Preface

When Johann Kuhnau died on 5 June 1722 after twenty-one years as cantor of St. Thomas’ Church, tribute was paid to him in a Leipzig yearbook with a detailed obituary.

It said: “The pieces of music that he composed for the church, especially since 1701 when he became cantor and music director, may be difficult to count, for he never or only very rarely made use of other people’s compositions at his frequent musical performances; on the other hand, he often had to help out others with his work.”

Only a fraction of this once extensive complex of works – which quantitatively overshadowed that of his successor in office, Johann Sebastian Bach – has survived to the present day. Just over thirty “church pieces” by Kuhnau have stood the test of time. They are stored in manuscript form in central and northern German libraries: mostly in the Becker Collection (Leipzig Municipal Library), in the music collection of the Grimmaer Prince School (Dresden Municipal Library) and in the Bokemeyer Collection (Berlin State Library). The manuscripts and original parts to these can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and with some secondary sources, the accuracy of the specification of the author – “di Kuhnau” – is rather doubtful.

Nonetheless, Kuhnau’s church music is especially attractive today for connoisseurs and lovers of baroque church music, as it is for amateur and professional musicians alike – for a number of reasons. Kuhnau’s works, composed between the early 1680s – when he was still a pupil in Zittau and Dresden, becoming organist at St. Thomas’ Church in Leipzig starting in 1684 – and the years just before 1720, reveal a wide variety of styles. The spectrum ranges from sacred arias and concertos of the 17th century, chorale adaptations and experimental forms to church cantatas setting texts by Neumeister. And the diversity of Kuhnau’s musical language, sometimes dramatic and theatrical, at other times flowing, arioso and highly devotional, gives the lie to those who would like to dismiss the church composer Kuhnau as an ostensibly backward-looking artist who vehemently disallowed the musical innovations of the early 18th century. This portrait, drawn by earlier researchers, is a distorted one, resulting from documents about the trench warfare carried on by the St. Thomas cantor Kuhnau – unfortunately in a maladroit fashion – against the young, innovative Leipzig music scene at the Neukirche and the opera house, namely the aspiring students Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann David Heinichen and Johann Friedrich Fasch.

This new edition of all the surviving sacred works of Kuhnau is intended to correct this erroneous image, and to rescue the composer from the corner of the alleged “musical horribilicribrifax” in which he was placed already at a very early stage. For Kuhnau’s church music provides a testimonial that is, in every respect, on a par with that of the gallant novelist, innovative keyboard composer and even opera composer. It is a testimonial, moreover, that makes clear why Telemann could later maintain that the quill pen of Kuhnau, widely famed as “polyhistoris in arte musica”, had once served him as a model: in order to fashion his own ecclesiastical style after it. And above all, this new edition of Kuhnau’s vocal works makes accessible an important musical facet of the transitional phase between the sacred concertos of the 17th century and the late baroque church cantata – an exciting facet as regards the history of the genre and one whose importance can hardly be overestimated.

Michael Maul