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Bach Aria Found in Shoe Box
By Tim Page The manuscript of a composition for soprano and harpsichord, discovered two weeks ago in a shoe box in Weimar, Germany, has been authenticated as a previously unknown early work by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the Bach Archive in Leipzig announced yesterday. Harvard University
professor Christoph Wolff, a leading expert on Bach's life and
art, flew to Germany to help authenticate the score. He called
the newly discovered piece "an exquisite and highly refined
strophic aria, Bach's only contribution to a musical genre popular
in late-17th-century Germany." In a strophic piece, all
of the verses are sung to the same music, without substantive
variation. The five-minute work was apparently composed in October 1713 by the 28-year-old Bach as a birthday present for one of his patrons, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. The manuscript was found amid the clutter of a box that also contained more than 100 poems and congratulatory letters written by others in celebration of the same birthday. According to a report in the London newspaper the Guardian, the library in Weimar where material pertaining to the duke had been stored for several centuries recently burned down, but by chance, the box containing the score had already been removed. Michael Maul, a researcher at the Bach Archive, discovered it while conducting research on the composer's sparsely chronicled life. "After Michael and I had identified it as Bach's, we opened a very expensive bottle of champagne," Peter Wollny, the archive's head of research, told the Guardian on Monday. "Michael came back from Weimar two weeks ago and said he had found something interesting. We got the microfilm of the score last week. We compared it with Bach's known compositions -- and bingo. "The last time anything by Bach was discovered was 80 years ago. So far we've only heard it on the computer. But it's a charming little work, written for one singer -- a soprano -- and a harpsichord. There's a little postlude at the end for a string ensemble -- two violins, a viola and a cello. It takes just four or five minutes to play." The archive has asked British conductor John Eliot Gardiner to present the world premiere and record the aria. Gardiner said that he thought the aria likely came from a longer cantata. "It is absolutely beautiful," Gardiner told the Guardian on Monday. "So many of Bach's cantatas went missing after he died. His son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was pretty profligate with his father's stuff. He sold manuscripts off, lost them, used them as firelighters. So when something like this turns up, it is wonderful." Gardiner described it as "a reflective, meditative, soothing piece, as Bach's church music so often is. It's not going to set the world alight -- enough of Bach's music from this early-to-mid period has survived to give us a sense of his musical personality at that time -- but it's just great to have this, because every one of his cantatas and arias is on a completely different level from all of his contemporaries." British music critic Tom Service, who has examined the score, wrote in yesterday's Guardian that it is "a charming tune in C major, full of a natural pastoral joy, an appropriate gift for the birthday of his patron in Weimar." "There's none of the contrapuntal seriousness that you associate with Bach's most involved music," he added. "Instead, this piece reveals an intimate side to the composer." Bach was highly prolific, and there is already a great deal of his music out there that is rarely heard. Indeed, only in the past quarter-century have all of Bach's 200-odd cantatas -- choral works he turned out, Sunday after Sunday, for use in church services -- been recorded. Still, the modern premiere of this aria, unheard for almost 300 years, promises to be one of the most eagerly anticipated classical music events of the season, and should take place before the end of the year. In a statement released by the archive, Prof. Wolff called Maul "a most resourceful researcher. In less than three years he uncovered an unparalleled number of new archival Bach documents, but this is the first time he presented a musical discovery. The overall research project is far from being over, and I am quite sure that sooner or later Michael Maul will make news again." |
Unknown J.S. Bach composition
found By Stephen Graham
BERLIN - A previously unknown work by Johann Sebastian Bach has been discovered in a crate of 18th-century birthday cards removed from a German library shortly before it was gutted by fire, researchers said Wednesday. Experts say the aria for soprano and string or keyboard accompaniment composed for a German duke's birthday is the first new music from the renowned composer to surface in three decades. Researcher Michael Maul of the Bach Archiv foundation found the composition, dated October 1713, last month in the eastern city of Weimar. The Leipzig-based foundation said there was no doubt about the authenticity of the handwritten, two-page score. "It is no major composition but an occasional work in the form of an exquisite and highly refined strophic aria, Bach's only contribution to a musical genre popular in late 17th-century Germany," said Christoph Wolff, the foundation's director and a professor at Harvard University. Wolff said the work, written when Bach was 28, was among documents taken from the Duchess Anna Amalia library in Weimar for restoration before September's devastating fire. "Otherwise the work would have been consumed by the flames, and we would never have known of its existence," Wolff said. Maul, who has been combing church and government archives in eastern Germany since 2002 for clues about Bach's life and work, said he was stunned to discover the composition in the last of five crates of documents that had been in a room completely gutted by the fire. He said the two pages were among several hundred poems and greetings written by officials and clerics to honor the 52nd birthday of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxony-Weimar, who Bach served as a court organist. "If I hadn't decided to go through them systematically, I would never have thought to look there," Maul said. He said it was the first Bach work to come to light since 1975, when a copy of the "Goldberg Variations" in a private collection was found to contain extra canons for piano in the composer's own handwriting. The last previously unknown vocal work by Bach to surface was in 1935, when the single-movement cantata fragment "Bekennen will ich seinen Namen" was discovered, the foundation said. Bach composed the newly discovered aria for a solo soprano, to be accompanied by strings or a harpsichord, the foundation said. The soprano was to sing a 12-stanza poem beginning with the duke's motto, "Everything with God and nothing without him," written by the theologian Johann Anton Mylius. The work was Bach's only known strophic aria, in which several stanzas are set to the same music, and the precise date made it valuable to researchers studying the development of the German composer's style, the foundation said. It was not clear if it was played at the time, but the foundation said English conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner is preparing to record it. Gardiner last month received a medal in recognition of his performance of Bach music from the Saxony city of Leipzig, where Bach was cantor of St. Thomas Church for 27 years. Maul said there were hopes the aria would be performed in Leipzig or Weimar to mark the first anniversary of the fire from which it had such a narrow escape. The blaze destroyed about 50,000 historic books and damaged another 62,000. Restoration costs are estimated at $61 million to $73 million. The 16th-century rococo palace that houses the library reopened in February. Germany's Baerenreiter publishing house plans to publish the composition in the fall. Maul said the foundation would exhibit the score once copyright issues have been cleared up. |