A recently discovered aria by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is to receive its first-ever modern performance in Weimar at the beginning of September, organisers of the city's Kunstfest said yesterday.
German soprano Juliane Banse will perform the hitherto unkown work, discovered this year in the archives of the famous Anna-Amalia Library in Weimar, on September 3 in the ceremonial ballroom of Weimar's Residenzschloss palace.
Banse will be accompanied by Hungarian pianist András Schiff on harpsichord and the French-Austrian string quartet, Quatuor Mosaïques.
The two-page handwritten aria, entitled "Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn' ihn" ("Everything with God and nothing without him"), was discovered in May stashed away in a box of birthday cards by German musicologist Michael Maul, a researcher at Leipzig's Bach Archive.
The 12-stanza "strophic" aria, to verses by Johann Anton Mylius, is for soprano, strings and basso continuo and was composed by Bach in October 1713 on the occasion of the 52nd birthday of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxony-Weimar (1662–1728).
The work was in fact Bach's sole contribution to that particular musical genre.
It is to be published for the first time, including a facsimile edition, by music publisher Bärenreiter in the autumn and a recording is also in preparation by British conductor and renowned Bach specialist John Eliot Gardiner.
The 17th century Anna-Amalia Library, on UNESCO's World
Heritage list, was devastated by a fire last September that destroyed around
50,000 invaluable books and manuscripts.
