Bach Again

August 19, 1999

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HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Bach Again

Pictured here is a page from the manuscripts of the musical estate of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, second son of Johann Sebastian Bach, which were rediscovered recently in Kiev, Ukraine.

The musical estate of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, second son of Johann Sebastian Bach, has been rediscovered in Kiev, Ukraine, by scholars from Harvard and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

The collection was found in Ukraine's Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art as part of the Berlin Sing-Akademie archive of 18th-century music. Last available for study in the 1930s, the materials were evacuated from Berlin to Silesia in 1943. They have been missing for over half a century, and many Western scholars feared they had been destroyed.

Christoph Wolff, a professor of music at Harvard and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has been searching for the Bach material for more than two decades in conjunction with his work on the Bach family's musical sources. Wolff discovered the materials in June, working with Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, an associate of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute who directs a project on Russian and Ukrainian archives; Hennadii Boriak, deputy director of the Institute of Ukrainian Archeography and Sources Studies; and Barbara Wolff, music cataloger at Harvard's Houghton Library.

The estate of C.P.E. Bach (1714-1788) forms a central portion of the Sing-Akademie archive and includes music by his father and brothers, a collection of works by his father's ancestors called "Old-Bach Archive" (many in copies from J.S. Bach's hand) and, most important, the bulk of his own compositions in autograph or authorized copies, among them 20 Passions, 50 keyboard concertos, and many other vocal and instrumental works. Most of the compositions are unpublished and have never been available for performance or study.

Music professor and Bach scholar Christoph Wolff talks about his recent discovery. Photo by Jon Chase

A team of scholars at Harvard and the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany, are editing The Collected Works of C.P.E. Bach under the auspices of the Packard Humanities Institute. A catalog of the approximately 500 Bach family works in the Sing-Akademie music archive is slated to be published as part of the Bach Repertorium series, another joint research project of Harvard's Music Department and the Leipzig Bach Archive.

In addition to important 17th- and 18th-century manuscripts, the Sing-Akademie library also contains substantial holdings of works by Georg Philipp Telemann, Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Johann Adolf Hasse, Franz and Georg Benda, and compositions by many musicians from 18th- and early 19th-century Berlin. Goethe's letters to Zelter, from the famous Goethe-Zelter correspondence, also form part of the archive.

The Main Archival Administration of Ukraine, Harvard University, and the Packard Humanities Institute of Los Altos, Calif., will collaborate to make the materials available for research and performance. It is hoped that the priceless musical sources will eventually be returned to their original home.