The earliest works written in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen (1707-8) largely conform to late 17th-century forms, with biblical and chorale texts often arranged in a sequence of varied strophic verses. Solos are short, through-composed episodes and a symmetrical structure is maintained by the opening and closing choruses being framed by the solos and a central chorus. Following his appointment as court organist at Weimar in 1708, Bach composed only the odd cantata until 1714, when he became Konzertmeister and was required to compose such works once a month. The twenty-odd cantatas produced as a result show Bach moving away from the old style to experiment with new structures, a development much influenced by the texts provided by his principal collaborator, the Weimar court poet Salomo Franck. The texts provided for Bach by Franck belong to reforms dating from the turn of the century in which freely-written poetic sections of a libretto were combined with biblical and chorale texts. A major consequence was the introduction of recitatives and da capo arias, thus moving the Lutheran church cantata ever closer to the style of the Italian cantata and greater dramatic potential.

The only major break in the production of church cantatas came during the period Bach was Kapellmeister at the Calvinist court at Cöthen (1717-1723), during which all that was required of him were occasional secular celebratory works composed for his employer Prince Leopold. Many of these are now lost, but scholars believe that Bach later drew on a number of them for the cantatas he later composed in Leipzig. It is therefore salutary to remind ourselves of the narrow dividing line between Bach’s sacred and secular vocal music, a lack of distinction that recalls Luther himself unashamedly fitting his sacred chorale texts to popular secular tunes. The events surrounding Bach’s move in 1723 from Cöthen to Leipzig to become Cantor of St. Thomas’s Leipzig and civic director of music are sufficiently well-known to require little comment here. His biographers have frequently pointed out that for Bach to move from the position of Kapellmeister to Kantor represented a distinct step down the social ladder, yet it must also be recalled that the position was one of the most important in Protestant German music, with a distinguished line of incumbents culminating in Bach’s immediate predecessor Johann Kuhnau. Above all it provided the opportunity to compose the sacred music that lay closest to Bach’s heart. Anxious to modernise the music heard at St. Thomas’s, he immediately made the decision to compose all the cantatas himself. The new Cantor was setting himself a formidable task. The annual number of cantatas required was 60, which included one for each Sunday starting with Advent Sunday, the fourth before Christmas and the start of the Lutheran church year. The remainder were made up of cantatas composed for major feast days.