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
Chorale cantata (Bach) with the hymn tune appearing as a cantus firmus. The last movement is a four-part harmonisation of the chorale tune for the choir, with the last stanza of the hymn as text. While the text of the stanzas used for the outer movements was retained unchanged, the text of the inner movements of the cantata, a succession of recitatives alternating with arias, was paraphrased from the inner stanzas of the hymn. Martin Luther advocated the use of vernacular hymns during services. He wrote several himself, also worked on their tunes, and helped publish the first Lutheran hymnal, the , containing