For 25 years, Teri Noel Towe has deeply treasured a slim volume bound in red morocco that he acquired at an auction house, a volume containing six handwritten pages of a musical manuscript.
"Just pick it up," says Towe, a trust and estate lawyer in New York, "and a funny electricity goes through your body. You are holding in your hands something Johann Sebastian Bach held in his."
Only Bach would have held a little bit more.
The manuscript is missing pages three and four of what should be eight pages of the original organ part for the cantata Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam (Christ Our Lord Came to the Jordan), composed in 1724 and numbered BWV 7 in the Bach catalog.
Much of the score was written out by a Bach pupil, but several of the composer's own notations are clearly recognizable, making this a valuable item - Towe paid $10,000 for it in 1983.
Pages three and four, containing the last measures of the opening choral movement and all of the following bass aria, cover the front and back of a music sheet presumed lost. Until now.
Thanks to an inquisitive Frenchman named Philippe d'Anchald and the detection power of the Internet, the missing link has been discovered about 30 miles from Paris, where it has been housed in a museum, never fully identified, since 1918.
Although not quite as newsy as the discovery of unknown music by Bach, the missing pages should interest scholars. The organ part used in performances of the cantata today is based on the extant harpsichord part, Towe says. Now it will be possible to see exactly what the organist saw on pages three and four of his score at the cantata's premiere in St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig on June 24, 1724.
"I'm thrilled this has been found," says Towe. "What Philippe has accomplished would not have been possible without the digital age."
D'Anchald, a lawyer for an international bank, is a Bach enthusiast (his eldest son is named Jean-Sebastien). About six years ago, while doing online research about a historic organ in Germany, he came across Towe's home pages and an article detailing the missing pages of the 1724 organ music.
"I was fascinated by the story of that manuscript and put it in the recesses of my memory," d'Anchald says in an e-mail. Earlier this summer, that memory was jogged "quite by chance" when a historian friend of d'Anchald's asked him to look at the copy of a will left by Sigismund Neukomm, an Austrian-born composer who died in Paris in 1858.
