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Komm, du süße Todesstunde (Come, o sweet hour of death), BWV 161, is a church cantata composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in Weimar for the 16th Sunday after Trinity Sunday, and probably first performed in 1716. The text, provided by the court poet Salomon Franck, was based on the prescribed gospel reading about the young man from Nain, and reflected on longing for death, seen as a transition to a life united with Jesus. The cantata in six movements opens with alternating arias and recitatives, leading to a chorus and a concluding chorale, a stanza of the hymn "Herzlich tut mich verlangen" by Christoph Knoll. The chorale tune appears in the first movement, played by the organ, providing a unity to the composition. Bach scored the work for alto and tenor soloists, a four-part choir, and a Baroque chamber ensemble of recorders, strings and continuo. In one recitative, he creates the images of sleep, of waking up, and of funeral bells. Although the libretto was published in a collection in 1715, Bach probably did not perform it until September 1716, due to a long period of public mourning in the duchy for the brother of Duke Ernst August. (Full article...)

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In the news

António Guterres

Iraqi government forces, allied militias, Peshmerga, and the CJTF-OIR launch an offensive to retake the city of Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Former Prime Minister of Portugal António Guterres (pictured) is elected Secretary-General of the United Nations.
King of Thailand Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world's longest-serving head of state, dies at the age of 88.
Bob Dylan is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the Colombian conflict.

On this day...

October 19: Mother Teresa Day in Albania

Ferdinand and Isabella

1469 – Ferdinand II of Aragon married Isabella I of Castile (both pictured), a marriage that paved the way to the unification of Aragon and Castile into a single country, Spain.
1864 – American Civil War: Despite incurring nearly twice as many casualties as the Confederates, the Union Army emerged victorious in the Battle of Cedar Creek.
1900 – German physicist Max Planck produced his law of black body emission, a pioneer result of modern physics and quantum theory.
1943 – Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, was first isolated by researchers at Rutgers University.
1986 – President of Mozambique Samora Machel and 43 others were killed when his presidential aircraft crashed in the Lebombo Mountains just inside the border of South Africa.

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The Miller cylindrical projection is a modified Mercator projection proposed by Osborn Maitland Miller (1897–1979) in 1942. The latitude is scaled by a factor of ⁴⁄₅, projected according to Mercator, and then the result is multiplied by ⁵⁄₄ to retain scale along the equator.

Map: Strebe, using Geocart

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