Messe in H-Moll, BWV 232 (review)

On 13 June 2007 a celebration at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, marked the completion of the groundbreaking edition of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach begun in 1954 as a cooperative project of the Johann-Sebastian-Bach Institut in Göttingen, the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, and Bärenreiter-Verlag (Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke [Kassel: Bärenreiter; Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1954-], widely known as the Neue Bach Ausgabe). In 2012 one last supplementary volume remains to appear of that colossal edition of 104 volumes of music and 101 critical commentaries: a study by Peter Wollny on source transmission to the year 1850. However, the editing of Bach's music continues. In 2010, publication of a new series of revised editions, the Neue Bach Ausgabe: Revidierte Edition (NBA^rev), to complement the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, commenced with Uwe Wolf's edition of the Mass in B Minor, BWV 232. A second volume appeared in 2012, containing cantatas from Bach's years as concertmaster at the Weimar court between 1714 and 1717.

The Neue Bach Ausgabe: Revidierte Edition will comprise twelve volumes of music, including early cantatas, the 1725 and 1749 versions of the St. John Passion, organ chorales, and chamber music, as well as a volume of pictorial documents, and an edition of the texts of the vocal works by Bach. In the "Notes on the Revised Edition" the editors justify this new editorial undertaking in light of the achievements of its predecessor which resulted in the reassessment of sources, the discovery of new sources, and the need to apply new knowledge and experience to works that had already appeared. The new editions retain the format and appearance of the volumes of music in the NBA with the exception of a new dark brown cloth binding. The new editions, however, incorporate the critical commentaries within the music volume, eschewing the octavo-sized companion volumes of the earlier edition. The new volumes contain longer introductions describing the compositions' histories and sources, and close with more concise source descriptions and revision reports. The editors of the new edition also state that "[a]s a rule, the critical commentaries of the NBA^rev presuppose that the reader will also use the relevant critical commentary in the NBA. This ensures that the NBA's scholarly conception is maintained along with its underlying editorial guidelines . . ." (p. viii).

That this new effort would commence with the Mass in B Minor adheres to a convention begun with the first complete edition of Bach's works published by the Bach Gesellschaft between 1850 and 1900, which intended to publish the Mass as its first volume. Likewise, Friedrich Smend's edition of the Mass in B Minor had been intended as the first volume of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe. In neither instance did this come to pass, though the slight delay of those volumes' publication merely reflected much larger problems associated with the editions themselves (see John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor, Cambridge Music Handbooks [Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 25-41; and George B. Stauffer, Bach, the Mass in B Minor: The Great Catholic Mass, Monuments of Western Music [New York: Schirmer Books, 1997], 267-70).

The situation with Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B Minor, BWV 232, confirms the fact that many of the most venerated compositions of Western art music do not survive in a perfect or complete state. This Mass reflects a late-in-life effort by Bach to assemble a complete setting...