Until the recovery of the long-lost Berlin Sing-Akademie manuscript collection in Kiev in the summer of 1999, one seldom encountered the name Sara Levy in musicological research. Whether the neglect was due to ignorance, bias against women, or German anti-Semitism, Levy and her role in the promotion and preservation of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons received little attention until the Sing-Akademie manuscripts were examined and assessed anew. Only then did Christoph Wolff, Peter Wollny, and other scholars finally focus on the largely overlooked Berlin salonnière who had played an important role in assembling the collection.

Not ignored to the same extent but nevertheless relatively unexplored is the relationship between Bach and the female musicians of his day. Both the women in his family and the women in his professional circle had a notunimportant influence on his music and music making, especially during the Leipzig years, when his interest in the German church cantata and Italian opera reached its peak.

“I can assure you that I can already form an ensemble, both vocaliter and instrumentaliter, within my family, particularly since my present wife sings a good, clear soprano, and my eldest daughter, too, joins in not badly.” Thus wrote Bach to his former schoolmate Georg Erdmann in 1730, when describing his domestic situation in Leipzig, where he had served as Cantor of the St. Thomas School since 1723. His second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach (1701–60), née Wilcke, had served as a professional singer in Weissenfels and Cöthen and continued to take part in professional engagements after her marriage to Bach in 1721. In addition to bearing thirteen children, she became one of her husband's principal copyists, writing out scores and performance parts for dozens of vocal, instrumental, and keyboard works. Of Bach's eldest daughter, Catharina Dorothea Bach (1708–74), we know little, except that she probably took singing lessons with her father and participated with her stepmother in house concerts at the large family apartment within the St. Thomas School. She, too, may have served as a copyist for her father, but her handwriting has not been identified. And we are equally in the dark about the musical activities of Bach's first wife, Maria Barbara Bach, except that she may have served as a copyist of his music in Mühlhausen, Weimar, and Cöthen.