Montreal, June 23rd -- The North American premiere of a recently discovered composition for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach took place in Montreal on July 1st at St. James United Church.
The premiere was performed on the great St. James organ, a heritage instrument, by Kurt-Ludwig Forg, an eminent German organist and academic, as part of his concert in the St. James Tuesday Recital Series, a summer institution in Montreal for decades.
Among other pieces, Mr. Forg played "Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält", BWV 1128. The work is a large-scale fantasia of 85 bars written between 1705 and 1710 early in Bach’s career and is described by scholars as being of “exceptional quality.”
A complete copy of the previously unknown organ composition was discovered in March 2008 by two German researchers examining recent acquisitions by the library of Halle University. The researchers – Stephan Blaut and Michael Pacholke – were going through the papers of Wilhelm Rust, a 19th-century successor of Bach as Kantor (or music director) at the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig, Germany and a famous editor of his work.
The current catalogue of Bach’s work merely describes the first few bars of the piece in its appendix and does not cite any source. But Blaut and Pacholke say the composition that they discovered had been copied by Rust in 1877 from a manuscript that has since been lost but can be traced back to Bach’s immediate circle.
They prepared a critical edition of the work which was published by Ortus Musikverlag of Brandenberg, Germany, on June 10th with an introduction by the renowned Bach scholar Hans-Joachim Schultze. The North American premiere of the piece occurs just three weeks after it was first published.
July 3, 2008
P. Crozier
