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BLINDING US WITH SCIENCE? MAN, MACHINE AND THE MASS IN B MINOR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2011

JOSHUA RIFKIN
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Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 77 - 91
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 For the background to the composition of the Mass, and for details on all the sources discussed here, see Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750): Messe h-moll BWV 232, ed. Joshua Rifkin (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2006), especially v–vi and 254–256. The admittedly tantalizing possibility, suggested by the recent research of Michael Maul and Peter Wollny, that Bach wrote the Mass on commission from Count Johann Adam von Questenberg for the ‘Musicalische Congregation’ in Vienna strikes me as still too tenuous to displace what has become the traditional view of the work's origin; see Maul, Michael, ‘“Die große catholische Messe”: Bach, Graf Questenberg und die Musicalische Congregation in Wien’, Bach-Jahrbuch 95 (2009), 152–175Google Scholar , and Wollny, Peter, ‘Beobachtungen am Autograph der h-Moll-Messe’, Bach-Jahrbuch 95 (2009), 144–147Google Scholar .

2 Wollny, ‘Beobachtungen’, 144–147, points to hints that Bach may have had – or intended to have – parts copied; again, these remain too vague at present to support any firm conclusions.

3 As we shall see, Uwe Wolf argues that it didn't begin there either; but see page 000 below.

4 Evidence of a performance before the well-known one of 1786 comes chiefly from the three parts of Source F copied by Heinrich Georg Michael Damköhler; see Rifkin, ed., Bach: Messe h-moll, 255.

5 See Wolf, Uwe, Hahn, Oliver and Wolff, Timo, ‘Wer schrieb was? Röntgenfloureszenzanalyse am Autograph von J. S. Bachs Messe in h-Moll BWV 232’, Bach-Jahrbuch 95 (2009), 118–133Google Scholar . In the remainder of this article I tacitly ascribe all musicological statements to Uwe Wolf alone.

6 See the abbreviated account in Rifkin, ed., Bach: Messe h-moll, 254; for the other sharps see ‘Et in unum Dominum’, bars 24–25, and the fugue bwv1080/19, easily consulted in the facsimile reproduction Johann Sebastian Bach: Die Kunst der Fuge BWV 1080. Autograph – Originaldruck, ed. Hans Gunter Hoke (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1979).

7 See Wolf, Hahn and Wolff, ‘Wer schrieb was?’, 131.

8 See Rilling, Helmuth, Johann Sebastian Bachs h-Moll-Messe (Neuhausen–Stuttgart: Hänssler, 1979), 106Google Scholar ; and Chafe, Eric, Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 83Google Scholar . For background to the passage, sources and readings see Rifkin, Joshua, ‘Eine schwierige Stelle in der h-Moll-Messe’, in Bach in Leipzig – Bach und Leipzig: Konferenzbericht Leipzig 2000, ed. Leisinger, Ulrich (Hildesheim: Olms, 2002), 321Google Scholar .

9 Despite its place in the alphabet, all but the earliest parts of source F – the tenor among them – may well postdate G.

10 Compare Rifkin, ‘Eine schwierige Stelle’, 329–330.

11 See Rifkin, ed., Bach: Messe h-moll, 270, and Wollny, ‘Beobachtungen’, 137–138. Although my edition, for reasons of space, did not explain the attribution to C. P. E. Bach, it in fact rested on essentially the same observations concerning the text underlay as Wollny has now published, and beyond that on the clear identity of ink between text and music – a detail, ironically, that XRF seems only to affirm.

12 Wolf, Hahn and Wolff, ‘Wer schrieb was?’, 126–128.

13 For an itemization of his copies in Anna Amalia's library – falsely listed under Johann Philipp Kirnberger (with a ‘?’), but adequate for present purposes – see Blechschmidt, Eva Renate, Die Amalien-Bibliothek: Musikbibliothek der Prinzessin Anna Amalia von Preußen (1723–1787). Historische Einordnung und Katalog mit Hinweisen auf die Schreiber der Handschriften (Berlin: Merseburger, 1965), 333Google Scholar ; on his putative identity with Kirnberger see particularly Yoshitake Kobayashi, review of Wutta, Eva Renate, Quellen der Bach-Tradition in der Berliner Amalien-Bibliothek: Mit zahlreichen Abbildungen der Handschriften nebst Briefen der Anna Amalia von Preußen (1723–1787) (Tutzing: Schneider, 1989)Google Scholar , Die Musikforschung 44 (1991), 291–292.

14 My thanks to David Fallows for enlightening discussion on this point. The later copyists include, as Table 1 makes plain, Ludwig August Christoph Hopff (twice) and Philipp Emanuel's chief copyist Johann Heinrich Michel. Michel has left us two copies of the passage, in sources F and I; but F, it would appear, relied not on the autograph but on an earlier set of parts, revised by Emanuel, of which only Damköhler's violins and continuo remain. See Rifkin, ed., Bach: Messe h-moll, 255. I might also note here that the more easily singable reading of the addition to the autograph finds no record in the copies until those connected directly with, or evidently reflective of, Emanuel's performances of the Symbolum.

15 See Wolf, Hahn and Wolff, ‘Wer schrieb was?’, especially 120–123.

16 Not, however, that all scientists inevitably follow this precept: see Alexander Schneider, M., ‘Mental Inertia in the Biological Sciences’, Trends in Biochemical Sciences 35 (2009), 125–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar . My thanks to Michael Shia for the reference.

17 Wolf, Hahn and Wolff, ‘Wer schrieb was?’, 131.

18 We may wonder, in fact, if the autograph even contains the supposed letter c. I do not recall noticing it when I examined the manuscript. Admittedly, at the time nothing about the spot struck me as suspicious, so I might not have looked as closely as I could have; but a colleague who has recently examined high-resolution digital images of the autograph tells me that even under considerable magnification he could not detect the presence of a c either.

19 See the observations on ‘immediate’ corrections in Marshall, Robert L., The Compositional Process of J. S. Bach: A Study of the Autograph Scores of the Vocal Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), volume 2, 36Google Scholar .

20 Wolf, Hahn and Wolff, ‘Wer schrieb was?’, 130–131; I read ‘an diesen Stellen’ as a slip for ‘an dieser Stelle’ and have translated accordingly.

21 See Rifkin, ed., Bach: Messe h-moll, 267.

22 For details see Rifkin, ed., Bach: Messe h-moll, 267; and Wolf, Hahn and Wolff, ‘Wer schrieb was?’, 123–125 – which, however, surely misreads the chronology of the musical revisions concerning bar 98.

23 Wolf, Hahn and Wolff, ‘Wer schrieb was?’, 124: ‘Verdeutlichung des Autographs und Vervollständigung der Abschrift gingen also Hand in Hand’.

24 See also, on this point, Wollny, ‘Beobachtungen’, 137.