Archivio di C. P. E. Bach
Annarita Indino
Ciao a tutti.
Ancora non si sa nulla di preciso, ma la notizia del ritrovamento di un
archivio musicale appartenuto a C. P. E. Bach, avvenuto in Ucraina, ha già
fatto il giro del momdo ed è stata già ampiamente diffusa. Avrei voluto
attendere, per parlarne, di sapere qualcosa di più preciso e, soprattutto
avrei voluto avere qualche fonte autorevole da citare (eheheh.....in
musicologia non sono ammessi pettegolezzi.....). Per ora ho solo questo post
recapitatomi dalla mailing list della American Musicological Society. Ve lo
passo subito......ma non posso garantire l'autenticità delle sue
affermazioni.
BACH MUSICAL ESTATE SURFACES IN UKRAINE
The long lost musical estate of Johann Sebastian Bach's| second son,
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, has been rediscovered in
Kyiv, Ukraine, where it is preserved as part of the music
archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie. The Sing-Akademie's
archive, with one of the world's most important collections of
18th-century music including significant and largely unique
Bach family materials, had been evacuated from Berlin to
Ullersdorf Castle, Silesia (now Polish, Oldrzychowice
Klodzkie), in 1943 during World War II, but then disappeared.
With no information available about its postwar fate, it has
been missing for over half a century and long feared destroyed.
Christoph Wolff, professor of music at Harvard University and
dean of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, whose new
biography of J. S. Bach will appear early next year at W. W.
Norton, has been following several leads to the whereabouts of
the material for more than two decades in connection with
research on the musical sources of the Bach family. Dr.
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, an associate of the Ukrainian
Research Institute at Harvard University, who directs a project
on Russian and Ukrainian archives, has been searching in
Ukraine in connection with her book now in press at Harvard,
Trophies of War and Empire. The close collaboration between
Professor Wolff and Dr. Grimsted at Harvard University,
together with Professor Hennadii Boriak, Deputy Director of the
Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies of the
Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, led to the recent discovery.
Earlier last month Professor Wolff, Dr. Grimsted, and Barbara
Wolff, music cataloger of Harvard's Houghton Library identified
and examined the Sing-Akademie collection in the Central State
Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine in Kyiv. The
Berlin Sing-Akademie, founded in 1791 by Carl Friedrich Fasch
(a colleague and friend of the younger Bach) and directed from
1800 to 1832 by Carl Friedrich Zelter, presented a celebrated
performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829 under the
direction of Zelter's pupil, the young Felix Mendelssohn. Its
music archive contains well over 5,000 items (mostly
manuscripts) that have been preserved in excellent conditions.
Even before its wartime disappearance, as a private collection
without a professional archivist, the materials were largely
inaccessible to scholars, and its only provisionally catalogued
holdings have never been systematically studied.
The estate of C. P. E. Bach (1714-1788) which forms a central
portion of the Sing-Akademie archive 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, including all
the Passions, more than two thirds of the keyboard concertos,
many chamber works, and songs are unpublished and have never been available
for performance or study. Led by a team of
scholars at Harvard University and the Bach Archive in Leipzig,
Germany, The Collected Works of C. P. E. Bach are currently
being edited under the auspices of the Packard Humanities
Institute, with Christopher Hogwood as chair of the editorial
board. In addition to important 17th- and 18th-century
manuscripts, the Sing-Akademie Library also contains
substantial holdings (in part stemming from the Bach estate) of
works by Georg Philipp Telemann (220-plus cantatas), Carl
Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun (more than 150 vocal and
420-plus instrumental sources), Johann Adolf Hasse (ca. 130
vocal and 80 instrumental sources), Franz and Georg Benda (ca.
120 works), and compositions by many musicians from 18th- and
early 19th-century Berlin, most of them associated with the
Prussian court. Goethe's letters to Zelter, from the famous
Goethe-Zelter correspondence, also form part of the archive.
Trophy art, library books, and archives from Western Europe
transferred to the former USSR after World War II were for the
most part kept in hiding throughout the Soviet period. But
since its independence, Ukraine has led former Soviet republics
in restitution efforts and signed a cultural agreement with
Germany providing for the mutual return of wartime cultural
trophies. A number of symbolic acts of restitution have taken
place in recent years, including the 1996 return to the Dresden
Art Gallery of valuable albums of drawings and lithographs
found in Kyiv and the return of three drawings to the Bremen
Kunsthalle from private sources in 1997. Ukraine has
simultaneously received from the Germany some important
cultural treasures that had been seized by the Nazis during the
war.
The over 5,000 music scores from the Sing-Akademie Library in
Berlin identified this summer in Kyiv undoubtedly represent the
most valuable trophy collection to have surfaced in Ukraine.
The Main Archival Administration of Ukraine and the Central
State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art are closely
cooperating with the Harvard specialists and agreed to planning
a collaborative project with Harvard University and the Packard
Humanities Institute to make these uniquely important materials
available for research and performance. A catalogue of the
Bachiana in the Sing-Akademie Archive is projected as part of
the Bach Repertorium series, a research project on the music of
the Bach family jointly undertaken by the Harvard Music
Department and the Leipzig Bach Archive.
It is hoped that the Academy of Music in Kyiv will be able to
participate. The project will also be closely coordinated with
the Sing-Akademie of Berlin, one of Germany's oldest continuing
performing organizations, and there is hope that the priceless
musical sources will eventually be returned to their original
home.
____________________________________________________
Robert De Lossa
Director of Publications
Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
1583 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
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Sicut ablactatus est super matre sua,
ita retributio in anima mea.
Annarita Indino
ar.i...@iol.it
http://members.it.tripod.de/cat33/index.html
ICQ #40404044
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