The uncommonly productive Christoph Graupner composed the five Epiphany cantatas selected for this recording between 1730 and December 1753, when he was no longer practicing the art of opera composition. The author of the texts, Graupner’s brother-in-law Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, was a Darmstadt pastor and Lutheran superintendent and between 1719 and 1743 wrote some 1,500 cantata texts for the composer’s highly imaginative settings. Two criteria operated during the selection process for this recording: one was the Epiphany theme, and the other was the extraordinary instrumentation serving to exemplify the multifaceted tone colors in Graupner’s music. It is above all in the arias that he succeeded in exploiting the musical potential offered by the various instruments – though never neglecting the voice part. Graupner’s cantata oeuvre is distinguished not only by the fine art of his chorale settings but also by his always resourceful imagination. He is open to new instruments then on the rise and subtly and effectively employs their various tone colors in order to compose highly expressive arias and recitatives representing the very best of those times. Many of his cantatas even today lie slumbering in the archives and continue to await rediscovery. May this recording do its part to contribute to making Graupner known to an even broader public and to showing why he would have been a very fine St. Thomas music director – as the members of the Leipzig city council themselves declared!