Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in G minor (BWV 235) is one of four so-called "Lutheran masses" or "little masses" composed and premiered in Leipzig between 1736 and 1739. The works seem to reflect a trend of the time among some Protestant composers who felt attached to the sanctity and tradition of the Latin-texted liturgy even within the context of the Lutheran theological and liturgical revisions. The practice has also been linked to the 1733 crowning of August III, a Catholic, as the King of Poland, and to the musical influences that subsequently may have emanated from the Warsaw court. Although the G minor mass stands as a secondary representative of Bach's relatively small body of Latin works (primarily overshadowed by the monumental B minor mass), it also belongs to a much larger category of pieces within Bach's oeuvre, namely, those compositions based on preexisting musical works. Each of the "little masses," designated as such because of their inclusion of settings of the Kyrie and Gloria only rather than the entire Ordinary mass, borrows much of its musical materials from various cantatas Bach had previously composed. The G minor mass stands out, however, in having a stronger connection to its source materials than the other works. The other masses generally borrow piecemeal from various cantatas; the recycled ideas upon which Bach bases four portions of the Gloria in the Mass in A major (BWV 234), for example, come from four different cantatas. In contrast, although the Kyrie and Gloria of the G minor mass borrow from the opening choruses of the Cantatas (BWV 102) and (BWV 72), respectively, the subsequent four sections of the Gloria are all adapted from numbers in a single work, the Cantata BWV 187. A bass solo and arias for alto and soprano serve as the settings for the devotional and confessional portions of the Gloria, while the opening chorus of the cantata serves as the musical foundation for the closing section of the Mass, the Cum sancto Spiritu. The work as a whole carries a pensive air, not only through the prevailing minor mode but in the elegant rigor of its counterpoint and the interplay of vocal contours and the instrumental timbres—especially the fluid lines given to the winds, which seem to evoke a sense of quietly fervent devotion throughout Bach's "little masses."

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