Neumeister Collection

Neumeister compiled his manuscript after 1790. It has been suggested that the 77 earliest works in the collection may have been copied from a single source, possibly a Bach family album put together in J. S. Bach's early years. The five works by Neumeister's own music teacher, Georg Andreas Sorge, were a later addition. Some time after 1807 the manuscript passed to Christian Heinrich Rinck (1770–1846), whose library was bought by Lowell Mason in 1852. After Mason's death in 1873, his collection was acquired by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. After satisfying themselves that the manuscript was genuine, they announced the discovery in December 1984. Their conclusions were confirmed in January 1985 by German organist (1937–2005), who had been working on the same material independently, and with a fatal lack of urgency, since 1981. Wolff acknowledged that he brought his announcement forward when he learned that Krumbach was in the field. Krumbach was unhappy with the way things turned out. == Works and composers ==

The Neumeister Collection contains 82 chorales, most of them unpublished before the 1980s re-evaluation of the Neumeister manuscript. The attribution of a few pieces in the manuscript remains uncertain: • 3 by Johann Christoph Bach (1642–1703), brother of Johann Michael and cousin of Johann Sebastian • At least 24 by Johann Michael Bach (1648–1694), cousin and father-in-law of Johann Sebastian • Around 38 by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) • 1 by Daniel Erich (1649–1712) • 1 or more by Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706) • 5 by Georg Andreas Sorge (1703–1778) • 1 possibly by Johann Gottfried Walther • 4 by Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow (1663–1712) • 5 unattributed works From the state of the manuscript Wolff concludes that the five unattributed works were written by composers represented elsewhere in the collection, whose names were omitted by accident. Weighing both textual and stylistic evidence, he proposes Johann Michael Bach as the author of all five, while allowing that one could also have been written by J. S. Bach and another by Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow. Johann Michael Bach The rediscovery of the Neumeister Collection quadrupled the number of keyboard works indisputably written by Johann Michael Bach, from eight to thirty-two, with six more arguably also his. Of the twenty-five pieces attributed to him in the manuscript, seven were known but had been credited to other composers and eighteen were entirely new, making this the largest single trove of his work. This remains the case even if, as some have suggested, one of the chorales that appears under his name would have been composed by Johann Heinrich Buttstett. Wolff has proposed that the five unattributed works in the volume could also be by Johann Michael Bach—confidently in three cases, less so in the other two. The collection contains 40 chorales with a BWV number: • Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder, BWV 742, moved to Anh. III (the annex of the spurious works) in BWV2a (1998). The Bach Digital website lists both Bach and Pachelbel as possible composers. They provide a new window on his formative years as a composer and cast the chorale preludes in the Orgelbüchlein, previously considered his earliest essays in the form, in a fresh light: the Orgelbüchlein pieces are not the work of a precocious beginner, but of an already practised hand. == Publication ==

Wolff published the chorale preludes by J. S. Bach in 1985, and a facsimile of the complete collection in 1986. Scores of the other composers here: https://partitura.org/index.php/bach-johann-michael/ Entire Neumeister Collection A facsimile of the entire collection was published in 1986. The B&H edition includes 35 chorale preludes of the Neumeister Collection: apart from the four BWV numbers not adopted in the NBA edition, it additionally omits BWV 1096 (likely composed by J. Pachelbel). ==Performances and recordings==

The Bach chorales in the Neumeister Collection attracted the interest of organists even before they were published. They were first performed privately by Wilhelm Krumbach at Utrecht in January 1985, and publicly by John Ferris and Charles Krigbaum at Yale in March. Later the same year, Joseph Payne made the world-premiere recording for Harmonia Mundi at St. Paul's Church in Brookline, Massachusetts, working from a photostat of the Yale manuscript, and Werner Jacob made the first recording of the Wolff edition for EMI-Angel on a restored Johann Andreas Silbermann organ at Arlesheim cathedral. == Notes ==