Bach and His Secular Cantatas: A Case Study‪.‬

At the age of seventeen Johann Sebastian Bach composed two keyboard pieces as tributes to people who were beloved by him in his comparatively young life. With one, the Capriccio on the Departure of the Beloved Brother. Bach likely intended to recognize a schoolmate by the name of Georg Erdmann, and with the other, Capriccio in Honor of Johann Christoph Bach, he acknowledged his elder brother who both fostered Sebastian in Ohrdruf and was his first keyboard teacher. (1) These two pieces are some of the first, if not the first, musical gestures that come from the composer's pen. They are certainly not the last. Seventeen years before his death in 1733 Bach sent a letter of fealty with music for a newly written Missa (Kyrie and Gloria) to Elector Friedrich August II in Dresden, the successor of August I after the latter's death a few months earlier. In the letter Bach wrote: