BWV 27 "Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende": the cantata bears witness to an attitude to life in which death was omnipresent for everyone. J. S. Bach plays all the manuals of his compositional organ and pulls out all the stops, from the passion-like opening chorus with its solo recitatives and an extremely dense orchestral movement to an almost frivolous alto aria, a bass aria meandering between inner serenity and outer tumult, and the final chorale, for which Bach used an original quotation by Johann Rosenmüller, two generations his senior.