J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

sounding object, nothing has changed. And yet . . .
I have since begun to notice the abruptness of the shift to V/V in bar five. Far
from emerging naturally out of the previous bar, it almost sounds as if a phrase of the
melody has been omitted. And now that I think about it the literal repetition of this
five-bar phrase—beautiful as it is in itself—every nine bars, now strikes me as,
perhaps, just a little artificial. The penumbra of melodic sweetness and fond
association remains, but starts to flicker around the edges. But I wonder: would I have
begun to think this way if the attribution to J. S. Bach had remained unchallenged?
The original source for ‘Bist du bei mir’ (for soprano, strings and continuo)
was discovered around 1915 by Max Schneider, in a manuscript in the library of the
Berlin Singakademie containing five Airs divers comp. par M. Stölzel. 9 Let us, for a
moment, put ourselves in Schneider’s position. As diligent musicologists
investigating a small, dusty corner of eighteenth-century Lutheran music, we are
sorting through the manuscript, enumerating the various stylistic features and making
tentative critical evaluative generalisations. All of a sudden, however, we come across
a startlingly familiar piece, shining out like a jewel in a cellar. Without warning we
have shifted from the domain of historical musicology to that of popular culture. In
contrast to its neighbours, ‘Bist du bei mir’ is emphatically public property: the
property of Lieder-singers, of wedding music anthologies, of exam syllabi, of
‘Classical favourites’ recordings. 10 Should we re-evaluate our moderate, dispassionate
judgement of the rest of the manuscript? How many other ‘Bist du bei mir’s remain to
be discovered therein? Or is it just a ‘sport’, a minor composer striking gold on an
isolated occasion? Is it really better than its neighbours, or does its significance and
9 Reported by Georg Dadelsen in Neue Bach-Ausgabe, Klavier- und Lautenwerke Band 4: Die
Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach von 1722 und 1725, Kritische Berichte (Kassel,
Bärenreiter, 1957), p.124.
10 If these are all ways of taking a piece out of its original context, it should be noted that ‘Bist du bei
mir’ is itself curiously contextless in relation to Bach’s other works. Anna Magdalena’s notebook is
far more of an easygoing miscellany than any of Bach’s other collections, and there is virtually no
other continuo song in Bach’s output with which to compare it. This in itself might perhaps have
cast doubt upon its authenticity.
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