In Leipzig, where the composer grew up, the Magnificat was regularly part of Sunday services, sung in German on ordinary Sundays but more elaborately and in Latin on the high holidays (Christmas, Easter and Pentecost) and on the three Marian feasts
Annunciation,
Visitation and
Purification. When J. S. Bach's
setting of the Magnificat was first performed on 2 July 1723, the boy was nine years old, ten years later his father transposed it
to D major and performed it again. C. P. E. Bach set the text in the same key as the later version, formally as a
cantata, in 1749 in
Berlin, where he was a harpsichordist at the court of
Frederick the Great. Some sources assume that Bach composed the piece to apply for the title of
Hofkapellmeister at the court of
Amalie, the king's sister, others suggest that he composed it to apply for his father's post as
Thomaskantor in Leipzig. Another suggested possibility, a composition intended for a memorial concert for his father for which every composing son wished to supply a piece worthy of him ("seiner würdig"), seems less likely as the father was still alive when the piece was composed.
John Butt notes that the Amen
fugue of the Magnificat shows similarities to parts of the Mass in B minor, the
Gratias from the Missa and the
Ex expecto from the Symbolum Nicenum. The composer chose the work to conclude a charity concert which he conducted in Hamburg in 1786 for the
Medizinisches Armeninstitut. The concert began with the
Credo from his father's Mass in B minor, followed by two excerpts from Handel's
Messiah, the
Hallelujah Chorus and the aria
I know that my redeemer liveth, both sung in German. Magnificat was published in 1829 by
N. Simrock in Bonn. It is the composer's first extant major choral composition. == Scoring and structure ==