all of his vocal works. But there are more than enough counterbalancing examples of arias in his cantatas to show how plastic this form could become in his hands for the expression of the deepest and tenderest sentiments and for the musical delineation of the subtlest details in the changing thought of the texts. The chorale, as already mentioned, played a most important rôle in the constructional plan of Bach’s cantatas. Since each church day had its especially appointed chorale (_Hauptlied_), he made it an almost universal practice to introduce this, either in whole or in modified form, as material for contrapuntal treatment in the voice-parts or in the accompaniments of at least several of the movements. In some of the cantatas, such as _Wer nur den lieben Gott_ and especially the famous _Ein’ feste Burg_, chorales appear in some guise or other in every movement, whether recitative, aria, or chorus. There are but very few of the cantatas, among them the well-known _Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss_, in which no chorale-melody appears. The Bach cantata regularly closed with a chorale in a plain and unornamented four-part form, but richly harmonized. It is a real misfortune that the profound beauties of these rare examples of ecclesiastical art are now practically unknown to any except the occasional student. But there are at least three things that have conspired to keep them away from the general knowledge and appreciation of the present-day public--(1) the Lutheran service, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries usually lasted for four hours at least, has been much shortened and the cantata is no longer a necessary component, hence at present it is rarely heard even in its original home, the Lutheran service; (2) the organ was such a central and dominating part of Bach’s whole scheme of musical utterance that the cantata cannot be performed with any other accompaniment without a large shrinkage in artistic effectiveness; (3) these works are so completely saturated with the spirit and meaning of the particular type of church worship for which they were created that when performed in the concert room, even with the organ, they lose in large measure, merely from the changed perspective and environment. Many of the cantatas are available for study in Peters’ Edition and, in English translation, in the Novello Edition.