Volume 18
Let the Bright Seraphim

VARIOUS- Arias and Choruses

KIRI TE KANAWA, soprano
JOSÉ CARRERAS, tenor
PETER SCHREIER, tenor

CD 454 420-2 ADD
PHILIPS

- The citizens of Leipzig may have seen the cantor of the Thomaskirche and schoolmaster of its charity school in a more realistic light than enraptured posterity, which for the last 200 years has regarded Bach as the "harp of the Lord," a man without weakness or sin. But his school colleagues, his pupils and the town players in his charge knew him to be an irascible and dogmatic man, who developed a passion for titles and orders and would haggle endlessly over a few miserable Marks. Only in his first five years at Leipzig did he rapidly produce devout cantatas for the services in the two main churches - later he preferred to play light music and dance music with students in the city's two coffee houses. In 1729 his St Matthew Passion was condemned by his superiors as "too operatic," but it was later to make a missionary of the atheist philosopher Nietzsche, who said: "Anyone who has totally forgotten Christianity can really hear its message here just as in a gospel."