"International Sleuthing Adds Insight About Bach," headed a story in the New York Times in mid-August. "Accident and adventure lead to a collection long thought lost: A Bach Score." So read the "Living Arts" section headline in the Boston Globe under a photograph of a line from a violin composition by Johann Christoph Bach. [1] The priceless music archive from the Berlin Sing-Akademie, which scholars had sought since its disappearance after World War II, was found in Kyiv in the summer of 1999. It was located and identified by a team from Harvard University in collaboration with a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The discovery of the most significant "trophy" collection to have surfaced in Ukraine brought headlines around the world. The Globe story appeared the same day that the chief of the Main Archival Administration of Ukraine, Ruslan Pyrih, arrived in Boston to discuss the possibilities of cooperation with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University to catalog and microfilm the unique collection along with other projects.
Now held in Kyiv in the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art÷TsDAMLM (Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv-muzei literatury i mystetstva)÷the over 5,100 (predominantly manuscript) scores embrace a major surviving part of the musical estate of the Bach family. The collection also contains compositions of other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German composers, including many musicians associated with the Prussian court. The initial discovery in Kyiv resulted from the collaboration of the present author with Hennadii Boriak, deputy director of the Hrushevs'kyi Institute of Ukrainian Archeography and Source Study of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The collection was definitively identified at the end of June 1999 by a team led by Christoph Wolff, professor of music and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, who had been searching for the lost Bach music scores for over two decades. The revelation of the Sing-Akademie collection and the subsequent openness of Ukrainian authorities in allowing the world to see it brings new optimism to the search for cultural treasures displaced as a result of the war. [2]
Established in Berlin in 1791, the Sing-Akademie became one of the most prestigious performing institutions in the Prussian capital. Its zenith was reached under the direction of Carl Friedrich Zelter from 1800 to 1832. It was there, in 1829, for example, that the young Felix Mendelssohn, one of Zelterâs gifted pupils, directed a celebrated performance of Bachâs "St. Matthewâs Passion." The Sing-Akademie was always a major repository for original German music scores, related archival materials, and important music publications. The musical estate of John Sebastian Bachâs second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714ö1788), which has come to be known as the "Old Bach Archive," forms the central part of the archive, coming under Zelterâs control soon after C.P.E. Bachâs death. These works include the major portion of his own compositions in autograph or authorized copies. Many of his vocal and instrumental works have never been published, including all twenty Passions and more than two-thirds of his fifty keyboard concertos. In addition to the C.P.E. Bach materials, there are scores of his fatherâs ancestors (many in autograph copies in J. S. Bachâs hand) and brothers, and over 500 scores of various members of the Bach family. Although most of the original scores of Johann Sebastian Bach were sold to the Prussian Royal library in 1854 (later the Prussian State Library), the rest of the Bach family legacy remained in the Sing-Akademie.
The Sing-Akademie collection also contains a major part of the music legacy of Georg Philipp Telemann (over 220 cantatas), Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun (more than 150 vocal and over 420 instrumental scores), Johann Adolf Hasse (ca. 130 vocal and 80 instrumental scores), Franz and Georg Benda (ca. 120 compositions), as well as many other important musicians of the period. There even are scores by King Frederich II of Prussia, along with compositions of better known musicians such as Franz Josef Haydn and Georg Friedrich Händel. Approximately 80 percent of the collection consists of original manuscripts, the rest, predominantly limited-edition lithographs or authorized performing copies.
A large part of the collection now held in Kyiv, including the Bach family music archive, had come to the Sing-Akademie during Zelterâs directorship. A provisional catalog of the materials collected by Zelter and held in the Sing-Akademie at the time of his death in 1832 was prepared soon thereafter.[3] Identification of the TsDAMLM collection can be confirmed by the fact that a large portion of the manuscript scores now in Kyiv bear the penciled numbers of the Zelter catalog among their other later markings. [4] A provisional card catalog of the library and its rich archival holdings was prepared before World War II, but there had never been a published catalog or even survey description. Since it was maintained privately by the Sing-Akademie in Berlin, the collection had never been publicly available for performance and study before the war. The most complete survey of the archival and printed holdings of the library÷based largely on the Zelter catalog was published in 1966, as part of a commemorative volume honoring the 175th anniversary of the Sing-Akademie in Berlin[5].
When Allied bombing of Berlin started in 1943, Nazi authorities started wide-scale evacuation of cultural treasures to mines, monasteries, and castles in the countryside. While many German cultural treasures were systematically transported to salt mines in Saxony and other sites that remained part of postwar Germany, others were sent East to remote areas of Silesia, Bohemia, and the Sudetenland. Ninety packets of the Sing-Akademie archive, together with the original card catalog, were secured in fourteen large crates and shipped off for safekeeping to the Ullersdorf Castle near Glatz (Polish KÂozko), some eighty kilometers south of Breslau (Polish Wroclaw) in Silesia [6]. The 1943 shipment to Ullersdorf also included materials from a number of other predominantly private collections from Berlin, the fate of which is still being investigated [7]. Silesia was an important evacuation area for Berlin cultural treasures, including major parts of the Prussian State Library, whose Musicalia and Orientalia collections, for example, went first to the elegant Castle of Fürstenstein (Polish KniaÃz), somewhat closer to Breslau, but then were later transferred to the Benedictine Abbey of Grüssau (Polish Krzeszów)[8].
The postwar fate of the evacuated cultural treasures varied widely. Some were rescued from their wartime hiding places by American authorities and taken to the Collection Points in the U.S. Occupation Zone in Germany for restitution to their countries of origin. Some of the evacuated collections were rescued by Polish authorities, since Silesia became part of Poland after the war. One of the most famous displaced collections in Poland are the Berlin Musicalia and other manuscript treasures from the Prussian State Library, found in the Abbey of Krzeszów (earlier German Grüssau), southwest of WrocÂaw. It was only in 1977, however, after a dramatic search by Western specialists, that they surfaced in the Jagellonian Library in Cracow, where most of them remain today [9].
The majority of the cultural treasures "rescued" by the Red Army in Silesia went to Moscow, where they remained in hiding for half a century. Information slowly is coming to light. Red Army reports on cultural reconnaissance and seizure are still not open to researchers, although a few copies of them, and reports by other agencies in the field have surfaced in Russian and Ukrainian archives. Reports are available about the Soviet seizures from Schloss Wölfelsdorf (now Polish Wilkanów), the baroque castle of Count von Althann, which housed major units of the Seventh Division (Amt VII) of the Reich Security Services Headquarters (Reichssicherheitshauptamt÷RSHA). The castle was located just twenty kilometers south of Ullersdorf, five kilometers southeast of Habelschwerdt (Polish Bystrzyca-KÂodzka). A Ukrainian colonel from the Communist Party school in Kyiv, then with the Fourth Ukrainian Front, uncovered there a major cache of records that had been confiscated by Nazi authorities, including material from Masonic lodges, socialist groups, and Jewish communities from all over the European Continent. Eight freight train wagons of this loot were sent to Kyiv in September 1945, but there is no hint that any of the holdings from near-by Ullersdorf went with that shipment to Kyiv. When Lavrentii Beria, Joseph Stalinâs security chief, heard about the Habelschwerdt/Wölfelsdorf holdings, he personally ordered that a special archival team be sent there to insure that all of the materials transferred to Moscow÷a total of 28 freight wagons arrived in October 1945, in addition to those rerouted from Kyiv [10].
Recently, it has come to light that the Ukrainian SSR had its own cultural trophy brigades in the field during 1945 and early 1946. However, according to surveys of trophy cultural treasures undertaken by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR in the late 1950s and other earlier documentation, we can ascertain that only a few cultural treasures went to Ukraine. And much of the German and other foreign loot that initially went to Kyiv was later transferred to Moscow [11].
No Soviet documentation has surfaced revealing where the Sing-Akademie archive was found after the war, nor how and when it was transported to Kyiv. According to the "legend" still circulating in Kyiv, the collection had been found by a tank driver in an unspecified village beyond the Ukrainian borders to the west in 1945, triumphantly brought back to Kyiv, and delivered to the steps of the Conservatory (the building itself was then in ruins). A major problem with that legend is that such a large collection would have hardly fit in a tank [12]. At the August 1999 press conference in Kyiv, Ukrainian Archival Administration Chief Ruslan Pyrih reported that the collection had been found in the rubble in Berlin after the war, but there is no documentation to support that assertion. Another newspaper correspondent reported that it had been found in a city dump in Poland, which was undoubtedly a variant of the legend about the tank driver [13].
Since the collection lay hidden for over half a century, many who knew about it in the West feared it had been destroyed. In the mid-1970s Wolff first heard German suspicions that at least part of the collection might be located in Kyiv. One of the lost works of Bachâs son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, the "Flute Concerto in D Minor," which Bach specialists knew to have been part of the Sing-Akademie collection, had been performed in Kyiv as early as 1969, and later in Leningrad. The score was never published, however, nor was its source ever attributed to the Sing-Akademie or to the collection then still held by the Conservatory in Kyiv. Curiously, however, a copy obtained by the Bach Archive in Leipzig (then East Germany) "from an unknown Russian source" was one of the few clues music specialists had that at least part of the collection had survived the war and might be located in the USSR [14]. Subsequently, my own inquiries about Bach manuscripts in Kyiv in the 1970s and 80s met only denials. Wolffâs inquiries by mail went unanswered, although one of his graduate students received written denial. In connection with my field research for my directory of archival repositories in Ukraine, the Kyiv Conservatory refused to receive me on several occasions, because they reported no manuscript holdings [15].
Christoph Wolff again raised the question of suspected lost Bach manuscripts in Kyiv in the spring of 1998, in connection with what he hoped would to be a definitive edition of the extant C.P.E. Bach legacy. When I pursued the matter on his behalf in Kyiv, the existence of Bach manuscripts was still firmly denied by all sources I approached, as well as by those sought out by several Kyiv colleagues [16]. Suspicions were substantiated, however, by the 1996 German-language publication of a 1957 Soviet Ministry of Culture report on trophy cultural treasures held in various Soviet repositories, including several in Kyiv. That report notes that the State Conservatory in Kyiv then held "5,170 items from a Berlin Music Library (Berliner Noten-Bibliothek), including works of early Western European composers with first editions and manuscripts. Inventories have been prepared in the Conservatory." [17]
When I forwarded a copy of that German published document to Ukrainian colleagues, an initial answer from Kyiv came back that the Moscow Ministry of Culture report was probably fabricated in Germany in connection with unsuccessful German restitution negotiations with Russia. Ukrainian archivists became more open to the possibility that the report was genuine, however, when they themselves tried÷unsuccessfully÷to obtain a copy of the original Russian-language document. The existence of such a document was confirmed from Moscow, but they were informed that the original (and presumably supporting documentation) was still officially classified as "secret." The "secret" status was reaffirmed to me when I later requested access to the file in the former Communist Party archive in Moscow that had been named as the source of the German-published version [18].
In the meantime, in April 1999, a librarian from the Conservatory, in a chance meeting with Boriak in Kyiv, admitted having seen a report about a large collection of foreign music that had been transferred in 1973 to the newly established Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art (TsDAMLM). That was the first indication we had of the actual present location of the collection, since the existence of such a German music collection had never been mentioned in any of the available descriptions of that archive. Armed with the librarianâs testimony and the German-published document, and with a keen understanding of the delicate diplomatic problems involved, Boriak was able to convince Archival Administration authorities to pursue the matter.
Not long afterwards, confirmation came back from Kyiv that a collection of over 5,000 units of foreign manuscripts earlier held by the Conservatory was held in the Archive-Museum (TsDAMLM) and that it possibly contained some German music, maybe even Bach scores. There were inventory registers for the collection, but Boriak was unable to see them or even determine in what language they had been compiled. No one in TsDAMLM knew the provenance of the collection, nor how it happened to have arrived in Kyiv. I then suggested to Christoph Wolff at the end of April that he should consider packing his bags. Given my own long-standing association with Ukrainian archives and with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, the Archival Administration of Ukraine agreed to provide access for Professor Wolff and myself in order to make an official appraisal of the collection [19]. TsDAMLM is currently preparing a comprehensive guide to its holdings, and, now that all secret materials in TsDAMLM have been declassified, proper identification of the collection is necessary. If it did turn out to be a trophy collection, as we suspected, then a professional appraisal would be appropriate.
We were confronted with difficulties and hesitations to reveal the treasure even after our arrival in Kyiv. Although the archive building was under renovation and the corridor leading to the reading room was blocked by scaffolding, the authorities there managed to clear a passage for us. In a perplexing turn of events, we were told that the collection had never been fully processed for use by researchers; the manuscripts therefore could not be brought to the reading room. I then remembered the inventories that had reportedly been turned over to the archive with the collection. Could we at least see those, I suggested? We finally were given special permission to view them.
When we were first received by the TsDAMLM director, he proudly escorted us to one of the stack areas, where the collection was being kept in optimal conditions÷in proper acid-free archival boxes in a humidity controlled storage area. The first box he randomly pulled out as a sample for us to examine contained several thin bound volumes of individual music scores. I spotted a red library stamp with a lyre in the center on the title page of the top manuscript. It was surrounded by the inscription "Sing Akademie zu Berlin." Christoph Wolff had not been able to obtain a picture of the stamp before our visit, but there it was, and later we found it on many other manuscripts. But Wolffâs eyes were initially more struck by the name on the first manuscript, which he recognized as the signature of Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen, a German composer and early director of the Sing Akademie. Our questions about the provenance of the collection were resolved. However, in TsDAMLM, the official listing of the collection in the register of archival fonds, which is also reflected in the labels on the boxes, would have never have led anyone to its contents or provenance: Fond 441÷"Collection of Manuscripts of Representatives of Western European Literature and Art from the 17th through 19th Centuries."
The five volumes of inventories, which we were permitted to examine in considerable detail, further confirmed that the collection was intact in Kyiv. The inventories had actually been prepared as acquisition registers in the Conservatory Library in Kyiv in the late 1940s. To our surprise, and unusual for Soviet archives, the inventories had been compiled with titles in the original language of the manuscripts themselves. The registers provide no indication of the provenance of the manuscripts, nor do they mention the existence of library stamps from the Sing-Akademie in Berlin. According to those five registers prepared at the Conservatory, which now serve as the official inventories and finding aids (opysy) in TsDAMLM, the collection contains 5,157 storage units. We are convinced that those registers were compiled on the basis of the original German card catalog that had also come to the Conservatory in the same crates with the collection itself [20]. The manuscripts had all been stamped with the seal of the Conservatory and numbered consecutively.
Although the collection had been boxed and labeled in TsDAMLM, it had in fact not been further processed as required for communication to researchers [21]. Nevertheless, the Archival Administration agreed that we could order a few sample manuscripts to examine in the reading room. Thanks to overtime efforts by TsDAMLM archivists in processing the materials requested, we were able to peruse a number of manuscripts during Wolffâs remaining days in Kyiv, chosen on the basis of the relatively thorough inventories. And we were permitted to take sample photographs. Wolff even found C.P.E. Bachâs own unpublished catalog of his keyboard compositions.
During our requested visit to the National Academy of Music of Ukraine (as the Kyiv Conservatory has been renamed), the present Rector, apparently unaware of the collection in TsDAMLM, assured us that if the Conservatory had received any "trophy collections" after the war, they were long since returned to Germany. My requested visit to the library of the Academy of Music nevertheless proved rewarding: A few documents about the collection found in the Conservatory archive there included the official transfer order from TsDAMLM for a "collection of manuscript and published music scores (XVIIöXIXth cc.) in foreign languages with approximately 5,000 documents, together with the card catalogs and inventory registers describing the collection." [22]
The official act of transfer to the archive also records receipt of a card catalog in addition to the five inventory registers. Today, unfortunately, the original German card catalog on the basis of which the inventories had undoubtedly been prepared, could not be found in TsDAMLM. According to the act of transfer, approximately one-fifth of the card catalog was missing at the time of transfer to TsDAMLM, which explains why the description of some of the items is much less thorough than others in the registers. Thirteen manuscript units were also missing from the collection at that time, according to the official transfer papers [23].
We still do not know about the fate of the epistolary collection from the Sing-Akademie only one folder of Goethe letters are held with the music scores in TsDAMLM, namely his correspondence with the early director of the Sing-Akademie, Carl Friedrich Zelter. All of the early printed books from the library, many with dedicatory autographs and marginal notes, are still missing. But from available documentation, it is not clear how many of the printed books were also evacuated from Berlin to Ullersdorf in 1943 [24]. Three books from the Sing-Akademie library were returned to Berlin from Moscow in 1957, at the time of the restitution of the Dresden Gallery collections to East Germany. Those three books (now on deposit in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin) have no Soviet book stamps that might give a clue, and as yet, we have been unable to determine where they were found in the USSR [25].
The discovery of the Sing-Akademie collection in Kyiv caused a tremendous sensation in the Ukrainian press, as it did worldwide, particularly after German television crews descended. Perhaps even more so because it was identified by foreigners: "What if Christoph Wolff had never come to Kyiv?" queried a correspondent in one of Kyivâs major papers [26]. "Why does it take foreigners to find what is in our archives?" asked another, critical of the Ukrainian archival administration for the great secrecy in which it has operated in the past [27].
Nevertheless, since our discovery and identification of the collection, archivists and some others in Kyiv are now insisting the collection was never classified, nor was ever a secret [28]. In a similar vein, recent articles in the Kyiv magazine "Politics and Culture" (Politika i kultura) and the newspaper "Day" (Den') focus on a Ukrainian chamber orchestra director, Ihor Blazhko (see fn. 14), who claims that the recent "discovery" by Professor Wolff was actually long since discovered by others, including himself in Kyiv [29]. However, none of the compositions Blazhko performed and recorded had been identified as to provenance with the Sing-Akademie Collection, nor had there been any previous published indication of its location. Although Blazhko suggests that the existence of the collection was "an open secret" among musicians in the Soviet Union since the late 1960s, none of the musicians with whom Wolff and his colleagues had been in contact earlier had ever admitted its existence. Even the official listing of the collection in TsDAMLM does not identify it with the Sing-Akademie, and it was never before mentioned in any published description of TsDAMLM holdings.
Wolff made a second trip to Kyiv in early October 1999, together with colleagues from the Bach Archive in Leipzig, to prepare a preliminary musicological analysis of the holdings. While there he offered a symposium at the Academy of Music (attended by only five specialists), and discussed plans for the proposed microfilming and cataloguing project in collaboration with Ukrainian colleagues, so the collection can be made publicly available for study and performance in Ukraine and throughout the world. The proposed scholarly project, supported by the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California, involves TsDAMLM, the Main Archival Administration of Ukraine, the Bach Archive in Leipzig, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The project will be closely coordinated with the Sing-Akademie of Berlin (as the original owner), which still exists as a private performing organization and whose directors have already written to the Kyiv archive in appreciation for the preservation of the archive and supporting the project being planned by Professor Wolff. There is hope that the priceless musical sources will eventually be returned to their original home.
Trophy art, library books, and archives from Western Europe transferred to the former USSR after World War II were for the most part kept in hiding throughout the Soviet period. But since its independence, Ukraine has led former Soviet republics in restitution efforts. A German-Ukrainian cultural agreement signed in 1993 provides for the mutual return of wartime cultural trophies. A number of symbolic acts of restitution have taken place in recent years, including the 1996 return to the Dresden Gallery of three valuable albums of drawings and lithographs found in the Museum of Western and Oriental Art in Kyiv and the return of three drawings to the Bremen Kunsthalle from private sources in 1997. Ukraine has simultaneously received some important cultural treasures from Germany that had been seized by the Nazis during the war, including rare books, an icon, a Scythian mirror and other archeological finds, and an extensive photographic collection found in the Bundesarchiv [30].
Discussion of possible restitution of the Sing-Akademie collection is already being aired in Kyiv. "I am not the person who decides whether to allow the return, but I do not think the talks would be hopeless," Ukrainian Archival Administration chairman Ruslan Pyrih replied to a press query [31]. The National Commission on Restitution of Cultural Treasures to Ukraine assured the press that in principle they are quite open to restitution discussion on mutually agreeable terms. Discussions with Germany about the collection were reportedly already broached on a presidential level, but cultural leaders on both sides are proceeding with caution. "Negotiations may take a long time," Pyrih speculated to me during his Harvard visit. Unlike the situation in Russia, where a recent Constitutional Court decision ruled out restitution to Germany, the Ukrainian press and public opinion react favorably to the official Ukrainian government policy of mutual restitution of displaced cultural treasures with Germany. " [32]Ukraine should set the standard for the West and return the Bach archive to Berlinâs Sing-Akademie. Besides, it is obliged to do this by the treaty with Germany for the mutual return of wartime cultural trophies," the English-language Kyiv Post declared in an editorial in early August [33].
Questions about possible restitution immediately raised high-level legal questions in Kyiv. A law on cultural restitution had been introduced in the legislature a couple of years ago, but lay dormant. Soon after the sensational news of the Bach discovery, the Ukrainian parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) took up discussion and passed a measure intended to provide the legal framework for the restitution of cultural treasures of foreign provenance found in Ukraine under appropriate conditions. "On the Import and Export of Cultural Treasures" was signed into law by President Leonid Kuchma on 21 September 1999, but the Cabinet of Ministers still has three months to introduce amendments, and procedures of implementation are yet to be developed [34]. As of this writing, the fate and impact of the law remains unclear, but as written, the law does not involve issues of ownership or nationalization, nor does it impose any restrictions on restitution, such as those involved in the controversial 1998 Russian law "On Cultural Treasures Transferred to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation."
Even though the existence of the collection in Kyiv has long been hidden from public eye, it still has symbolic value as a trophy of that war that devastated the country and destroyed millions of its library books and the buildings that house them, to say nothing of archives and art. Major German collections of music are still held hostage in Poland awaiting some significant cultural recompense for the wartime losses and damage brutally caused by the Nazi invasion sixty years ago. One significant music collection was returned from Leningrad to Hamburg in 1990, just before the collapse of the USSR. But other trophy music known to be held in Russia has yet to be revealed. Since independence, Ukraine may be better prepared for restitution than Russia, but it is unlikely that the priceless collection of the Sing-Akademie in Berlin will be returned without considerable debate and without some equivalent compensation from the German side. In the meantime, during the period since our sensational discovery, colleagues in Kyiv report a new under-current of anti-restitution sentiment in some Kyiv cultural circles.
Nevertheless, much more important for culture and scholarship than the politics of restitution, the preservation of the long-lost Berlin Sing-Akademie music archive can at last be made known to the world. No longer held as prisoners of war, the over 5,100 priceless music scores preserved in Kyiv can be described, studied, performed, and appreciated and at last be restored to their rightful place as a major component of the common European cultural heritage. Whether in Kyiv or Berlin or in the Silesian castle where they survived the war, the most important fact is that they are now safe, that the collection is largely intact, and its location in a public archive is known to scholars for the first time in over half a century. As Michel Rautenberg, one of the Sing-Akademie directors replied to a correspondent from Le Monde, "this discovery restores access to more than half of the Bach family archive, and will provide information on large gaps in the history of music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." [35] Despite the otherwise inadequate knowledge of the fate of trophy cultural treasures that came to Ukraine and Russia after the war, the identification of this collection raises new optimism about locating lost and displaced cultural treasures that have survived their wartime and postwar displacements in Eastern Europe.
[1] Joseph P. Kahn, "A Bach Score: Accident and Adventure Lead to a Collection Long Thought Lost," Boston Globe 30 September 1999: E1, E7. See, also the account by Sarah Boxer, "International Sleuthing Adds Insight About Bach," The New York Times 16 August 1999: B1, B4, which appeared in slightly condensed form as "On the Bach Trail" in The International Herald Tribune 20 August 1999: 20.
[2] The discovery of the collection in Kyiv resulted from research for my book, Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, forthcoming, 2000).
[3] "Catalog musikalisch-literarischer und practischer Werke aus dem Nachlasse der Konigl. Professors Dr Zelter." A manuscript copy of the Zelter catalog, which established the initial provisional numeration of that portion of the Sing-Akademie holdings, survives in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Christoph Wolff kindly showed me his xerox copy of this catalog, which is organized in several sections by type of materials.
[4] Although there has not yet been time for a full correlation with this catalog, most of the manuscripts we examined in Kyiv can be matched up with the Zelter catalog. Obviously, when a scholarly catalog is prepared, it will be important to include correlations with these earlier markings. The printed books on music theory covered by the "A" section of the Zelter catalog are not in Kyiv, so far as is known. Additional materials acquired by the Sing-Akademie between 1832 and 1850, and materials acquired earlier from other sources, to be sure, are not included in the catalog of the Zelter collection. The J.S. Bach materials sold to the Royal Library in 1854 were covered by a separate catalog.
[5] Friedrich Welter, "Die Musikbibliothek der Sing-Akademie zu Berlin," in Sing-Akademie zu Berlin: Festschrift zum 175 jährigen Bestehen, ed. Werner Bollert (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1966): 33-47. This posthumous memoir had been prepared before the war by an assistant in the Sing-Akademie, largely based on the Zelter catalog.
[6] The village of Ullersdorf (now Polish Oldzyechowiche-KÂodzkie) is 12 kilometers southeast of KÂozko (German Glatz) on a tributory of the Nysa (Neisse) River. Confirmation of the shipment there comes from a report "Eigentum der Berliner-Sing-Akademie" (15.III.1945), signed by Georg Schumann, then director of the Sing-Akademie in Berlin. Christoph Wolff received a copy of this document and a 1930 picture of the castle from Berlin. As confirmed during my October 1999 visit, the castle where the collection was stored is now in ruins. Turned over to an agricultural cooperative for storage of machinery after the war, the building was not kept up. Since abandoned, it was seriously flooded in 1997.
[9] See the latest report on the status of the Musicalia holdings of the Prussian State Library, a large part of which is now held in the Jagellonian Library in Cracow, in Verlagert, Verschollen, Vernichtet, especially pp. 9, 19-26. Regarding the thirty-five year search for the German music collections in Poland, see the intriguing account by Nigel Lewis, Paperchase: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach-: The Search for Their Lost Music (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981). See also "Bestände aus der früheren Preussischen Staatsbibliothek in Polen," Jahrbuch für Preussischer Kulturbesitz 29 (1995): 339-64; and the earlier account by P.J.P Whitehead, "The Lost Berlin Manuscripts," Notes 33:1 (September 1976): 7-15.
[10] See more details about this operation in my report, "New Clues in the Records of Archival and Library Plunder: The ERR Ratibor Center and the RSHA VII Amt Operations in Silesia," in "The Return of Looted Collections (1946ö1946). An Unfinished Chapter": Proceedings of an International Symposium to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Return of Dutch Collections from Germany, ed. F.J. Hoogewoud, E.P. Kwaadgras et al. (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 52-67. A more detailed version is in preparation. None of the Soviet documentation found so far regarding the Habelschwerdt/Wölfelsdorf cache mentions the Sing-Akademie or other materials from Ullersdorf.
[11] See more details about these operations in my Trophies of War and Empire.
[12] Efforts to locate additional documentation about the retrieval of the collection from Ullersdorf have hitherto been unsuccessful. Military reports relating to trophy operations remain classified in Russia.
[13] Viktor Luhovyk, "Ukraine to Study Its Bach Archives," Associated Press file, Kyiv, 10 August 1999. Olena Diachkova, "Unique Documents Shelved for 54 Years," Den'/Day Weekly Digest 17 August 1999: 6.
[14] Following our Harvard press release in August 1999, I received a fax from the conductor Igor Blazhkov, who directs the Perpetuum Mobile Orchestra in Kyiv, claiming that we had not "discovered" the collection, because he was using music scores from the collection already in May of 1969. However, in so far as we have been able to determine, what scores he used and recorded were never identified as to their source. The flute concerto score itself was never published, nor was there ever published mention of the music score collection from the Sing-Akademie in Kyiv. Christoph Wolff mentioned the Leipzig copy in his reply to Blazhkov (25 August 1999).
[15]That report was corroborated from other sources in preparation of my directory of archival holdings in Ukraine: Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Collections in the USSR: Ukraine and Moldavia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 400-401. Since one of Christoph Wolffâs graduate students had contacted me regarding possible Bach manuscripts in Kyiv, I made numerous inquiries during several visits to Kyiv in the late 1970s and 1980s, but the results were all negative.
[16]In response to inquiries by Boriak and others, as well as my own, the Kyiv Conservatory and other Kyiv music repositories reported no trophy music holdings.
[17] Die Trophäenkommissionen der Roten Armee: Eine Dokumentensammlung zur Verschleppung von Büchern aus deutschen Bibliotheken, comp. and ed. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann and Ingo Kolasa (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), doc. no. 46, p. 245 [=Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, Sonderheft 64]. A large part of one of the documents is also published in Kolassaâs earlier article, "Sag mir wo die Bücher sind...: Ein Beitrag zu ÎBeutekulturgüternâ und ÎTrophäenkommissionenâ," Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 42(4) 1995: 357-60.
[18] The German published version identifies the documents as having come from the CP Central Committee Secretariat (fond 4) in TsKhSD (in March 1999 TsKhSD was renamed the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History RGANI [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishii istorii]). Kyiv archival officials were refused a copy, when they inquired in April and May of 1999. I was refused access in Moscow in June/July 1999. Reportedly, the copies from which the German translations were prepared had been acquired in TsKhSD, although neither the copies themselves, nor their publication, had been authorized.
[19] The Institute of Ukrainian Archeography sent him a formal invitation, and the Archival Administration took care of the necessary arrangements for his visit. The research party also included his wife Barbara, a music cataloger at Harvardâs Houghton Library, and me. (I had arrived earlier from Moscow.)
[20] The inventories were prepared after the war by Liubov' Favndovna Fainshtein, who had served as a music librarian in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She is now no longer living. Fainshteinâs signature appears on the final page of each of the five bound inventory volumes, only one copy of which are now held in TsDAMLM.
[21] This meant that, according to Soviet-period rules still in effect in Ukrainian archives, for every file we wanted to see, an archivist had to undertake the laborious task of adding folio numbers in pencil and preparing the necessary accompanying papers, before it could be sent to the reading room.
[22] "Doruchennia," 27.VII.1973, and TsDAMLM Director V.P. Koba to Conservatory Rector I.F. Liashenko, 31.VII.1973. Both documents were the official copies held by the Conservatory library, copies of which were kindly furnished me by the librarian in charge. In the official act of transfer, however, the collection had been renamed as noted above, with no mention of music "Akt No 2 o peredache dokumental'nykh materialov," 14.III.1973, indicating transfer from the Conservatory to TsDAMLM.
[23] The official signed and sealed act of transfer clearly indicates that the card catalog had been turned over to the archive with the collection in 1973, although it recorded that 1,025 of the 5,170 numbered cards were missing. TsDAMLM and the Archival Administration promised to investigate the disappearance of the card catalog, but as of this writing it has not yet been found. The official act of transfer also itemizes the 13 missing items from the catalog numbered entries.
[24] As of yet, there is no trace of them in any major Kyiv library with music holdings. Some of the early holdings relating to music theory were included in the ca. 1832 Zelter catalog (see fn. 3). There is no evidence that they were delivered to the Kyiv Conservatory after the war, as librarians in the Academy of Music showed us the postwar accession registers for printed books. The only copy of the registers they had prepared covering the manuscripts had been transferred to the archive with the music score collection.
[25] In July 1999, Christoph Wolff was shown the three books returned from Moscow to Berlin, now on deposit in the Staatsbibliothek (State Library). German colleagues suspected the books came from the Glinka Central Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, but during my October 1999 visit, that museum denied it has any trophy German music publications in its library.
[26] Elena Cherednichenko, "V Ukraine 54 goda khranilas' unikal'naia kollektsiia Bakha. Sovetskie tankisty okazalis' smyshlenee nashikh uchenykh: Sensatsiia," Kievskie vedomosti 12 August 1999: 3.
[27] Ibid.
[28]See, for example, the statement at a press conference in Kyiv (10 August 1999) by Chief of the Main Archival Administration of Ukraine, Ruslan Pyrih, as quoted by Olena Nikolayenko, "Enigma of Bachâs Musical Archive Solved by Harvard Professor in Kyiv," Kyiv Post 32 (12 August 1999) and an editorial in the same issue (p. 10).
[29] Nelia Pasichnyk, "Chy zakhustyt' Ukraïna pravo na beztsinnu kolektsiiu. Amerykans'kyi profesor Îvidkryvaeâ davno vidkryte v Ukraïni Skandal" (interview with Ihor Blazhko, and insert direct comments by Blazhko), Politika i kul'tura 23 (1-7 October 1999): 42-44. Another article along the same line appeared more recently erroneously accusing the Archival Administration of trying to see the rights to the collection Nataliia Balandiuk, "Komu distanut'sia prava na kolektsiiu syniv Bakha?" Den' 217 (24 November 1999): 1, and in the English weekly edition, "Who Will Get Rights to the Collection of Bachâs Sons?" The Day 44 (30 November 1999): 6. Wolff since prepared a reply explaining the scholarly purposes of the project, the importance of preservation microfilming and cataloguing, and noting the lack of any published reference to the collection as being held in Kyiv, before the Harvard University press release at the beginning of August.
[30] See more details in my forthcoming Trophies of War and Empire, Ch. 12.
[31] As quoted from Reuters by Olena Nikolayenko, "Enigma of Bachâs Musical Archive."
[32] See the statement by a representative of the National Commission for the Restitution of Cultural Treasures to Ukraine, as quoted in a Kyiv story by Agence France Presse (10.8.1999). That point of view was also expressed during our visit to Kyiv when the collection was discovered. See more about the context of Ukrainian restitution policy and recent mutual acts of restitution with Germany in the forthcoming Grimsted study, Trophies of War and Empire, ch. 12. See one immediate Russian reaction signed by Mikhail' Maus (Mickey Mouse?), "Tikhaia restitutsiia? Germaniia pytaetsia vernut' sebe rukopisi Bakha, naidennye na Ukraine, i nadeetsia na uspekh Îzakulisnykhâ peregovorov v Moskve," Nezavisimaia gazeta 17 August 1999: 7.
[33] "Return Bach to Germany," Kyiv Post 32 (12 August 1999).
[34] "Pro vyvezennia, vvezennia ta povernennia kul'turnykh tsinnostei," Law of Ukraine, 1068-14, 21.IX.1999. I cite the text as it appeared on the official website of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (http://alpha.rada.kiev.ua/sgi-bin/putfile.cgi).
[35] As quoted by Philippe Ricard, "Des archives Bach retrouvées à Kiev," Le Monde 9 August 1999: 14.