Erdmann Neumeister (jan 1, 1671 – jan 1, 1756)

Description:

Opera forms came to Lutheran music in part through the work of Bach's older contemporary Erdmann Neumeister, a German poet and theologian, who expanded the form and style of Lutheran sacred texts for music. Traditionally, Lutheran church music had been based on chorales. In the late seventeenth century, a style developed in which chorales alternated with biblical verses and a new ingredient: brief poems that reflected emotionally on the verses the way arias reflected on the action in an opera seria. This "oratorio" style was used especailly for Passion music around Easter. Bach composed at least three Passion settings of this kind as well, quite elaborate ones.

Around the turn of the century, Neumeister began publishing his little oratorio texts, for which he borrowed the name of the Italian genre that had inspired him. Consisting of vividly picturesque, "madrigalesque" verses, and explicitly divided into recitatives and arias, they were dubbed "cantatas" by their author. They provided the prototype for hundreds of church compositions by Bach, although for the most part he continued to call such pieces with mixed voices and instruments "concertos," retaining the term in use since the time of Giovanni Gabrieli and Schutz. Neumeister's cantata texts were published in a series of comprehensive cycles covering all the Sundays and feasts of the church calendar. They were expressly intended for setting by Lutheran cantors like Bach, whose job it was to compose yearly cycles of concerted vocal works according to the same liturgical schedule.

Only a handful of Bach's some two hundred surviving sacred cantatas were composed to actual Neumeister texts, but the vast majority of them adhere nevertheless to the format of mixing opera-like recitatives and da capo arias with the chorale verses. In this way Bach became a sort of opera composer. Cantatas, however, were reflective not dramatic works. The singers of the arias were not characters but, rather, disembodied personas who voiced the idealized thoughts of the congregation in response to the occasion that had brought them together. Indeed, the Lutheran cantata was viewed as a sort of musical sermon.

Most of his cantatas were written in the first few years of being in Leipzig

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