Bach took up his post as Thomaskantor (cantor of St. Thomas School and music director for Leipzig’s principal Lutheran churches) and led the first performance of his inaugural Leipzig cantata, Die Elenden sollen essen (BWV 75), at the Nikolaikirche. This marked the start of his Leipzig-era institutional responsibilities and the intense pace of weekly sacred music production.
In his first year in Leipzig, Bach introduced his festive Magnificat in E-flat major (BWV 243a), one of his earliest large-scale Leipzig sacred works and a major Latin-text composition for the city’s Vespers services. Scholarship commonly associates an early performance with the Feast of the Visitation.
Bach premiered the dialogue cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (BWV 60) in Leipzig, an early example of his Leipzig practice of pairing theological reflection with dramatic vocal characterization within the cantata form.
Bach’s St John Passion (BWV 245)—his earliest surviving Passion—was first performed for Good Friday Vespers at Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche. It became a cornerstone of his Leipzig sacred output and a defining model for Passion settings in the Lutheran tradition.
With O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (BWV 20), Bach began his second annual Leipzig cantata cycle, planned around chorale cantatas (cantatas based on Lutheran hymns). The project systematized chorale-based theology and musical design across the church year.
Bach’s St Matthew Passion (BWV 244) was probably first performed on Good Friday at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche. The work expanded Passion-scale forces and narrative/reflective architecture, and it became one of the central monuments of his Leipzig years.
Bach assumed leadership of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, directing regular public concerts (notably connected with Zimmermann’s coffeehouse and garden). This expanded his Leipzig activity beyond church services into civic and semi-public musical life.
Bach began first performances of the six-part Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248) across Leipzig’s Christmas season services. Part I premiered on Christmas Day, launching a sequence of festival-day performances split between St. Nicholas and St. Thomas churches.
The Christmas Oratorio performance cycle concluded with Part VI on Epiphany, completing Bach’s integrated set of festive cantatas for the season and illustrating how Leipzig liturgy shaped large-scale composition and performance planning.
Bach published Clavier-Übung III—a major organ collection often called the “German Organ Mass”—in Leipzig. The volume consolidated large-scale chorale-prelude craft and contrapuntal display, reflecting Bach’s late Leipzig focus on publication and encyclopedic synthesis.
Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) were published during his lifetime as Clavier-Übung IV. The print exemplifies his Leipzig-era engagement with commercial publication and with large, systematically organized keyboard forms.
Bach visited Potsdam to meet Frederick II (the Great) and improvised on a theme given by the king. Back in Leipzig, he developed the material into The Musical Offering (BWV 1079), a late masterwork of contrapuntal and canonic writing tied to this court encounter.
Bach joined Lorenz Christoph Mizler’s learned Society of the Musical Sciences in Leipzig’s intellectual orbit, aligning his late work with contemporary scholarly discourse on musical theory and craft.
Bach completed the compilation of the Mass in B minor (BWV 232) in the late 1740s, finishing the full Ordinary largely by assembling and newly composing movements into a monumental setting—one of the culminating syntheses of his Leipzig years.
After months of illness and failed eye operations, Bach died in Leipzig, ending the 27-year period in which he shaped the city’s church music institutions and produced a substantial portion of his best-known sacred and instrumental works.
Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig (1723–1750)
