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Bach in time: a 'new' aria

Researchers working in Germany say they have found a long forgotten piece of music written by Johann Sebastian Bach.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published June 9, 2005

It's a musicologist's dream come true.

A long forgotten 18th century aria by Johann Sebastian Bach was found last month in a crate by a scholar from the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany.

The work, in C major for soprano, harpsichord and strings, was written in October 1713 as a 52nd birthday present for Bach's patron, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. Bach, then court organist in Weimar, composed the music to go with a 12-verse poem dedicated to the duke that began, "Everything with God and nothing without him."

The two-page score, handwritten by Bach, was discovered about two weeks ago by researcher Michael Maul in the course of a systematic survey of central German church, communal and state archival collections, according to the archive, which announced the find this week.

"It is an amazing, sensational discovery," said Robert Levin, associate artistic director of the Sarasota Music Festival and president of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition, held every two years in Leipzig.

Bach's artistic legacy is somewhat mysterious because his manuscripts were divided among his children when he died in 1750 and many were subsequently lost. He composed about 100 cantatas and a St. Mark Passion that disappeared.

"What we're talking about here is a small aria, which pales in scale to Bach's major works that were lost, but when you're talking about a genius and one of the central composers in Western civilization, a piece of a couple of minutes is a sensational discovery," said Levin, a concert pianist and Harvard professor who has seen a copy of the manuscript.

The Anna Amalia Library in the eastern city of Weimar where the score had been stored for several centuries recently burned down, but fortunately the crate containing the score had been removed before the fire. Maul came across the composition while going through the crate's contents.

"After Michael and I had identified it as Bach's, we opened a very expensive bottle of champagne," Peter Wollny, head of research at the Bach Archive, told England's Guardian newspaper. "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 aria is 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 the single-movement cantata fragment "Bekennen will ich seinen Namen," discovered in 1935.

"This aria is early as far as Bach's development is concerned," Levin said. "He was 28 years old when he wrote it. It would appear from the nature of the manuscript that it is an individual work which is complete in itself. Nothing on a large scale, but simply an occasional piece, though of choice quality. It would appear to be the one time in Bach's life that he wrote such a composition, an aria with a series of verses in which the same music can be used over and over again."

British conductor John Eliot Gardiner, a champion of Bach's works, plans to perform the newly discovered aria at London's Cadogan Hall on Dec. 18. No word yet on which soprano will get to sing it. "That will be a privileged thing," Levin said.

Information from the Associated Press, the Guardian and the Bach Archive Foundation Web site (www.bach-leipzig.de) was used in this report.

[Last modified June 9, 2005, 01:18:46]