Cantata

A cantata is a multi-movement work for voice or voices with instrumental accompaniment, structured around alternating recitatives, arias and choruses. The Baroque Lutheran church cantata, the form's central instance, runs about twenty minutes and typically opens with a large chorus, alternates aria and recitative for one or two soloists in the middle, and closes with a four-part chorale harmonization of a familiar Lutheran hymn. Scoring uses a small orchestra of strings, two oboes or flutes, and continuo (organ, cello, bassoon), expanded with trumpets and timpani for festal occasions. Italian secular cantatas are scaled down to one or two singers with continuo; their texts are usually mythological or pastoral.

The Italian secular cantata of the early seventeenth century, in Alessandro Scarlatti's and Handel's hands, was a chamber form for noble drawing rooms. The German Lutheran cantata, which the form is now most identified with, was codified as part of weekly liturgy by composers including Buxtehude and culminated in J.S. Bach's tenure at Leipzig (1723-1750), where he produced more than two hundred surviving works — one new cantata per Sunday or feast day across the church year. The form declined in the late eighteenth century as Lutheran liturgy reformed and the public concert displaced the church service as the venue for vocal music.

The arias are where the music dwells longest on a single emotional state; the recitatives connect them with the narrative or theological text. In Bach's cantatas, the opening chorus often establishes the work's controlling image — a fortress, a wedding, the soul as bride — and the closing chorale settles the same idea into a four-part hymn the original congregation would have sung along with. Listen for the obbligato instruments in arias: a single violin, flute or oboe duets with the singer across the whole movement.

Bach's 'Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,' BWV 140 (1731), is the standard first listen — its opening chorus and its hymn-based central tenor duet are among the best-loved Baroque movements. For sustained immersion, John Eliot Gardiner's complete cantatas project (2000) traces the church year cantata by cantata.

Bach's cantata 'Coffee Cantata,' BWV 211 (c. 1735), is a secular comic work about a young woman addicted to coffee whose father tries to make her quit. It premiered in Zimmermann's coffee house in Leipzig — one of the first known pieces of music written for performance in a café.