According to many, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) has written the most beautiful music that has ever been created. Among his extensive work are many cantatas: vocal compositions performed by individual singers or choirs, accompanied by a limited set of musical instruments. As a cantor/organist in several churches, Bach composed most of his cantatas to support the Lutheran liturgy.

The Lutheran church year starts with Advent and revolves around two important biblical feasts: Christmas - the birth of Christ - and Easter - the ressurection of Christ. All Sundays in between have a specific name and meaning. In addition to this so-called 'temporal cycle' of events, there are also some fixed-date commemorations and feasts: the 'sanctoral cycle'. Bach has written cantatas for almost every such church year occasion.

Listening to a cantata in the moment for which it has been composed provides an additional musical dimension. Not only because of the relation to the Lutheran church year events, but also because the mood of Bach's cantatas often pleasantly reflects the seasons and the time of the year. As a consequence, I always found myself tracking the date of the most recent Sunday, matching it against a Lutheran calendar to get its designation, then finding the cantatas composed for that Sunday and finally looking up the best recordings of those cantatas to play and listen to them.

To get rid of this tedious task and concentrate on his magnificent music instead, we have created a Bach calendar that contains all the relevant Lutheran church year events¹, whereby each event holds links to publicly available Spotify playlists that contain the best cantata recordings (e.g. Harnoncourt, Gardiner, Koopman) for that specific event. You can now start listening to Bach from any device by simply clicking a calendar event!

The calendar updates automatically and will always contain the events for the current, past and next year.

To subscribe for free, use this link. If you have any questions or suggestions to improve the calendar, feel free to drop me a line.