From the New York Times, 16 August 1999:

   International Sleuthing Adds Insight About Bach
   By SARAH BOXER

   The story of the long search for the musical estate of Johann Sebastian
   Bach's second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, is straight out of a
   bad Cold War novel.  The estate, discovered by scholars this summer
   in Ukrainian archive, included hundreds of unpublished scores by J.S.
   Bach's sons and forebears and had been feared lost or destroyed.  In
   fact, it has been in Ukraine ever since the Red army took it from
   Germany as a trophy after World War II.

   The search began in the 1970s when Dr.  Christoph Wolff, a music
   professor at Harvard University who was writing the Bach family entry
   for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, was tipped off
   by a librarian in East Berlin that C.P.E.  Bach's estate was stashed
   somewhere in Ukraine.

   When he tried to learn more, he encountered two decades of denial.
   He enlisted the help of Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, a specialist in
   Soviet trophy archives and an associate of the Ukrainian Research
   Institute at Harvard.  But she too was stonewalled.

   It was only this year that the case began to crack.  In researching
   her forthcoming book about war spoils, "Trophies of War and Empire,"
   Dr. Grimsted stumbled upon a German translation of a 1957 report by
   the Soviet Ministry of Culture that mentioned some 5,100 musical
   manuscripts in a conservatory in Kiev.  But when the conservatory
   officials were questioned about the document, they said they knew
   nothing about it.

   At this point, Dr.  Grimsted's colleague, Hennadii Boriak, the deputy
   director of Ukrainian archeography and sources studies at the Ukrainian
   Academy of Sciences, stepped in.  He found a librarian who remembered
   seeing a report about a music collection being moved in 1973 to the
   Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art in Kiev.  Archive
   officials confirmed that they had a collection of some sort, but
   offered no further information.

   This spring, when Boriak finally got to see the collection, no one
   knew what it contained.  Wolff asked him after his visit, "Does it
   contain the Bach family name?"

   He responded, "Yes, quite a few."

   That was not the end of the maze.  In June, Dr.  Grimsted and Wolff
   arrived in Kiev to appraise the collection and met with a string of
   delays.  Their first day there was a holiday.  On the second day the
   archive was being renovated.  On the third day the archive's director
   showed the scholars an inventory of the archive, but not the collection
   itself.

   Finally, the director, who Ms.  Grimsted recalled was "worried that
   we were going to write that the material was in disrepair," pulled
   down a box.  It contained about six bound manuscripts and bore the
   stamp of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, the choral society that had
   inherited C.P.E Bach's estate.  The scholars knew they had hit pay
   dirt.  They had three days to examine the loot.

   About a tenth of the collection contained Bach family manuscripts.
   There were a few scores by J.S. Bach.  (Most of his manuscripts have
   been in the state library in Berlin since 1854.) But the bulk of the
   Bach booty was a collection of unpublished manuscripts by J.S. Bach's
   two eldest sons, C.P.E.  and Wilhelm Friedemann, as well as music
   by his ancestors, making up the "Old Bach Archive" that dates to a
   17th-century polychoral composition by his great grandfather, Johann
   Bach.  There were also compositions by Georg Telemann and other
   composers, as well as the originals of Goethe's letters to the
   composer Carl Friedrich Zelter.

   How did this collection wind up where no one, apparently, knew
   what it was? In 1943, when the bombing of Berlin began, the Berlin
   Sing-Akademie collection was taken for safekeeping to a castle in
   Silesia, now part of Poland.  In the spring of 1945, when Soviet
   trophy brigades began combing the area, a tank driver from Kiev
   discovered the archive.  The KGB arranged to have the material taken
   to a music conservatory in Kiev, and there it stayed until 1973, when
   it was moved to the state archive.

   The manuscripts, Wolff said, hold important clues about J.S. Bach's
   relationship to his ancestors and sons.  The music shows that the
   sons were "overwhelmed" by their father's mastery, Wolff noted.
   "Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote 20 Passions, and in many he integrated
   whole movements from his father's works," he said, but added that
   C.P.E.  Bach was also bending the Passion genre.

   J.S. Bach worked side by side with his sons, Wolff said.  "He would
   pick up some of the modern ideas they tried out first, a melodic
   phrase that would reflect the gallant manner of the younger generation,
   and he would react to it and say, 'I can do it better."'

   Based on music the sons composed in the 1730s and '40s, Wolff said,
   it is clear they were trained to be individuals, not clones of their
   father.  For example, Wilhelm Friedemann is less whimsical and more
   difficult than C.P.E.

   What about J.S. Bach's relationship to his ancestors? He was the
   family historian, Wolff said.  Beginning in 1735, when his oldest
   sons left home and started their careers, Bach, then 50, realized
   that the family's musical tradition would continue and that he should
   record its history.  In keeping with the Age of Enlightenment, when
   family histories became popular, J.S. Bach drew a family tree complete
   with commentaries on everyone who was musical.  He singled out his
   uncle Johann Christoph Bach as a great expressive composer.

   But that does not mean much, Wolff said, unless one knows what Bach
   meant by "expressive." Now one can make sense of Bach's commentaries
   because he not only rated his ancestors, but he copied their scores,
   and the copies are also part of the archive.  The music of Bach's
   uncles J.C.  Bach and Johann Michael Bach is virtuosic and far more
   demanding than that of their contemporaries Johann Pachelbel and
   Dietrich Buxtehude, Wolff said.

   The Ukrainian authorities have orally agreed to let the Harvard music
   department and the Ukrainian Research Institute put the collection
   on microfilm, Wolff said, and he hopes to compile a rough manuscript
   of the collection's music within a year so that research can go on
   while the fate of the originals is decided.

   That may take a while.  A few weeks ago, Dr.  Grimsted said, the
   Russians confirmed that they would return no war trophies to Germany.
   But the Ukrainians, who are eager to forge connections with Western
   Europe, seem willing to consider returning their war spoils in exchange
   for the return of the few Ukrainian works left in Germany, Wolff
   said.  "They have done it before," he said, "and they may do it
   again."