One of my passions (to follow on from yesterday’s blog) is the music of Johann Friedrich Fasch. I came upon his music purely by chance when, in 1988, I was looking around for ideas for concerts that I’d been ask to organize on the Fringe of the Edinburgh International Festival. Fasch was born in 1688, you see, so a tercentenary celebration of a composer who the textbooks said was held in high esteem by Bach and Telemann seemed like a plan.
The rest, as they say, is history. The concerts were very successful – the music was popular with the performers and audiences alike. With the help of libraries in Sweden and Germany, I had produced hand-written editions for sonatas and concertos, which were given their modern premieres. For two of the cantatas, we played off copies of Fasch’s own manuscripts – his calligraphy is beautiful!
Nowadays, as more and more libraries around the world digitize their resources and make them available online (and long may it continue, I say!), part of my weekly routine is checking out what additions there have been on my favourite sites. A couple of weeks back, I was leafing through a volume that supposedly contained Melchior Hoffman’s copy of a Telemann cantata in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark. To be honest, although the scoring of the separate movements was interesting (there is one that features two harps, for example), I was getting bored and I was on the point of giving up when a little voice in my head said, “No, keep going.”
I’m glad I did – the very next page made my heart jump. I recognized the handwriting immediately: none other than Johann Friedrich Fasch. And it was not too difficult to work out what it was – here were three movements of a church cantata. I fired off a quick email to Dr. Gottfried Gille of Bad Langensalza, Germany, who is something of a specialist in Fasch’s cantatas (having compiled a catalogue of the known texts) to see if he could identify my “bleeding chunk”. It turns out that only the first movement of the cantata is missing – from the 1730/31 cycle setting of poetry by Erdmann Neumeister, the title is Lasst uns dulden, lasst uns hoffen.
This is one of the highlights of my job – finding something thought long-lost, and being able to identify it and share it with others. If I chance upon a “new” piece by Fasch once a year, I’ll be happy. Wish me luck!
