WITH the unexpected death of the 33-year-old Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen in November 1728 it fell to J. S. Bach as the Prince's honorary (or ‘non-resident’) Capellmeister and erstwhile employee to supply and supervise music for the ensuing funeral ceremonies. These were set for the following spring, doubtless to allow the fullest possible attendance from around the principality and further afield, while over the winter months the Prince's body (duly embalmed, one must presume) lay in Cöthen's small court chapel. At the centre of elaborate funeral proceedings, painstakingly documented in court records, were

• a Burial Service (Beysetzung), held late at night on 23 March (1729) and lasting until about two in the morning, and

• a Memorial Service (Gedächtniß Predigt), following just a few hours later on the morning of 24 March.

Both services were held in the town's Calvinist Jacobikirche, and each included ‘Trauer Musique’ (music of mourning). No musical source survives, however, and the only real clue to Bach's music comes instead in the form of a libretto, headed in its earliest printed version ‘Trauer-Music … most humbly performed at the Memorial Service held on 24 March 1729’ (see Illus. 13.1). This may have been intended for use by those attending the ceremonies but is perhaps more likely to be a commemorative publication. Its text is known to be by ‘Picander’ (Christian Friedrich Henrici, the young Leipzig-based poet also responsible for the libretto of the St Matthew Passion) and is a substantial one in four parts (with a total of 24 movements), constituting the lost work catalogued today as Klagt, Kinder, klagt es aller Welt, bwv244a (‘Let your lamentations, children, be heard by all the world’). No additional text is known, yet today's scholarly literature, taking its lead from Friedrich Smend (to whom we owe much of the documentation on which this article is based), tells of not one but ‘two large-scale works’ by Bach – one for each service.