Bach in Ukraine

Thu Aug 5 13:56:00 UTC 1999

The recent AP release overlooks the fact that it was the work of Drs.
Grimsted and Boriak that actually located the archive and negotiated access
to it. Here's the fuller story:

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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
617-496-8768; fax. 617-495-8097
reply to: rdelossa at fas.harvard.edu
http://www.sabre.org/huri/