History
The celebrations in 1950 of the bicentennial of Bach's death in Göttingen and Leipzig led to the initiative to publish his complete works in a critical scientific edition. Musicologists such as Friedrich Blume, Max Schneider, Friedrich Smend and Heinrich Besseler, and sponsors such as Bernhard Sprengel and Otto Benecke made the project possible, supported by the editor Karl Vötterle.
The Neue Bachgesellschaft recommended to pursue the project as a joint venture of musicologists in Göttingen, then West Germany, and Leipzig, then East Germany, in order to stress that the common cultural heritage was undivisible. The Bach-Archiv Leipzig and the Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Institut Göttingen collaborated, their directors Werner Neumann and Alfred Dürr made the new edition their life's project. The publishers were Bärenreiter in Kassel, chosen in 1951 by the Federal Government, and from 1954 the Deutscher Verlag für Musik, a new publisher in Leipzig which was involved until the unification of Germany.
Initially the duration of the edition was estimated as 15 to 20 years, but the scientific work with the sources required much more time than anticipated. The first volumes appeared in 1954. The edition was completed in June 2007.
Read more about this topic: Neue Bach-Ausgabe
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