Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 7, 2015

Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe (Jesus gathered the Twelve to Himself), BWV 22, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, written for the last Sunday before Lent. He composed it as an audition piece for the position of director of church music in Leipzig, and first performed it in a church service there at St. Thomas (pictured) on 7 February 1723. The work begins with a scene from the Gospels in which Jesus predicts his suffering in Jerusalem. The unknown poet of the cantata text took the scene as a starting point for reflections in which the contemporary Christian takes the place of the disciples who do not understand what Jesus is telling them. The closing chorale is a stanza from Elisabeth Cruciger's "Herr Christ, der einig Gotts Sohn". The work, structured in five movements, shows that Bach had mastered the composition of a dramatic scene, an expressive aria with obbligato oboe, a recitative with strings, an exuberant dance, and a chorale in the style of Johann Kuhnau, his predecessor in Leipzig. According to the Bach scholar Richard D. P. Jones, elements such as a "frame of biblical text and chorale around the operatic forms of aria and recitative" became standards for Bach's Leipzig cantatas and even his Passions. (Full article...)

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