Bach-Handbuch (review)

Bach Handbuch. Edited by Konrad Küster. Kassel: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999. [x, 997 p. ISBN 3-7618-2000-3 (Bärenreiter); 3-476-01717-6 (Metzler). DM 158.]

As we enter the new millennium via the Bach Year 2000, it is heartening to observe the recent appearance of a number of excellent reference volumes concerning the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach. For Bach bibliography, we have Daniel R. Melamed and Michael Marissen's Introduction to Bach Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), a highly useful, well-organized overview of the literature. For the documents pertaining to Bach's life, we have Christoph Wolff's New Bach Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), a revision of Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel's classic Bach Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945; rev. ed., 1966) and an important, up-to-date supplement to the two-decades-old Bach-Dokumente (ed. Werner Neumann and Hans-Joachim Schulze, 4 vols. [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963-78]). For Bach biography, we have Wolff's Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), the most significant study of the composer's life since Philipp Spitta's monumental Johann Sebastian Bach (1873-80). And for Bach's music, we now have the Bach Handbuch, an ambitious, twelve-author, 997-page German survey of the Bach repertory.

Edited by Konrad Küster, the Bach Handbuch opens with four general essays, on Bach's political profile (Ulrich Siegele), Bach reception (Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen), Bach performance practice since 1750 (Martin Elste), and Bach and theology (Martin Petzoldt). The discussion then turns to the music itself, which is divided into five broad categories: vocal works (Küster), organ works (Michael Kube and Werner Breig), clavier works (Siegbert Rampe, Peter Schleuning, Kube, Emil Platen, and Küster), chamber and orchestral works (Hans Eppstein and Küster), and the Musical Offering, Art of Fugue, and canons (Friedrich Sprondel). Within each of these categories, the works are divided into well-organized subsections. For the vocal music, the subsections consist of chronological groupings: "Bach's Earliest Cantatas (up to 1708)," "Weimar Cantatas," "Bach's Music for Leipzig Worship Services in the Main Churches," "Cantata Compositions after the Summer of 1727," etc. (All translations are mine.) For the instrumental music, the subsections consist of work-types: "Chorale-Based Organ Works," "Free Organ Works," "Suites and Clavier-Übung Series," "Capricci, Toccatas, and Fantasias," and so on. A listing of recent secondary literature is given at the end of each subsection.

A great strength of this volume is its encompassing nature. The contributors manage to discuss in some detail the entire Bach corpus and to place the individual works within the context of the composer's creative development. Of the current catalogues raisonnés, the highly accurate Bach Compendium (1 vol. in 4 pts. to date, ed. Hans-Joachim Schulze and Christoph Wolff [Frankfurt: C. F. Peters, 1985-]) goes no further than the vocal works, and the second edition of the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach, ed. Wolfgang Schmieder [Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1990]) is riddled with errors and out-of-date information. The Bach Handbuch covers the whole repertory and sets the record straight (as far as it can be, from the latest research), even to the point of correcting the critical reports of recent volumes of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1950-]).

For instance, in the critical report to NBA IV/7, the Six Trio Sonatas for Organ, BWV 525-30, Dietrich Kilian attempted to trace the origins of several sonata movements to Bach's Weimar years (1708-17) on the basis of manuscript copies made by Johann Gottfried Walther and Johann Tobias Krebs, both connected with Bach during his Weimar tenure (Walther as colleague, Krebs as student). In the Bach Handbuch (p. 681), Breig cites the recent studies by Kirsten Beisswenger and Hans-Joachim Schulze that show that the Walther and Krebs manuscripts were not written until 1729...