Page "Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach" Paragraph 12

Bach began to turn more of his energies to choral music in his new position.

The job required the steady production of music for Protestant church services at the Michaeliskirche ( Church of St. Michael ) and elsewhere in Hamburg.

The following year he produced his oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste ( The Israelites in the Desert ), a composition remarkable not only for its great beauty but for the resemblance of its plan to that of Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah.

Between 1768 and 1788 he wrote twenty-one settings of the Passion, and some seventy cantatas, litanies, motets, and other liturgical pieces.

In Hamburg he also presented a number of works by contemporaries, including his father, Telemann, Graun, Handel, Haydn, Salieri and Johann David Holland.

Bach's choral output reached its apex in two works: the double chorus Heilig ( Holy, Holy, Holy ) of 1776, a setting of the seraph song from the throne scene in Isaiah, and the grand cantata Die Auferstehung Jesu ( The Resurrection of Jesus ) of 1774-1782, which sets a poetic Gospel harmonization by the poet Karl Wilhelm Ramler ( 1725-1798 ).

Widespread admiration of Auferstehung led to three 1788 performances in Vienna sponsored by the Baron Gottfried van Swieten and conducted by Mozart.