Every Bach Cantata, Ranked

After ranking the complete Scarlatti sonatas and Schubert songs, you might think I’d have learned my lesson, both in time spent and in baffled—or worse—reactions received. Still, I admit when I decided to take on ranking the complete Bach Cantatas, I was a little naive about the time commitment required. With fairly regular listening, this took me 15 months. The Ton Koopman survey with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir, which I used for this ranking, weighs in at 1,518 tracks, or 73 hours and 30 minutes of music. I welcome criticism of my takes, though you should really listen to everything as well before you do so. You can find the playlist here. (The only pieces I skipped here were Bach’s masses and the odd work by son Wilhelm Friedemann, clearly included to fill out CDs at the end of the cycle.)

In his book Letters to a Young Pianist, violinist Gidon Kremer writes, “You never feel lonely with Bach.” The reality is a little more complicated. There are cantatas here that can increase your loneliness, as if you’re in a religious service where you don’t know the songs, the texts, the language, when to rise and when to sit. There are others that offer powerful solace and capture the appeal of Bach’s Christianity, even for a secular Jew like me. (There are also the secular cantatas, which, well: You’ll see.) Maybe more than any composer, Bach’s music is associated with the sublime, spiritual, abstract, and transcendental. And yet, this oeuvre is deeply human. He rushes, sucks up to the powerful, generates boilerplate fugues—then writes some of the most beautiful music ever to move air molecules. It’s every Bach Cantata, ranked.