http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wobach0609,0,4837445,print.story?coll=ny-leadworldnews-headlinesy STEPHEN GRAHAM
Associated Press Writer
June 8, 2005, 5:06 PM EDT
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 devastated 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, whom 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.
Bach had composed arias but this work was his only known strophic aria, in which several stanzas are set to the same music. The foundation said its precise date made it valuable to researchers studying the development of the German composer's style.
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.
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On the Net:
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Too Fricken Cool. Can't wait to hear It.
Stephen
Topic: Unknown J.S. Bach composition found (Read 917 times)