Recovered in Kiev: Bach et al. A Preliminary Report on the Music Archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie

It was a fortunate coincidence that the Notenarchiv (historical music collection) of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, long missing and believed to be lost, emerged in 1999 on the eve of the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death. This breakthrough resulted from years of effort on my part, in collaboration with the Russian Research Center of Harvard University and, in particular, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). Since 1991, my colleagues Patricia Grimsted of Cambridge and Hennadii Boriak of Kiev had been compiling an inventory of West European political and historical archival holdings in Ukraine for HURI's research project "Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the Politics of Restitution." The so-called trophy materials captured at the end of the Second World War by the Red Army and distributed throughout the provinces of the former Soviet Union were invariably held, like all archival possessions in socialist states, under the jurisdiction of state security services, the former KGB. Hence, official inquiries usually remained unanswered. Like everyone else, the HURI scholars had again and again encountered utter silence in response to their questions regarding trophy materials, even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Results were often more readily obtained through unofficial channels, as turned out to be the case with the Sing-Akademie music collection. ¹

During the end of the Second World War, many museum, library, and archival holdings were evacuated from German cities and sheltered in remote rural areas. Almost all of the materials located in the eastern parts of Germany were seized as trophies and removed by the Red Army, usually to Moscow. The Red Army cultural officers kept the most significant trophies there and sent those of lesser importance to provincial capitals. Virtually no information was available about the location of these materials, including the confiscated and dislocated possessions of the Berlin Sing-Akademie that had been transferred in August 1943 to the castle of Ullersdorf near Glatz in Upper Silesia. Conflicting hypotheses emerged in the late 1950s, however, when a few nineteenth-century manuscript choirbooks from the Sing-Akademie were returned from Moscow to the music division of the former Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in East Berlin, giving rise to the assumption that the Notenarchiv, along with other extensive music materials, had found its way to Moscow. A contradictory rumor reached the East Berlin Staatsbibliothek toward the end of the 1970s, that at least parts of the Sing-Akademie's library were in Ukraine. Yet nothing could be verified, even in official consultations among socialist brother states. The late Leonid Roizman, professor of organ at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and a long-time member of the editorial board of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, ² seriously tried to determine the fate of the Sing-Akademie collection with its important Bach sources. ³ East Berlin librarians and German Democratic Republic authorities did the same, with equal lack of success--to say nothing of the efforts by the owner, the Sing-Akademie, which after the war relocated from their historical headquarters in the old center of Berlin (which had become the Soviet sector) to the American sector in West Berlin. ⁴

A classified document of the Red Army, commissioned in 1957 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, eventually provided a clue. It indicated that 5,170 items of music (including first editions and manuscripts) were deposited in the P. I. Tchaikovsky Kiev State Conservatory. ⁵ Although there was no indication of provenance or other relevant information, the size of the collection corresponded roughly to the size of the Sing-Akademie music collection. Upon inquiry, however, the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy, formerly the conservatory, in Kiev claimed to have no war-time deposited music materials. The vice-rector, a colleague in musicology, had never heard...