An unknown painting by Johannes Vermeer, a new film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, a previously hidden eclogue by Garcilaso de la Vega? A similar miracle became a reality this afternoon in Leipzig, where, in an event of the greatest solemnity, and on the imposing stage of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, the discovery of two scores composed by Johann Sebastian Bach whose existence until now was unknown was announced. Given the extent of the German composer’s legacy, perhaps it would be more appropriate to equate this discovery with that of a new painting by Titian, a once-thought-lost film by Kenji Mizoguchi, or a rediscovered drama by Calderón.
The latest edition of the catalog of Bach’s works (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis), also presented here in Leipzig in 2022, contains 1,177 entries, the numbers of which always appear preceded by the omnipresent acronym BWV, although they can refer both to a small Invention lasting just over a minute and to works the size of The Passion according to St. Matthew wave Mass in B minor. Fortunately, with this afternoon’s revelation, it has just become obsolete and, in its next reprint, the publishing house Breitkopf & Härtel will have to accommodate two new organ pieces which were played this afternoon in the church where Bach presented a good number of his compositions, without the privileged Leipzig faithful realizing that they were hearing for the first time the music of “the greatest composer who ever lived”, a statement so irrefutable that, as was one of his most great current performers, the Hungarian pianist András Schiff, has recalled more than once, “does not need demonstrations”.
A long job
The discovery does not come from nowhere, as the musicologists of the Bach-Archiv, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, have spent decades, like true bloodhounds, patiently and meticulously scouring archives, libraries, churches and town halls across Germany in search of new scores by the German genius. We know that, despite the extent of his legacy, much has also been lost and the most striking example is, perhaps, that of the sacred cantatas. According to the obituary (Obituary) written by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and his disciple Johann Friedrich Agricola shortly after his death, but published for the first time in the last issue of the magazine Music library In 1754 Bach composed “five annual cycles of cantatas for all Sundays and holidays”, so it can be assumed that about a hundred of these compositions have not reached us. We later realize the existence of “five passions,” but we retain only those that are based on the Gospel accounts of John and Matthew.
In recent decades there have been several great discoveries, such as the collection of sheet music from Johann Sebastian’s ancestors (Alt-Bachisches Archive), reappeared in 1999 in the Kiev State Archives thanks to the research of Christoph Wolff, whose essential work was recently published in Spanish Bach’s musical universe and that he had already attributed to the composer to whom he had dedicated his whole life 38 of the 82 organ chorales contained in a volume compiled by Johann Gottfried Neumeister whose manuscript he found together with Harold E. Samuel at Yale University in 1984: 31 of them did not appear in any other source. An essential letter to confirm Bach’s dissatisfaction a few years after settling in Leipzig, and the most personal of those that are preserved, is the one he wrote to his high school friend Georg Erdmann on 28 October 1730. Philipp Spitta found it in the State Archives of Moscow in 1868 during the preparation of his monumental biography and transcribed it in full in the second volume (1880), but then the original disappeared and came back to light, also in Russian. capital, at the end of 1950, the year in which Bach’s second centenary was commemorated, full of good news: the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnisthe Bach-Archiv was founded in Leipzig and in Neue-Bach-Ausgabethe second edition – significantly revised and expanded – of the German composer’s complete works.
In 1977, on the back of a copy of the first edition of the fourth issue of the Clavier-Übung (the work known by the spurious title of Goldberg Variations) preserved at the National Library of France, fourteen canons were found on the first eight notes of the bass of the Aria, a work by Bach himself, cataloged thirteen years later as BWV 1087. And Michael Maul, brilliant musicologist and artistic director of the Leipzig Bach Festival since 2018, is responsible for the two most recent great discoveries, both in the library of Duchess Anna Amalia of Weimar. In 2006 he identified two manuscripts in organ tablatures containing music by Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reincken copied in 1698 and 1700 for personal use by a very young Bach (at thirteen and fifteen years old) in Ohrdruf and Lüneburg, which attest not only to the precocious musical training and technical virtuosity of that teenager, but Reincken’s copy also allows us to verify that he studied there. second location with Georg Böhm, whose name is mentioned at the end of the copy of the choral fantasy Am Wasserflüssen Babylon in a short Latin inscription: “A Dom(ino) Georg Böhme, descriptum anno 1700, Lunaburgi”. Previously, in 2005, Maul had brought to light an aria for soprano and continuous bass (“Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn’ Ihn”, BWV 1127), also by Bach himself, on two blank pages in a poem by the superintendent Mylius de Buttstadt printed in 1713: in a very Bachian gesture, the 52 notes of the instrumental prelude correspond to the age which was the birthday of the Duke William Ernest of Saxe-Weimar, whose two names are completed in an acrostic formed by the initials of twelve words distributed over as many stanzas of the poem.
An exceptional event
What happened today in Leipzig therefore has all the signs of a truly exceptional event and the discovery was presented in a press conference by the German government’s Minister of Culture, Wolfram Weimar; the mayor of Leipzig, Burkhard Jung; the president and director of the Bach Archives in Leipzig, Ton Koopman and Peter Wollny; the president of the Saxon Academy of Sciences, Hans-Joachim Knölker; and the director of the publishing house Breitkopf & Härtel, Nick Pfefferkorn, who acted as moderator. The closest thing that is remembered to today’s solemn event is when, ten years ago, the portrait of Bach painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann in 1748 officially returned to Leipzig after several decades in the United States, in a much better preserved copy than the previous one, from 1746, which can be admired in the Old Town Hall of Leipzig. The painting was inaugurated on 12 June 2015 in the Nikolaikirche, in the presence of the mayor of the city himself, the social democrat Burkhard Jung, of the then president of the Bach-Archiv, John Eliot Gardiner, who remains its director, Peter Wollny, and of the widow and daughter of its owner until then, the philanthropist William H. Scheide, in whose private villa in Princeton it hung for more than sixty years. It is currently part, as one of its great treasures, of the permanent collection of the Bach Museum in Leipzig.
The first clue to the two new compositions formally attributed to Bach came in 1992, when Peter Wollny was struck by several manuscripts of organ music contained in a volume preserved in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels in which he intuited their Thuringian origin. Two works in particular, the Chaconne in D minor and G minor, in copies dating from around 1705, had striking coincidences with Bach’s later Passacaglia in C minor (BWV 582), such as the later use of the repeated bass motif as the subject of the fugue (a procedure present only in the much longer Chaconne in D minor). Many years later, the location of the copyist, Salomon Günther John, an organist active in Thuringia, who in a letter claimed to have studied with Bach in Arnstadt, was made possible by a joint project of the Bach Archive and the Saxon Academy of Sciences, which traces every imaginable archival source relating to the Bach family: not only with Johann Sebastian, but also with his ancestors and their descendants, including dozens of musicians. The music clearly reflects what Bach learned during his formative years and the decisive influence of Johann Pachelbel (whose works he secretly copied during his adolescence at the home of his older brother Johann Christoph, after the death of his parents) and of Dieterich Buxtehude, who he went to listen to in Lübeck during his years in Arnstadt. Both obviously mastered the art of the chaconne, a musical form consisting of a series of variations on an incessantly repeated bass.
The German Minister of Culture defined Wollny – who had assured a few weeks ago that he had “a degree of certainty of 95%” that both chaconne are indeed compositions by the young Bach, but which has now risen to “99.9%” – as almost a “criminological detective”, even if the main factotum of the discovery wanted to share the credit with the entire team of musicologists working at the Bach-Archiv, which the mayor of Leipzig defined as “the world center of research musicological studies on Bach. The two chaconnes already have their assigned numbers in the catalogue: BWV 1178 (D minor) and 1179 (G minor), and their first modern interpretation, by Ton Koopman, can be followed live this afternoon on YouTube, where it will continue to be available for all those who want to listen to both works. In this modern world premiere, the Chaconne BWV 1178 lasted 6 minutes and 35 seconds. 3 minutes and 26 seconds Next Saturday, the chief organist of the Thomaskirche will perform the two works again during the church service in the Thomaskirche. This afternoon, many spectators already had the score edited by Breitkopf & Härtel in their hands.
This same week, and after having made the world participate in this historic discovery today, the anniversary of the Bach-Archiv will also be celebrated with a commemorative day on Thursday followed by a two-day congress (Friday and Saturday) dedicated “to the young Johann Sebastian Bach and musical culture in Thuringia at the beginning of the 18th century” and by a final concert on Sunday, events in which all the greats of current Bach musicology will parade, including the great patriarch Hans-Joachim Schulze, curator say the essentials Bach documents and now ninety years old, his two successors at the helm of the Archive, Christoph Wolff and Peter Wollny, the extraordinary researcher Christine Blanken (co-editor with both of them of the third edition of the Archive Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis and the great creator of that marvel within everyone’s reach called Digital Bach), Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Andreas Glöckner, Daniel R. Melamed, the aforementioned Michael Maul and performers of the caliber of Jean-Claude Zehnder and Pieter Dirksen, among many others: a party from start to finish. It is not difficult to imagine that these two new Bach compositions, recently unveiled at the Thomaskirche, will be a topic of conversation in all groups. There are those who think that a couple of compositions to add to a vast corpus that already exceeds a thousand entries is not a great thing. But a little bit of Bach – no matter how young he was when he gave birth to these two chaconnes – is a lot. Amount.
