Philipp Spitta, in his 19th-century biography of the composer, praised the chorale cantatas, but failed to see them as a cycle tied to 1724–25.
It took about a century after Spitta before Bach's cantata cycles were analysed in scholarly literature, but then Bach's ambitious project to write a chorale cantata for each occasion of the liturgical year was characterized as "the largest musical project that the composer ever undertook".
Possibly the idea for writing a series of chorale cantatas was inspired by the bicentennial anniversary of the first publications of Lutheran hymnals (1524).
[3] Bach's last newly composed chorale cantata in his second year in Leipzig was Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1, for the feast of the Annunciation on 25 March, which fell on Palm Sunday in 1725.
[3] Newly composed cantatas, to make the year cycle complete up to Trinity Sunday, were no longer in the chorale cantata format, possibly because Bach lost his librettist, likely Andreas Stübel, who died on 31 January 1725.
Bach did not present much newly composed music for the Good Friday and Easter services of 1725.
The St John Passion, which was a repeat performance of the previous year, now in the St. Thomas church (where Bach had initially attempted to stage its premiere), did, however, contain four new movements (BWV 244/29, 245a, 245b and 245c).
[1] After Doles, who was Thomaskantor until 1789, the practice of performing Bach cantatas in Leipzig was interrupted until Kantor Müller started to revive some of them from 1803.
[4] Bach's early biographers (his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Friedrich Agricola in the Nekrolog and Forkel in his 1802 biography) gave little or no attention to individual cantatas, and confined themselves to mentioning that Bach had composed five complete cycles of church cantatas.
The performance parts of 44 chorale cantatas were about all that was left of Bach's music in the St. Thomas church by 1830.
[14][15] Questionable chronologies and minor differences aside, they followed in Spitta's footsteps praising Bach's so-called "later" chorale cantatas as an epitome of the composer's art.
[13][16][17] The three editions of the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) that appeared in the second half of the 20th century gave little attention to the cycles of Bach's cantatas: the principles for assigning BWV numbers, as laid down by Wolfgang Schmieder for the catalogue's first edition in 1950, did not result in the chorale cantatas being identifiable as a group or cycle in the catalogue.
[19] In the 21st century Klaus Hofmann has termed the cycle "the largest musical project that the composer ever undertook: the 'chorale cantata year'".