C. P. E. Bach Sources at the Library of Congress

Abstract

In the course of the first three decades of the twentieth century, Oscar Sonneck and Carl Engel assembled for the Music Division in the Library of Congress a major collection of manuscripts and early printed editions of the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. This article provides an inventory of these sources, as well as an examination of the provenance of several groupings of manuscripts that reflect common origins. These manuscript sources document the work of copyists closely associated with Bach, including J. F. Hering, Anon. 302, and Anon. 303, who presumably supplied copies of Bach’s music to meet the demand stemming from private music making in eighteenth-century Berlin. The manuscripts also provide evidence of the wider interest among eighteenth-century musicians and collectors, reflected in the collection assembled by Friedrich Wilhelm Rust. Additionally, these materials document the collecting activities of several nineteenth-century musicians, including Eduard Grell, Franz Commer, Erich Prieger, and Ludwig Scheibler, and an obscure figure from Chatellerault, France, by the name of Lasserre.