Secular Cantatas

Music history has not always been kind to Bach's secular cantatas, and only in recent decades, with some major revisions to conventional views of Bach's style, have works like Coffee Cantata and Peasant Cantata assumed their rightful places in the oeuvre. The image of Bach that developed in Germany following the Bach revival of the early nineteenth century has proved remarkably tenacious: even today, the Romantic image of Bach as sober, learned, and religious makes the secular cantatas something of a problem, even an embarrassment, for musicians uneasy at the thought of the Great Composer paying homage to minor court officials or imitating comic opera. One can imagine the reluctance with which the old Bach-Gesellschaft must have admitted this line from the Coffee Cantata into the canon: If, three times a day I don't drink my bowl of coffee, then in agony I'll wither like a dried out chunk of roasted goat! - Kevin Bazzana