About Bach, the Universe and Everything:

This is a concert series with a difference. Across six Sunday morning events, we explore the human desire to understand our place in the cosmos, guided by the work of JS Bach – composer and intergalactic genius – through his 200 cantatas. As NASA shares images from the very first moments of time, we invite you to join us on a cosmic journey: each event is built around a Bach cantata and a talk from a guest scientist, writer or broadcaster, alongside choral and instrumental music.

Bach’s life coincides with the most profound change in our view of the night sky. Instead of a ‘heavenly’ realm, the scientific revolution made us see ‘space’ as a remote yet knowable place.

We still live with the positive and negative consequences of this discovery. In this Sunday morning event, Dr Stuart Clark will explore how these new ideas about the wider Universe forged the modern world by forcing scientists, artists and philosophers to reappraise humankind’s relationship with the universe.

Bach’s cantata Herr Christ, der einge Gottessohn is based a mystic hymn eulogising Jesus as the ‘Morning Star’. Composed in 1724 in Leipzig, the six movement cantata is colourfully scored and calls for four vocal soloists.

Dr Stuart Clark is an astronomer and award winning science journalist. He writes the Guardian’s weekly Starwatch column, and is the author of Beneath the Night: How the stars shaped the history of Humankind (Faber).

Duration: approx. 1hr with no interval

‘He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe.’

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy