organ music. Thus he reconciled the two seemingly dissimilar styles and fused them into one, which so perfectly expressed the essential being of the Church he so deeply loved and so loyally served that, as Spitta asserts, he ‘has remained to this day the last church composer.’[60] During all his years of musical activity Bach was a church organist and choir director. In these positions it was a part of his official duties to compose music for the various services of the church calendar. The zeal and fidelity with which he performed this part of his task is clearly evidenced by the following list of his more important church works, vocal and instrumental: about 20 large fantasias, preludes and fugues, a passacaglia, several toccatas, and a large number of chorale-preludes and elaborations, about 300 cantatas, 5 Passions, 3 oratorios for Christmas, Easter, and Ascension, 5 large masses and several shorter ones, many motets, 2 Magnificats, 5 Sanctuses, etc. By far the largest single group of his compositions consists of church cantatas. Of these he wrote five series for the Sundays and festivals of the church year, 295 cantatas in all, of which 266 were written while he was director of music at the Thomas and Nicolai Churches in Leipzig, which post he held from 1723 until his death in 1750. They easily take rank among the master’s best works, and, notwithstanding the rather astounding fact that for over four years he wrote a cantata each week for the following Sunday’s service in addition to other compositions, they contain many of the finest and loftiest examples of accompanied church music of his own or any other period, and give unmistakable evidence of the scholarly care and loving thought he bestowed upon them. As a group they are excelled only by the Passions and the great B minor Mass, and some of their choruses are not surpassed even by these wonderful creations. Not one of them was published during his life and many have been lost. The manuscripts remained almost forgotten for nearly a century after his death, but the Bach-Gesellschaft has published about two hundred of them in its authoritative edition of the master’s works (1851-1899), comprising over fifty volumes and forming an enduring monument to the master’s genius.