The careers of the early seventeenth century composer Johann Hermann Schein and the early eighteenth century composer J.S. Bach, though separated by a full century, are strangely parallel to one another. Schein served as Kapellmeister to the court of Weimar, and then, in 1616, moved on to take up the position of Kantor to the St. Thomas Church and School in Leipzig. Bach was similarly employed in Weimar for a long time (he eventually left Weimar specifically because he was not appointed Kapellmeister, or music director, when the job opened up), and, more famously, he spent almost the whole of the last half of his life with the title Thomaskantor of Leipzig. And just as Bach divided his time between composing sacred vocal music and composing secular instrumental music, so too was Schein a renowned author of vocal music (in both the German and the Italian styles, something quite remarkable for his time) and also of brilliant and widely esteemed instrumental dance suites. Indeed, it is quite appropriate to say that the long-term influence of Schein's groundbreaking Banchetto musicale of 1617 was such that had Schein never produced it, J.S. Bach could never possibly have written his own (much more famous) instrumental suites in quite the way that he did.

The Banchetto musicale is a collection of "Padouanen, Gagliarden, Courenten und Allemanden" (pavanes, galliards, courantes, and allemandes) scored for five instruments. "Violen" are asked for, by which we can assume Schein meant either viols or the more modern violins, and there is no continuo part. There are 20 separate suites in the various modes. The four individual dance movements of any one suite are all related to one another, motivically speaking: the same thematic building blocks are used for pavane, galliard, courante, and allemande. And at the end of each suite there is a "triple" in which the allemande is recast in triple meter, just as many dances are followed by "doubles" in later composers' suites.

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