A particularly interesting area of Bach research in the past few decades has concentrated on the reconstruction and study of Bach's own personal music library. Kirsten Beißwenger, in her landmark study Johann Sebastian Bachs Notenbibliothek (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1992), was the first to examine and catalogue comprehensively Bach's collection of manuscripts and prints. Since Beißwenger's study was published, additional items that were once part of the collection have been discovered, but perhaps more importantly, scholars have also begun to examine how these works by other composers influenced Bach's own compositional style.
One of the most important influences upon the development of Bach's late style was Latin church music. It is interesting to note, in connection with a composer working at a Lutheran church, that settings of the Catholic mass (both complete and partial) actually constituted the largest group of works from Bach's music library. A number of these works are fully or at least partially in Bach's hand, sometimes with annotations and additions by Bach himself. They show that he intensively studied the archaic styles of strict stile antico polyphony and canon, and even made arrangements of Italian Catholic music for performance in the Leipzig churches. These also acted as preparatory exercises for his own large-scale compositions during his final decade, such as the B minor mass, the Art of Fugue and the Musikalisches Opfer: for example, the little F major Credo-Intonation (bwv1081), which Bach attached to his copy of one of the masses from Giovanni Battista Bassani's Acroama missale, is virtually identical in style to the larger Credo in unum Deum movement from the B minor mass.
A significant addition to this repertoire of ‘preparatory studies’ from Bach's personal library came to light in 2013, with Peter Wollny's discovery, in the former Ephoralbibliothek of Weißenfels, of a set of thirteen parts for the Missa canonica by the Italian composer Francesco Gasparini (see Wollny, ‘Eine unbekannte Bach-Handschrift und andere Quellen zur Leipziger Musikgeschichte in Weißenfels’, Bach-Jahrbuch 2013, 129–170). Gasparini was one of the most important Italian composers and music theorists of the early eighteenth century, and belonged to the group of Catholic Italian composers who worked at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, which included Antonio Vivaldi, Nicola Porpora, Andrea Bernasconi and several others. He had studied with both Arcangelo Corelli and Bernardo Pasquini, and was also a highly regarded teacher himself: among his pupils were Domenico Scarlatti and Johann Joachim Quantz. His most important theoretical contribution to music was his treatise L'armonico pratico al cimbalo (1708), an instruction manual on figured-bass realization that remained in print throughout the eighteenth century.
During his lifetime Gasparini's reputation in Italy rested largely on the many operas he composed both for Venice and for Rome, but, as Dennis Libby and Angela Lepore note in their New Grove article on the composer, he was also recognized for his technical mastery of canon and free counterpoint (Libby and Lepore, ‘Gasparini: (1) Francesco Gasparini’, www.oxfordmusiconline.com (16 March 2016)). This was a hallmark of many of his works both sacred and secular – including, as its title suggests, the Missa canonica. The great number of surviving copies of this particular work – including several made in Germany – is testament to the wide fame it achieved during the eighteenth century. It is hardly surprising that a work Quantz described as being ‘highly esteemed by contrapuntists’, as Wollny notes in his Foreword, should have made its way to Leipzig and attracted the attention of J. S. Bach (for the Quantz reference see Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Historich-Kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, volume 1 (Berlin: J. J. Schützens, 1754–1755), 224).
Bach's arrangement has now been published for the first time, in a critical edition by Peter Wollny, as part of the Bach-Archiv Leipzig's Musikalische Denkmäler (Musical Monuments) series. The series ‘presents works from Johann Sebastian Bach's music library or from his immediate environment in scholarly editions for performance’ (24) and has previously made available Bach's arrangements of masses and mass movements by Palestrina and of Kaiser's St Mark Passion.
Wollny provides an informative foreword (in both German and English) that neatly summarizes the history of the manuscript parts, in so far as it can be determined, and the textual issues surrounding these parts. What seems at first glance like one version is actually, it turns out, three. Bach initially reinforced the original SATB and continuo setting by adding an ensemble of cornetto and three trombones, notated in F Lydian and performed at Chorton (as Wollny notes, the same scoring is also found in Bach's arrangement of Palestrina's Missa sine nomine). He also copied out other instrumental parts for two oboes and taille d'hautbois (together with another continuo part), which had to be notated a tone higher in G since these instruments performed at Kammerton. At a later date, Bach expanded the instrumental designations of these woodwind parts to introduce a further alternative scoring of two violins and viola. The parts therefore show how Bach was interested in experimenting with scoring variants that clearly separated different sonorities and groups of instruments, in contrast to the practice found in many of his Leipzig cantatas from the 1720s and 1730s where the vocal parts are doubled by several instrumental groups simultaneously.
A concise Kritischer Bericht (critical report, given in German only) at the back of the volume describes the source itself in more detail, together with the editorial methods used and specific editorial remarks, for the versions in F and G respectively. As is entirely appropriate, given its aim to represent Bach's arrangement of the work, the edition takes as its sole principal source the Weißenfels manuscript parts, some of which are in the hand of a pupil from the Thomasschule, Johann Gottlieb August Fritzsch (born 1727), with revisions by Bach, and others in Bach's hand only. Wollny also lists six other manuscript copies of the Missa canonica that were viewed for comparative purposes, presumably in order to resolve questionable readings from the principal source.
The score itself is clearly printed and appears to be free of errors. The continuo part has been left unrealized, and editorial accidentals are indicated through the use of small type. Wollny's decision to standardize the variant barring found in the sources by utilizing breve barring, subdivided into semibreve bars, works well (for ease of use, the semibreve barring is used for the numbering of bars).
Only the version in F is printed in the full score, with the appropriate instrumentation for this version – cornetto, three trombones and organ – listed alongside the voices. Wollny notes in the Kritischer Bericht that the presence of the two versions required a ‘practical decision’ as to which version to present in the edition, and the publisher has made performing parts (not under review here) available for both versions to enable performances in F or G. It might have been preferable both for scholarly ‘completeness’ and for ease of use in performance to have also included the version in G in the full score (as for Bach's arrangement of Johann Caspar Kerll's Sanctus, bwv241, which is printed in versions in both D major and E major in series II, volume 9 of the Neue Bachausgabe (Leipzig: Bärenreiter, 2000)), although, as Wollny acknowledges, the oboe and string parts present other source-critical problems concerning accidentals. Given the importance of these remarks concerning the two versions and the dual function of this publication as both a scholarly and a performing edition, an English translation of the Kritischer Bericht for users of the score who do not read German would also have been helpful.
These, nonetheless, are minor quibbles about an edition that is affordable, well researched and cleanly presented. As with the other publications in the Bach-Archiv's series, Wollny's volume provides a welcome addition to the growing number of works from Bach's library available in critical editions. It makes available for wider study and performance another important model for Bach's own exploration of the stile antico and strict canonic styles that were so integral to the monumental works of his final decade.
