section_path: Compositions/Cantatas/Secular cantatas
section_name: Secular cantatas
paragraph_text: Secular cantatas
  
  Bach also wrote secular cantatas, for instance for members of the royal Polish and prince-electoral Saxonian families (e.g. Trauer-Ode), or other public or private occasions (e.g. Hunting Cantata). The text of these cantatas was occasionally in dialect (e.g. Peasant Cantata) or Italian (e.g. Amore traditore). Many of the secular cantatas were lost, but for some of them, the text and occasion are known. For instance, when Picander later published their librettos (e.g. BWV Anh. 11 – 12).
  
  Some of the surviving secular cantatas have a plot involving mythological figures of Greek antiquity (e.g. Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan), and others were almost miniature buffo operas (e.g. Coffee Cantata). Although Bach never expressed any interest in opera, his secular cantatas, or drammi per musica, would have allowed Leipzig audiences, deprived of opera since 1720, to experience musical performances comparable to the royal opera in Dresden. These were not "poor or makeshift substitutes for real opera" but spectacles displaying "full mastery of the dramatic genre and the proper pacing of the dialogues."