Collected Bach is finished
Today marks the official completion of the Neue Bach Ausgabe.
On 13 June 2007, a ceremony marking the completion of the New Bach Edition will take place at St. Thomas’s Church, Leipzig as part of the Bach Festival. At this ceremony, the final volume of the edition will be symbolically presented to the public. Guest speakers will include the President of the Bundestag, Dr. Norbert Lammert, the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Dr. Annette Schavan and the President of the Union of Academies, Prof. Dr. Gerhard Gottschalk. Musical highlights will be provided by St. Thomas’s Choir, Leipzig, under the direction of the Kantor of St. Thomas’s, Georg Christoph Biller, and the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Works by Bach first published in the New Bach Edition will be performed.
Comments
Posted by: jeffrey smith
Posted on: June 13, 2007 11:08 PM
Symbolically presented to the public? Would I be perverse in suspecting that the public paid for it in ways that were definitely not symbolic?
BTW, if you're interested, someone has put up the entire "Alte" Ausgabe as a series of PDF files. If you're interested, I can hunt up the URL.
Posted by: Ross
Posted on: June 14, 2007 10:57 AM
Wouldn't "Es ist vollbracht" be the proper expression for this? What do you want to bet that somebody uttered those words at St. Thomas yesterday.
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: June 14, 2007 11:20 AM
I'd like to think that the NBA was an easier and more pleasant labor than the Passion. Though, with academics, one never knows...
Jeffrey...I'm sitting 20 feet away from the old collected Bach, and scores online are such a drag.
Posted by: jeffrey smith
Posted on: June 14, 2007 02:25 PM
That's when you're at work. But how about at home?
And there is something to having it on your hard drive. (Although I didn't download the whole thing--just the Kunst der Fuge, the partitas, and some of the instrumental stuff.) Then looking at it the opening of the First Violin Partita, as you put on the CD player, wondering how anyone could possibly play that congerie of notes, and listening to someone do exactly just that.
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: June 16, 2007 06:11 AM
Home? Between the farm, practicing pre-Bach instruments, composing, and paying attention to my wife, I don't know when I'd be studying Bach scores.