D'Anchald recalled reading Neukomm's name in Towe's article. On the organ manuscript is an inscription that identifies the music as a gift Neukomm received from August Eberhard Muller, one of Bach's successors as cantor at St. Thomas' Church. It is known that Neukomm visited Leipzig in 1808.
Perusing Neukomm's will, "I noticed that there were a few music manuscripts in the inventory, so I wondered where they could be," d'Anchald says.
That curiosity led to a Google search yielding "a very short piece of information - two lines - mentioning that in a small museum in a city south of Paris called Melun there was a sheet of music given by Neukomm to a certain Auguste Vincent," d'Anchald says, "and that it was probably a Bach autograph."
He obtained from the museum's curator photos of the music sheet and e-mailed them to Towe. On Aug. 22, d'Anchald traveled to the museum for a first-hand look. "Now I can affirm that the Melun manuscript contains the missing pages three and four," he says.
Towe, who has compared the photo copies with the rest of his volume, is equally sure.
The two 60-year-old men, who have never met and have only communicated via the Internet, are still exchanging theories on why part of this score was ever extracted and presented by Neukomm to Vincent, an obscure figure who studied piano, d'Anchald discovered, with a friend of Chopin's.
Towe, who has lectured for the American Bach Society and is involved in noted Baltimore filmmaker Mike Lawrence's Bach Project, a documentary currently in production, has traced much of his prized Bach manuscript's history.
It found its way to London, where it was bound (on the cover is printed "John Sebastian Bach"). It was exhibited there in 1904, sold in Germany in 1913 and sold again in the 1930s by a New York autograph dealer to a private collector.
When it came up for sale again, Towe, who had loved the cantata since first hearing it during his college days at Princeton, was waiting.
"What I acquired on Oct. 20, 1983," he says, "was the privilege, the pleasure, and, above all, the responsibility, of being its custodian for a while."
Towe has no immediate plans to travel to Melun to see the missing pages and he doesn't anticipate ever possessing them.
"I don't know if French law would even permit it," he says. "If I won Power Ball, yeah, maybe I'd negotiate for it. But my father used to say '40 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing.' I have 75 percent. And for the other 25 percent, a digital scan of the pages is more than satisfactory to me."
recent musical finds
2006: Oldest known manuscripts in Bach's hand - copies he made when he was a teenager of works by other composers - discovered in a Weimar, Germany, library.
2005: Unknown 1713 aria by Bach, Alles mit Gott, found in same Weimar library
2005: Manuscript of long-lost 1826 piano duet of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, found in a Pennsylvania seminary library
