Abstract Eerie is the only word for the virtual silence that has greeted the end of this project, inaugurated in 1971 amid considerable fanfare and controversy Completion was announced for 1985, the Bach tricentennial year. Had that deadline been achieved, no doubt, we would have heard more about it. Meanwhile, a competing series, inaugurated in 1975 under the leadership of the German choral specialist Helmuth Rilling, did make it to the finish line in time. Although the Rilling traversal relied on standard instruments and a traditional (alas, rather drab if dependable) performance style, it possessed a certain musicological cachet. It was issued in the revolutionary new chronological order of cantatas that was established in the 1950‘s by a heroic team of German scholars, while the Teldec project followed the aimless order of the nineteenth-century Bach Gesellschaft edition. The Rilling version is also marginally more complete, since it includes the fragmentary works and parodies.
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