The application of rhetoric to music had special significance in the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth century. The discipline of classical Greek oratory, originally dealing with how to make and execute a speech, formed the basis for the rules of composition and performance, especially in German-speaking lands. During this period the influence of rhetorical principles on all parameters of music was commonplace; not only did a vast number of treatises on rhetoric in music emerge, but the central educational programme taught in the Latin schools and the universities included both musica and rhetorica among the seven artes liberales. That rhetoric was also a fundamental part of Bach’s music-making is shown by the following testimony from Johann Abraham Birnbaum (1702–1748), Professor of Poetics and Rhetoric at Leipzig: ‘He so perfectly understood the resemblance which the performance of a musical piece has in common with rhetorical art that he was listened to with the utmost satisfaction and pleasure when he discoursed of the similarity and agreement between them; but we also wonder at the skilful use he made of this in his works’.