Music Scholar Makes Bach Find Public

A Harvard music professor who last March unearthed 33 works by Johann Sebastian Bach in the Yale University Music Library has gone public with his find after months of scrutiny convinced him that the works were authentic.

Music Department Chairman Christoph Wolff discovered the previously overlooked organ chorale preludes while doing research for a Bach compendium to be presented at a festival and scholarly conference honoring the composer's 300th birthday this spring in East Germany.

"You can really fall flat on your face by releasing something prematurely," Wolff said yesterday. "I was sure they were Bach, but I was doing a lot of double checking," he added.

"It's the greatest Bach discovery of the century," added Leon Plantinga, chairman of the Yale Music Department.

Although Wolff was not the first to notice the attributions to "J.S. Bach" and "Joh. Sebast. Bach" in the collection of 17th-and 18th-century manuscripts, he was the first to analyze the pieces, which had been previously disregarded as shams.

"At first evidence was lacking--the manuscripts were widely regarded as spurious," Plantinga said. "But [Wolff] is a very good scholar who does his work well, and if he thinks they're real, that convinces me that they are," he added.

The manuscripts were not in Bach's handwriting, but the copyist signed the composer's name at the top of the music. Wolff said that stylistic patterns and internal symbols convinced him that the copyist's attributions were correct.

Stellar Find

Wolff's discovery "was like finding the tail to Halley's comet in the middle of Fresh Pond Parkway," said Daniel Pinkham '44, the chairman of the Early Music Performances Department at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Wolff estimated that although one-third of Bach's work "can be considered lost" he said he was "convinced that there are other pockets of single manuscripts and larger collections" that will eventually be discovered.

Pinkham added that the 33 preludes increase the repertoire of Bach's organ pieces by 20 percent and tell "a great deal about the early procedures of Bach."

Wolff said he originally planned to reveal his findings in a paper he will give at the Bach gala. But late last month he received a phone call from a journalist in Amsterdam who said he had heard rumors of "possible unknown Bach works in a private collection in America." Wolff said he "thought someone might be on the trail" and decided to make his discovery known.

Officials at the Yale University Press said that they plan to publish an edition of the preludes this year. The Yale library has housed the bound volume containing the preludes since 1867, when an American composer donated it to the school.