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in Ukrainian archive, included hundreds of unpublished scores by J.S.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."
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