Bach cantata her company in staged productions, "The Peasant Cantata" and "The Coffee Cantata". In 1931 a recording was made of a performance of , in Barcelona. The number of performances and recordings increased in the decades after the Second World War. In the early 1950s Fritz Lehmann recorded several cantatas with the Berliner Motettenchor and the Berlin Philharmonic. From 1953, Max Thurn conducted for the broadcaster NDR a series of Bach cantatas, with members of the NDR Chor and members of the NDR Sinfonieorchester. Karl Richter called his choir programmatically Münchener Bach-Chor in 1954 and recorded about a third of the
Magnificat (Bach) hymns is comparable with that of an average Bach cantata. However, there are many differences: the Magnificat contains about twice as many movements as an average cantata, keeping it short by avoiding da capos in the arias, and altogether no recitatives. Also the text is in Latin (not the usual language for a Bach cantata), the architecture of the movements is fairly complex, as opposed to the fairly simple structure of an average cantata, and the choral writing is in five parts, "outside the normal routine of Bach's sacred vocal works". The movements 1 (Magnificat), 7 (Fecit potentiam) and 12