List of secular cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach

Apart from his hundreds of church cantatas, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote secular cantatas in Weimar, Köthen and Leipzig, for instance for members of the Royal-Polish and Prince-electoral Saxonian family (e.g. Trauer-Ode),^[1] or other public or private occasions (e.g. Hunting Cantata).^[2] The text of these cantatas was occasionally in dialect (e.g. Peasant Cantata)^[3] or in Italian (e.g. Amore traditore).^[4] Many of the secular cantatas were lost, but for some of these the text and the occasion are known, for instance when Picander later published their libretto (e.g. BWV Anh. 11–12).^[5] Some of the secular cantatas had a plot carried by mythological figures of Greek antiquity (e.g. Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan),^[6] others were almost miniature buffo operas (e.g. Coffee Cantata).^[7]

Extant secular cantatas are published in the New Bach Edition (Neue Bach-Ausgabe, NBA), Series I, volumes 35 to 40, with the two Italian cantatas included in volume 41.^[8] The Bach Digital website lists 50 secular cantatas by Bach.^[9] Less than half of Bach's known secular cantatas survive with music. For most of the others at least the libretto survives. Some of the secular cantatas are based on music Bach had composed at an earlier date (e.g. some music of the first Brandenburg Concerto was adopted in a secular cantata), and Bach quite often parodied secular cantatas into church music: for instance his Christmas Oratorio opens with music originally written for a secular cantata.^[10]

In the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) the range of Nos. 201 to 216a contains mostly extant secular cantatas. Other secular cantatas are in the range of the church cantatas (BWV 1–200), most of them with an "a", "b" or "c" index added to the number of a church cantata while the cantatas share the same music. The same applies for the secular cantata precursors of the Easter Oratorio. Other secular cantatas are listed in BWV Anh. I, that is the appendix of the lost works. Even for these cantatas the music can sometimes be reconstructed, based on the church cantatas that were derived from them.