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. Each event is built around a Bach cantata and a talk from a guest, alongside choral and instrumental music.

Bach, the Universe and Everything – The End of Enchantment?
Sun 16 Oct | 11:30

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. 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.

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).

The 2022-23 season

This season of Bach, the Universe and Everything looks to the stars. As NASA shares images from the very first moments of time, we invite you to join us on a cosmic journey. Six eminent scientists, writers and broadcasters explore why humans started looking beyond our planet in the first place, space exploration and what lessons we can learn for life on Earth from future discoveries.

‘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