Literary monoliths

All publishers want to make money from pieces that no pupil can ignore. Bach's two- and three-part inventions belong in every lesson on a keyboard instrument in order, as he himself wrote, "to acquire a cantabile way of playing and also to get a strong foretaste of composition". No wonder that Peters-Verlag, after years of income from the editions by Carl Czerny (1840) and Ludwig Landshoff (1933) and the facsimile of the original manuscript (1942), now wants to participate in the market success of this music again.

For Ulrich Bartels, a former employee of the Bach Institute in Göttingen, it was a simple matter to edit the Critical Report on the 1970 edition of the New Bach Edition, which was only completed by his colleagues in 2007, and - following the last restoration of the original source in 2003 - to reveal further traces of the working process within Bach's own manuscript. Little has changed in the actual music text as a result - for the most part it follows the layout and details of the Bach edition. Only the use of warning accidentals has been reduced, and in the three-part symphonies the middle part has been rearranged here and there to make it easier to read the music. This could be done even more consistently in order to finally obtain an optimal, scholarly and practically useful edition.

One more thing: even if the copies by Bach's pupils Gerber and Kayser are philologically regarded merely as secondary sources, a transcription of all their ornaments into the main text would be desirable in order to make it clear to today's pianists that such "essential ornaments" were part of the music even if there were even fewer of them (or none at all) in the notes.

Johann Sebastian Bach: 15 two-part inventions BWV 772-786, 15 three-part symphonies BWV 787-801, edited by Ulrich Bartels, EP 11422, € 14.95, Edition Peters, Leipzig etc. 2015