Recovered in Kiev: Bach et al. A Preliminary Report on the Music Archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie

Abstract

It was a fortunate coincidence that the Notenarchiv (historical music collection) of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, long missing and believed to be lost, emerged in 1999 on the eve of the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death. This breakthrough resulted from years of effort on my part, in collaboration with the Russian Research Center of Harvard University and, in particular, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). Since 1991, my colleagues Patricia Grimsted of Cambridge and Hennadii Boriak of Kiev had been compiling an inventory of West European political and historical archival holdings in Ukraine for HURI's research project "Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the Politics of Restitution." The so-called trophy materials captured at the end of the Second World War by the Red Army and distributed throughout the provinces of the former Soviet Union were invariably held, like all archival possessions in socialist states, under the jurisdiction of state security services, the former KGB. Hence, official inquiries usually remained unanswered. Like everyone else, the HURI scholars had again and again encountered utter silence in response to their questions regarding trophy materials, even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Results were often more readily obtained through unofficial channels, as turned out to be the case with the Sing-Akademie music collection. 1