Was Ist Vernunft?

This section contains cantatas for the Sixth to Seventeenth Sundays after Trinity: a period when no festivals occur. The same is often said of the whole of the second half of the church year but that is not altogether true. There are no major feasts between the Visitation on 2 July and Michaelmas on 29 September but the intervening weeks are far from drab and uneventful. To this day, each single Sunday in the period spotlights an important event in Christ’s ministry on earth, and the cantatas selected for this section almost all refer to that and only exceptionally and less pointedly to the Epistle for the day.

Franz Lehar was the most gifted and successful composer of operetta of the 20th century, and the most important composer of operetta after Johann Strauss Jr. His most famous work, The Merry Widow, may be the most recorded operetta in the world, and is in the repertory of numerous international opera companies; it has also been filmed several times, including three times in America – in 1924 (by Erich Von Stroheim), in 1934 with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, and in 1952 with Lana Turner and Fernando Lamas. The title waltz is sufficiently well known to middle-class American audiences to have figured as a key clue in the classic 1942 Hitchcock movie Shadow of a Doubt, set in a small California town. But he is also responsible for a half dozen other of the most beautiful operettas ever written.