Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 April 4
From today's featured articleChrist lag in Todes Banden (Christ lay in death's bonds), BWV 4, is a chorale cantata for Easter by Johann Sebastian Bach, one of his earliest church cantatas. It is agreed to be an early work, partly for stylistic reasons and partly because there is evidence that it was probably written for a performance in 1707. Text and music are based on Luther's hymn of the same name, derived from medieval models. In each of seven vocal movements, Bach used the unchanged words of a stanza of the chorale and its tune as a cantus firmus. Although all movements are in E minor, Bach intensified the meaning of the text through a variety of musical forms and techniques. He performed the cantata again as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, beginning in 1724 for his first Easter there. Only this second version survived, scored for four vocal parts (soprano part pictured) and a Baroque instrumental ensemble with strings and a choir of cornetto and three trombones. John Eliot Gardiner described the cantata as Bach's "first-known attempt at painting narrative in music" and "a bold, innovative piece of musical drama". (Full article...)
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On this dayApril 4: Easter (Western Christianity, 2021); Hansik in South Korea (2021)
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Étienne Maurice Gérard (4 April 1773 – 17 April 1852) was a French general, statesman and marshal of France. He served under a succession of French governments, including the monarchy of the Ancien Régime, the First Republic, the First Empire, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, and arguably the Second Empire, becoming prime minister briefly in 1834. This 1816 portrait of Gérard by Jacques-Louis David is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Painting credit: Jacques-Louis David
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