By the Hand of Genius – Bach's Kaleidoscopic Score Finds a New Home

T here’s a special fascination about a composer’s manuscript score. It’s not just the knowledge that the notes on the page were made by the hand of a much-loved genius. With a great music manuscript, it can feel as if we’re seeing a snapshot of the creative process itself: the composer’s personality spilling onto the paper. We can see Beethoven scribbling furiously as he wrestles his ideas into shape; or marvel at the elegance and clarity of Mozart’s handwriting – as if the music has simply flowed, fully-formed, from mind to page.

So the acquisition by the Bodleian Library of Johann Sebastian Bach’s original 1725 working score of the Cantata No.128 ‘Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein’ in a dealnegotiated by Sotheby’s, is a cause for unalloyed celebration. Bach (1685-1750) is more than just a great composer. For many music-lovers he is the supreme master – a genius on a par with Shakespeare, Homer, Michelangelo and Newton, whose imagination, intelligence and profound insight into the human condition places him in a category of his own.

Born into a family of musicians in the small German city of Eisenach, Bach excelled as an organist from an early age. Over five decades as a musician at the courts of Weimar and Köthen, and finally (from 1723) as the kantor (music-master) at the church of St Thomas in Leipzig, he composed more than 1100 surviving works: for the keyboard and the organ, for instrumental ensembles, and above all for the church. Bach’s subsequent influence on western music has been incalculable, extending through Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Stravinsky to Duke Ellington, The Beatles and Lady Gaga. In 1977, recordings of his music were sent into outer space on the Voyager space probe - as proof of humanity’s creative ability.

And yet original Bach manuscripts are surprisingly rare. Relatively few of Bach’s manuscript scores survived the 18^th century, and many of his major works (such as the six Cello Suites) exist only in copies by other hands. Until now, only three Bach manuscripts have been housed in major UK collections: two in the British Library and one in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Now Oxford – a major centre of Bach scholarship – joins that select group.

That in itself would make the Kohn manuscript (named after its previous owner, the Leipzig-born scientist and collector Sir Ralph Kohn) of the Cantata No.128 of interest. The work itself is one of over 200 cantatas that Bach composed over the course of his career: short, sacred vocal pieces intended for performance in church on specific days of the ecclesiastical calendar. Taken as a whole, they offer a kaleidoscopic and endlessly rich panorama of Bach’s genius in all its aspects, and in the 21^st century – when, for the first time, the complete cycle has become available on record – they’ve acquired a renewed popularity with performers and listeners.



As far as we know, Bach composed the Cantata No.128 for performance in Leipzig on Ascension Day, 10^th May 1725. The manuscript takes us into that precise moment: the fluid, lively handwriting; the ebullient character of its scoring (with horns and trumpets), and the little human details that reveal a genius at work. We can see the epigraph J.J (Jesu Juva – “Jesus, help”) with which Bach prayed for inspiration before beginning composition. In places, his sleeve has smudged the ink, and he writes to the very edge of the paper – physical evidence of the speed and energy of his creative process.

But the stories contained in this score go beyond Bach’s own methods, or the musical glory of this life-affirming masterpiece. It contains annotations in the hand of Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann (1710-1784), a skilled composer in his own right. There are pencil marks from 1878, when the rediscovery of Bach’s music was gathering pace and German editors prepared the cantata for its first publication, 138 years after Bach’s death. It’s also a physical testament to the career of Ralph Kohn, born in Bach’s own city of Leipzig but forced to flee from Nazi persecution to Britain – where he found a lasting home.

The manuscript is now available for everyone to view in perpetuity after Sotheby’s Tax, Heritage & UK Museums team, working alongside our Books & Manuscripts department and Dr Stephen Roe successfully negotiated the acquistion. The score is now on display alongside manuscripts by Jane Austen, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett in the Weston Library’s free exhibition Write, Cut, Rewrite. It will also be made available in digitised form through the Library’s Digital Bodleian platform, and through the Bach Digital online portal: providing universal access to a document of four centuries of cultural history in western Europe – an irreplaceable and endlessly fascinating product of one of music’s most beautiful minds.

The Acceptance in Lieu of Tax scheme is administered by Arts Council England, which allows owners of ‘pre-eminent’ objects and works of art to offer them to the nation in exchange for a tax credit to set against their Inheritance Tax liability. In most cases, including this acquisition, these important objects come at no cost to the acquiring institution. Importantly, the scheme includes a tax incentive – referred to as the douceur – as an added encourgament to owners to consider making these offers to the nation. This is why the scheme is of such interest to estate-planners and other advisers working with art-owning families who are interested in tax-efficient succession planning.

Write, Cut, Rewrite is at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, from 29 February 2024–5 January 2025.

Tax, Heritage & UK Museums