Bach's Lost Works; How Much is Missing?

"It’s not difficult to imagine that Bach, who would soon write a cantata every week for several years, would earlier have written an orchestral work every week. So… where are they?"

Absence Stimulates Fantasy¹

Within the oeuvre of the great composers, there must be works that went missing. Their compositions bring meaning to our lives, so the idea that there could be more excites us. For some composers, works that were burned, destroyed, or lost may gain even a legendary aura.

How do we know Bach didn’t write another chaccone? or Saint Matthew Passion? We imagine perhaps that, in a creative flurry, pieces flowed out of the master like water, scattered around his harpsichord with cigarette butts and crumbled papers bearing the bars of a masterpiece that would make us weep. Could there turn up an outtake, a failed sketch that makes Bach look more human? Did something go missing that shows his struggle? For that matter, how do we know there wasn’t even someone better than Bach?

Although it is possible that there are geniuses lost to modern history, this is not the case with classical composers. Music was made in a different environment that didn’t allow for the “expression of the individual” as we envision it today. There are no geniuses who have been silenced by the establishment, there are no missing Beethovens. Careful research and scholarship over the centuries have turned up any musician worthy of our continued attention.

An unknown creative individual is simply impossible in the eras where music was a communal business. Written music was so highly technical, that to even begin acquiring the skill set to “speak” required training, and was often passed down within the family. There were families of engravers, families of instrument builders, there were civic musical duties laid out by the local town— any individual writing influential music in such an atmosphere would surface in the archives.

But! History has not preserved every piece from every master. We will focus on the missing works of Bach: Because of his consistent quality, we imagine that any missing works must be equally brilliant. A missing scrap of Bach probably contains more music than an ambitious work of a lesser master, so we will forever be on the lookout for anything that slipped through the cracks.

The Stage for Scholarship

“Bach’s music was so unpopular after his death that it was used to wrap fish and meat.” …or so we are told. Some myths can be debunked by asking a simple follow up question, such as, “What butcher would wrap meat in ink-filled paper?”

Making even a single definitive statement about Bach and his music requires extensive research and nuanced understanding. For better or worse, the study of Bach has become precise, rigorous, scientific, and altogether serious. Intuition is suspect. Hypotheses are seldom published. A somewhat recent (2017) research guide to Bach scholarship mentions “how vast and complex a field of Bach scholarship has become, how challenging it is for even the better prepared and how nearly impenetrable it has become for the uninitiated.”²

Still, notwithstanding the difficulties of Bach scholarship, it seems fairly intuitive that something went missing: No vast body of work set down on mere paper is likely to survive in its entirety for 300 years. But how much of the music is missing?

Three years ago, I asked the most eminent Bach scholar, Christoph Wolff. He replied:

“Well, I wish I could give you exact information. We do have some clues based on vocal works where the texts were published during Bach’s lifetime, but we do not have the scores— like the score of the music of the St. Mark Passion. We also have the text of quite a few secular cantatas, where the music is completely lost. We have much less of a clue when it comes to instrumental works, but we can guess because both in Köthen and in Weimar we have information on the deliveries of paper for the purpose of composition. But when we stack up the compositions composed in Weimar or in Köthen, we see that there are several hundred bifolios that must have existed, which would probably not have been thrown away, which contain instrumental and possibly vocal works by Bach, so it’s hard to come by an exact estimate, but it’s quite sure that a considerable number of works are lost… I venture to say however, the pieces that were important to him and to his students and to his family, that those have not disappeared. It tells me that if the Saint Mark Passion is lost, it was not a work that Bach estimated in the same way that he estimated the St. Matthew Passion and the St. John Passion, I mean, that’s a suspicion I have, but I think it’s quite reasonable.”³

Wolff’s observations, based on a lifetime of scholarship, are worth examining in detail.

The Saint Mark Passion

The Mark Passion was composed in 1731, after Matthew and John. It is generally agreed that Mark is a parody of an earlier work. (Parody is an important word in Bach which has nothing to do with humor: Parody is Bach’s borrowing from himself. He recycles his earlier music and rewrites the text.) Bach was clearly fond of the music that was in Mark, for it was parodied not once, but twice: The music was initially composed for a funeral in 1727 (BWV 198). Bach then composed a parody for another funeral in 1729 (BWV 244a). Since the funeral in 1729 was in Köthen (outside his Leipzig duties) a parody would have been practical for the busy composer. Likewise, in 1731, when Bach needed to compose yet another passion, he would have seen the thematic connections, the capabilities for a further parody, and hence, assembled a St. Mark Passion. The music of both parodies (that is, Mark and BWV 244a) are lost, but they can be reconstructed using existing librettos and music from BWV 198 and other earlier vocal works.⁴

Still More Missing Passions!?

Bach’s son, C.P.E., and son-in-law, J.F. Agricola listed Bach’s compositions shortly after Bach’s death. This text is referred to as the “first list of works.” Listed are both Bach’s published and unpublished works. The published works are easily accounted for, but the unpublished list boasts notorious claims:

“Five full annual cycles of church pieces for all the Sundays and holidays…”

“Five passions, of which one is for double chorus.”⁵

Five!? Counting Mark are there still two more missing passions? Felix Mendelssohn knew of the score of a Saint Luke Passion partially in Bach’s hand, but in a letter to the collector who had proudly purchased the manuscript, Mendelssohn correctly affirms the music is not by Bach, but is a copy of another composer’s work.

Interpreting a statement made in another century requires adopting the mindset of that era— a mindset wholly foreign to us. Only by doing so can we avoid the mistake of imagining that “five passions” meant five unique, equally important, passions. If the first list of works was correct in affirming that there were actually five passions, it’s safe to assume that the missing three may be either parodies, like Mark, or copies of other composers’ work, like Luke.

Lost Secular Cantatas

Wolff mentions missing secular cantatas. A secular cantata is a composition written for a one-off occasion, such as an important birthday, funeral, wedding, the election of a new town council, or any number of public or private occasions. This is the group of works that suffered the most casualties: Some fifty secular cantatas are documented— a fraction of what must have existed— of which only twenty-two are completely intact. Again, parody may explain the loss as Bach heavily parodied music that could only be used for a special occasion. Perhaps many lost secular cantatas are scattered throughout the extant works— that is likely. In any case, over 50% of the documented secular cantatas are missing, and we do not know what percentage of the whole escaped documentation altogether.

Lost Church Cantatas

“Five full annual cycles of church pieces for all the Sundays and holidays…”

Sundays and holidays in the year total about 60. If Bach wrote five times this amount, we should have around 300 church cantatas, but we can only account for some 180. Forkel, Bach’s early biographer, claims that after Bach’s death, his son W.F. received most of his father’s scores. The rumor that W.F. became a drunk and sold many of his father’s scores for wine is a romantic image, probably not exactly accurate, but it does seem that W.F. was less careful than was his family with his inheritance. Another explanation is that the missing 100-plus cantatas were removed from Bach’s library for use somewhere else:

[A] letter of Johann Elias Bach to Johann Wilhelm Koch, dated 28 January 1741, hints that a large number of cantatas from the two missing annual cycles may have already been removed from Bach’s library in 1740. … Whether or not Bach indeed composed all five annual cycles of cantatas will undoubtedly remain a pressing question for future Bach studies.⁶

If five cycles were indeed composed, and whether the lost works funded W.F.’s alcoholism or were relocated to a library which later vanished (as libraries do, we shall soon see), we can at least say: two fifths of the church cantatas are lost.

Lost Instrumental Music

Wolff mentions that paper went missing in Köthen. Concerts were integral to the court soirées there. Bach, director of chamber music, would have been hard at work composing music for these functions. We know from salary records kept at Prince Leopold’s court that one full-time and one part-time copyist were employed— that’s two people simply making copies of music. Bookbinding costs are also carefully recorded, so we know that in Köthen during Bach’s time, they were assembling a library of whatever music was performed.

Performing music already written outside the court would have required permission and payments for such a permission, and hence showed up as an expense. But such an expense first occurred in 1723— when Bach was already gone! All the works performed while Bach was there were therefore new compositions, and Prince Leopold was paying enough to stock his library with some 50 major orchestral scores with parts every year— around one new orchestral work a week, for six years. It’s not difficult to imagine that Bach, who would soon write a cantata every week for several years, would earlier have written an orchestral work every week.

So… where are they? The Library of the Kapelle at Köthen disappeared without a trace.⁷ Wars, fires, floods, looting, neglect, relocation, changes of ownership, changes in taste, lack of interest, lack of funding, lack of documentation… the disappearance of a library and its collection can occur for a variety of reasons.

Wolff says, “A considerable amount” of works are lost. In one of his books, he says “most of the actual music”⁸ from the chamber concerts at Köthen is lost. Most! Bach’s later Leipzig music contains some of the lost Köthen music in the form of parodies, but only some.

Losses from Köthen might well exceed 200 orchestral and chamber works. Losses from Weimar could be similar.⁹

Lost Details

A missing work is obviously lost, but details and revisions to existing works can also be “lost.” Music is never finished for a baroque composer, and there are revisions made even decades into the life of a work. Bach was constantly revising, and his latest thoughts on a piece sometimes are missing. In 1974, Bach’s Handexemplar of the Goldberg Variations was discovered (a Handexemplar is a composer’s personal copy of a printed work he retains for personal use). It contained numerous annotations and corrections (even additional music)— details of the work that for more than 200 years had been lost.

Bach’s autograph of the cello suites is also lost, but the music is not: we have copies of the autograph from his students and his wife. Still, even an assiduous copyist like Anna Magdalena or J.P. Kellner lacks the immaculate hand of the master, and between copies there are disagreements on notes, phrasings, et cetera. Without the original, it’s impossible to say how much the copyist changed things, hence we will continue to search for ideas that got “lost” in the cello suites.

Fragments

A beautiful prelude, BWV 932, begins with all the hallmarks of Bach’s mature style, but one beat into bar eleven, it breaks off, unfinished— There are dozens of such examples. Bach sat down for maybe 3 minutes and was called away. Pieces of a smaller scale could have had any number of different conclusions, and it’s impossible to know where such pieces were heading. He was, after all, writing in great haste, and writing straight through without any sketches, drafts or corrections.

More tantalizing, however, are the fragments that did have endings.¹⁰ The most famous is obviously The Art of Fugue. When viewed as a musical loss, this missing ending is the greatest tragedy of music. When viewed through a sense of irony, it could be the greatest comedy. Through the confusion of his death among his family, the piece of paper that held the conclusion went missing.¹¹

What is Never Lost

Wolff ventures that the works that were important to Bach and to his students and to his family have not disappeared. The manuscript of the Matthew Passion was damaged, and Bach famously repaired it, pasting new paper over the damaged parts. And there are no fewer than four layers of revisions to his 1722 manuscript of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the latest made into the 1740s. Evidently (and plausibly) he valued the first music written in all possible keys more than the hundreds of orchestral works written in Köthen.¹²

A Definitive Collection

Baroque composers including Bach were prolific because they were in the business of making music, and the business demanded it. Bach would not have been deeply attached to much of his output. He would likely not have been interested or able to give us what we want today: a definitive statement of what his corpus comprised. As for what he sent to the engravers to be published, Bach omits many of our favorites: he published neither his French Suites nor a single prelude and fugue from the Well Tempered Clavier. Of the organ repertoire he published very little— not the passacaglia nor any of his giant toccatas and fugues. The beloved violin and cello works were not published at all. A definitive collection for Bach therefore does not end at what he considered worth publishing. The “first list of works” is a good summary, though it too overlooks many wonderful pieces. The last category on the list of 16 items is: “Finally, a mass of other instrumental pieces of all sorts and for all kinds of instruments.”¹³ Any piece that might be discovered in the future would presumably turn up in this category.

Will Lost Become Found?

In 1984, only ten years after the discovery of the Handexemplar of the Goldberg Variations, a set of chorale preludes by Bach (and others) was discovered. These are the Neumeister Chorales, which shed new light on the young Bach’s development. In 1999, an important archive in Kiev was finally opened, boasting some 5,000 autograph manuscripts from the estate of Bach’s son, C.P.E., where manuscripts in J.S.’ hand were also found. This discovery entirely transformed our knowledge of C.P.E. Bach’s world. We might imagine— though we shouldn’t hold our breath— a similar discovery might reveal a world of J.S.’ treasures that would occupy and sustain us.

It is probably a mistake to imagine that, aside from the finale of The Art of Fugue, Bach’s great works are lost. To the person who laments the loss and yearns for the hypothetical missing 200 cantatas, I ask: how deep is your knowledge of the existing 200? Did you study BWV 198 before mourning the St. Mark Passion? The longest life is hardly long enough to appreciate the Bach that survives. The world of Bach scholarship has grown too vast to be comprehended by a single group or individual (there is talk of using AI to quicken our knowledge and enhance our understanding). But, surfeited as we are, we will always be on the lookout for missing works by Bach, and, if we find them, they will inevitably bring us joy. The safe bet is that they will be peripheral to his oeuvre— and yet! still very beautiful.¹⁴

1. N.B. An early version of this article appeared in The Culture We Deserve on October 23rd, 2023 under the title: ‘Manuscripts Don't Burn, and Other Lies.’

2. Leaver, R.A. (2020) (P. ix) in The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach. London: Routledge,

3. Shinners, Evan. (2021) The WTF Bach Podcast [Special Guest: Christoph Wolff. What else can we learn about Bach?] 25 October, 2021

4. Many good attempts at the reconstruction and articles about those attempts have been made. Ton Koopman made a reconstruction around 1999. As for essays, one might see John Butt’s essay in Early Music, Vol. 26, No. 4, (Nov., 1998), pp. 673-675.

5. David, H.T., Mendel, A. and Wolff, C. (1999) ‘P. 304’, in The New Bach Reader: A life of Johann Sebastian Bach in letters and documents. New York: W.W. Norton.

6. Tomita, Y. (28 Nov 2016) ‘Manuscripts’ in The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach London: Routledge

7. Wolff, C. (2014) ‘Pursuing “the Musical Contest for Superiority”’, in Johann Sebastian Bach: The learned musician. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8. Ibid

9. Those of us curious to know what some of these missing instrumental pieces sounded like, the first movement of BWV 35 comes to mind as a perfect example of the first movement of a missing concerto.

10. The enticing and evasive fugue, BWV 906, is viewed either as unfinished or a da capo fugue without the words ‘da capo’ at the end. I intend— somehow— at a later date, to prove it is not a fragment but a finished fugue in the da capo form his late style sometimes preferred.

11. The fugue was finished. While composing a quadruple fugue, one begins at the end, as the combination of four independent fugal subjects requires a working out in advance to see if they will indeed combine well. Also, there are records for how many copper plates were to be engraved with this music, and the missing plates show quite clearly that some 30 bars of music would have gone on the final page.

12. Among the unknown number of lost concerti from Köthen, Bach did choose to collect the six keyboard concerti, BWVs 1052-1057, beginning the collection with J.J. (Jesu Juva) and finishing with S.D.Gl (Soli Deo Gloria). The only other collection of concerti Bach assembled himself are the Brandenburgs, which survive miraculously, and despite all their merits, did not represent a coherent group of works like the keyboard concerti worth taking extra measures to preserve. It is probable that other missing works from this period are therefore on par with the Brandenburgs- a staggering thought.

13. David, H.T., Mendel, A. and Wolff, C. (1999) ‘P. 304’, in The New Bach Reader: A life of Johann Sebastian Bach in letters and documents. New York: W.W. Norton.

14. I’d like to express my gratitude to Jessa Crispin for commissioning this essay. Many thanks to Shep Barbash for the helpful edits.