carry the argument forward in something close to heightened speech; arias dwell on a single feeling or idea; and a plain four-part chorale, a hymn the congregation knew, closes the piece. Some of Bach’s early Leipzig works were in two parts, with one half performed before the sermon and the other after it. His first two Leipzig cantatas were built this way.

Cantatas were also needed beyond the ordinary Sundays. The city council’s annual inauguration each August, church and organ consecrations, weddings, funerals and university occasions all called for music. The weekly cycle was the backbone, but the cantor’s year was crowded well beyond it.

Bach takes up the post of Thomaskantor

Bach came to Leipzig in 1723 to fill one of the most prominent musical posts in Protestant Germany: cantor of the Thomasschule and director of music for the city’s churches. He had already composed cantatas at the Weimar court, where he spent nine years and wrote much of his organ music, a period traced in our article on Bach’s organ music in Weimar. Leipzig asked for something different in scale: a cantata for almost every Sunday and feast day of the year.

He was inaugurated on 30 May 1723, the first Sunday after Trinity, and that day his cantata Die Elenden sollen essen (BWV 75) was performed in the Nikolaikirche. The date mattered. The Lutheran church year begins in Advent, but Bach began his first annual cycle where his job began, after Trinity, and his later cycles kept to that rhythm. The office itself, with its teaching duties, its school, its choir and its awkward relationship with the city council, is the subject of our companion article on the Thomaskirche and the office of the Thomaskantor.

The annual cycles, year by year

Scholars describe Bach’s Leipzig cantatas in annual cycles, or Jahrgänge, each running roughly from Trinity to Trinity and covering around sixty Sundays and feast days.

The first cycle, 1723 to 1724

The first cycle ran from 30 May 1723 to 4 June 1724. It mixed newly written cantatas with works revised from Bach’s earlier posts, and included the two-part cantatas that framed the sermon. Within it, on Good Friday 1724, came the first performance of the St John Passion, also in the Nikolaikirche.

The chorale cantata cycle, 1724 to 1725

For his second year Bach set himself a stricter plan. Every cantata would be built around a single Lutheran hymn, its text and melody shaping the whole work, typically with an elaborate chorale setting at the start and a plain harmonisation at the end. The cycle opened on 11 June 1724 with O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (BWV 20), and the run of chorale cantatas continued to the feast of the Annunciation on 25 March 1725, which fell on Palm Sunday that year, with Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (BWV 1).

Then the series broke off. One suggested reason is that Bach lost his librettist: Andreas Stübel, the likely author of the reworked hymn texts, died on 31 January 1725, though the connection is not proven. From Jubilate Sunday on 22 April through to Trinity on 27 May 1725, Bach set texts by the Leipzig poet Christiana Mariana von Ziegler instead, the only period in which the two are known to have worked together.

The later cycles and the missing music

A third cycle followed from Trinity 1725, more loosely organised and interleaved with cantatas by Bach’s distant cousin Johann Ludwig Bach. A fourth, from 24 June 1728, used a printed annual cycle of cantata texts by the poet known as Picander, but much of its music has not survived. Bach’s obituary of 1754 credited him with five complete annual cycles for all Sundays and feasts, which would mean well over 275 cantatas. Around two-thirds of that number survive, and whether a fifth cycle ever existed is still debated.

Advent, Lent and the quiet seasons

Leipzig observed a tempus clausum, a closed time, during Advent and Lent, when no cantatas were performed in the main services. In Lent the one exception was the feast of the Annunciation, and on Good Friday a Passion was performed at Vespers. Bach’s surviving Advent cantatas therefore date mostly from his years before Leipzig.

The quiet seasons bought time for larger projects. The great feasts at either end of them, Christmas, Easter and Pentecost, brought some of Bach’s most festive writing, with trumpets and timpani added to the usual strings and oboes. His Christmas Oratorio, first heard over the 1734 to 1735 season, is in fact six cantatas, one for each of six feast days from Christmas Day to Epiphany.

Who performed the music

The singers were boys and young men of the Thomasschule. In Bach’s time its pupils were divided into four choirs serving four churches: the Thomaskirche, the Nikolaikirche, the Neue Kirche, and the Peterskirche, where boys who could not read music sang only hymns. The best singers formed the first choir, which performed the cantata in whichever principal church had the main music that Sunday, alternating between the Thomaskirche and the Nikolaikirche.

The instrumental core was small. The city provided eight musicians for church music: four Stadtpfeifer, or town pipers, three Kunstgeiger, professional fiddlers, and one apprentice. On 23 August 1730 Bach set out his needs in a memorandum to the council, a short but blunt document. He asked for at least three singers to a part in each choir, preferably four, and at least eighteen instrumentalists, plus two flautists for works that used flutes. He added that some of the town musicians were partly retired and not in the practice they should be.

How long is a Bach cantata?

About half an hour is typical for a Leipzig church cantata, within a main service that ran for around three hours from its seven o’clock start. Two-part cantatas split that music either side of the sermon. Heard today in concert, a programme of two or three cantatas makes a full evening, and the brevity of each is part of the appeal: every one is a complete argument in miniature.

The two churches today

Both principal churches still stand within a few minutes’ walk of each other in Leipzig’s old town, and both have changed since Bach’s day. The Nikolaikirche, where his first Leipzig cantata and the St John Passion were first heard, was remodelled inside between 1784 and 1797 by Johann Carl Friedrich Dauthe in the neoclassical style, so the interior visitors see today is not the one Bach knew. The church took on a new role in modern history when people gathered there on Monday evenings in 1989, the beginning of the peaceful protests that helped bring down the East German government.

The Thomaskirche is where Bach lies. He was first buried in the cemetery of the Johanniskirche, and after that church was destroyed in 1943, the remains believed to be his were moved to the Thomaskirche, where a new grave was dedicated on 28 July 1950. The church now has two major organs: a Romantic instrument by Wilhelm Sauer, and a Bach organ built by Gerald Woehl’s workshop in 1999 and 2000, its case modelled on an organ Bach knew in the university church. Our overview of Leipzig as a destination covers the wider old town around them.

Can you hear a Bach cantata in the Thomaskirche today?

Yes. The Thomanerchor, the choir Bach directed, performs a Bach cantata each week with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, in its motets and in church services at the Thomaskirche. The motets take place on Friday evenings and on Saturdays at 3 pm; a printed programme costing €15 serves as the admission ticket and is sold at the church doors from 45 minutes before the start, while Sunday services are free. Times can change around school holidays and the festival period, so check the choir’s schedule before planning around a particular performance.

The cantatas at Bachfest

Every June, Leipzig’s Bachfest fills both churches, along with concert halls and smaller venues across the city, with performers from around the world. Cantatas are central to the festival because they are central to the city’s identity: this is music written for these buildings, in this order of service, by a man who walked between them every week. Our article on how Bachfest Leipzig performs Bach’s legacy looks at the festival itself and how its programme is built. Bachfest 2027 runs from 10 to 20 June.

Will the tour’s Leipzig concerts include Bach cantatas?

Very likely, though the exact programme is not fixed in advance. The group’s concerts in Leipzig are chosen from the Bachfest programme, so the works listed on the itinerary are indicative and based on previous years. Past programmes have included a Passion at the Nikolaikirche and a concert of Bach’s Weimar cantatas in the Thomaskirche, alongside other festival events. The 2027 departure runs from 5 to 20 June, with three nights in Leipzig, and includes tickets to six concerts across the tour.

How much walking is involved in Leipzig?

Moderate walking on mostly level, paved streets, with long periods seated in concerts. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate): travellers should be able to carry their own luggage, manage stairs and take part in three to five hours of activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground. In Leipzig the walking tour takes in the Nikolaikirche, the Thomaskirche and the Bach monuments. The Thomaskirche can be entered by a ramp or a single step through an alternative entrance near Burgstrasse.

Leipzig on the Bach route

Leipzig is where Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life, but it is the destination of a much longer journey. Before arriving, the tour travels from Berlin through Dresden; after Leipzig, it follows him back through the Thuringian towns of his youth and early career, then to Köthen and on to Hamburg. Our overview of Bach’s Germany sets the cantatas in that wider story, and for further reading before you travel, our list of books on Johann Sebastian Bach includes several studies of the church music.

What makes Leipzig remarkable is how much of the machinery behind this music is still visible: the two churches, the grave, the choir that still sings his cantatas every week. Sitting in one of those churches as a cantata begins, it is easy to imagine the first choir hurrying across the square at seven in the morning, with freshly copied parts, about to sing something entirely new.