Today, we remember Johann Sebastian Bach as one of the most prolific composers in music history. However, a significant portion of his output – about half – has not survived.
Johann Sebastian Bach
These lost works span categories including sacred and secular cantatas, Passion settings, and instrumental compositions.
Their disappearance can be attributed to various historical factors, including neglect after Bach’s death, the scattering of manuscripts among heirs, wartime losses, and more.
Today, we’re looking at the stories behind these lost Bach masterpieces – and how they might have been lost to time.
What Happened to Bach’s Manuscripts After He Died?
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach
After Bach’s death in 1750, his manuscripts were divided among his family members, especially his widow Anna Magdalena and his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
Wilhelm Friedemann sold his father’s scores piecemeal during various periods of financial struggle.
After his death in 1784, the remaining manuscripts were auctioned off to various collectors – including one of his students, Sara Itzig Levy, best-known today for being Felix Mendelssohn‘s great-aunt.
Carl Philipp Emanuel inherited another chunk of his father’s estate: the manuscripts of Bach’s Passions and other major works. He died in 1788, and his collection was passed to his granddaughter.
After she died in 1805, many of the manuscripts were sold off. A large portion was eventually purchased by a musical society and archive founded in Berlin known as the Sing-Akademie.
The Sing-Akademie’s Role In Preserving Bach Manuscripts
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
In 1800, German composer and conductor Carl Friedrich Zelter became the leader of the Sing-Akademie. His star student, Felix Mendelssohn, became fascinated with the Bach works that were in the musical society collection, as well as the ones that his great-aunt had saved for her own private collection.
Over the generations, wartime upheavals took a toll on Bach’s works.
During World War II, the Berlin Sing-Akademie archives were moved for safekeeping and then seized by the Soviet army.
For decades, it was believed the archives had been lost, but in 1999, they were found in Ukraine intact. The rediscovery of the old Sing-Akademie archives yielded some previously lost Bach works and documents.
Other Bach Rediscoveries
Bach manuscript
This isn’t the only place where undiscovered Bach manuscripts have been found, either.
In 1992, Peter Wollny, the present-day director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, came across two unsigned and undated music manuscripts at the Royal Library of Belgium.
Years later, Wollny discovered that the handwriting in the manuscripts belonged to a student of Bach’s named Salomon Günther John, and that John may have copied them out.
The works – two Ciaconas for organ, likely dating from Bach’s teenage years – were authenticated and were performed for the first time in centuries in November 2025.
The discovery suggests that more lost Bach works might be uncovered someday.
Bach’s lost masterpiece: Chaconne in D minor, BWV 1178 | Ton Koopman (organ)
What Were the Lost Works?
The lost Bach works fall into a few baskets:
- Sacred cantatas
- Secular cantatas
- Passions
- Instrumental works
Why Are So Many of Bach’s Sacred Cantatas Lost?
Throughout his career, Bach’s job description often included writing sacred cantatas for performance on Sunday services and feast days.
While Bach worked in Leipzig between 1723 and 1750, his responsibilities included composing cantatas.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach claimed that he composed five full annual cycles of church cantatas.
Each annual cycle would consist of around 60 cantatas. Five full cycles’ worth would suggest the existence of 300. However, we only know of around 200, meaning around a hundred are presumably missing.
Another contributing factor to the confusion was the fact that Bach frequently (and understandably) reused or adapted parts of older cantatas as part of his newer versions.
After Bach’s death, there were simply too many pieces – and too many heirs – for the cantatas to remain a unified collection, so they were ultimately split up.
Bach’s Cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140
What Happened to Bach’s Secular Cantatas?
Bach also composed numerous secular cantatas, i.e., celebratory works for royal birthdays, weddings, city officials, and the like.
Because they were often written for a single specific occasion, their scores were less likely to be preserved. Sometimes those scores might have been gifted to dedicatees or patrons as gifts.
One example is Bach’s Birthday Cantata for Augustus II (BWV 1156) from 1727. The libretto survives today because it was presented in print to Augustus, but Bach’s music hasn’t survived.
It has been theorised that portions of Bach’s Mass in B minor, dating from 1749, were adapted from this cantata, as pieces of the Mass appear to fit Haupt’s text.
If that theory is true, it means that Bach may have reused secular music in his later sacred music, or vice versa, even decades after the fact.
Bach’s Coffee Cantata, BWV 211
Why Are So Many of Bach’s Passions Lost?
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244
Only two authentic Bach Passions have survived in their entirety: the St. John Passion from 1724 and the St. Matthew Passion from 1727.
We also have the libretto of a third: the St. Mark Passion.
However, Bach’s obituary lists five Passions, suggesting there might be two we don’t know about.
A payment record exists from 1717, paying Bach (referred to as “Concert Meister Bachen” in the paperwork) for a Passion music performance. However, we don’t have any trace of this hypothetical work at all.
As for the fifth, if it ever existed, we have no concrete evidence about it.
There’s an outside possibility that while writing his obituary, Bach’s family incorrectly ascribed a Passion to him. A surviving manuscript of a St. Luke’s Passion copied by Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel exists, and for a while, historians believed that Bach had written it. However, it has since been attributed to another unknown composer.
If the obituary was correct, and there were indeed three other complete passions by Bach that we know nothing about, as gutting as the loss would be, it would also make a certain amount of sense. The Passions were massive works meant for performance during Holy Week, which only happened once a year, so these weren’t works that were intended to be preserved and performed long-term.
What Happened to Bach’s Lost Instrumental Works?
Scholars believe that we have far fewer instrumental works by Bach than we should, given that he had two appointments – one in Weimar from 1708 to 1717, and one in Köthen from 1717 to 1723 – where his primary responsibilities would have included writing instrumental music.
It is believed that his Harpsichord Concerto in D-minor (BWV 1052) was adapted from a lost violin concerto; transposing the keyboard part to violin suggests an original string version.
Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D-minor, BWV 1052
In fact, reconstructions have been made for about ten instrumental concertos that Bach likely wrote but are now lost.
Bach’s obituary also mentions that he composed “many trios”, but not many survive.
There’s also an excerpt from a Sinfonia in D-major that ends abruptly and has no known accompanying sections; we simply don’t know where the rest went.
Bach’s Sinfonia in D-major, BWV 1045
Conclusion
Johann Sebastian Bach’s surviving output is vast, but, unbelievably, it represents only a fraction of what he actually composed during his lifetime.
The story of those lost pieces reminds us that there is much we still don’t know about Bach’s work – even though he is arguably the single most important figure in the history of classical music.
But there are still plenty of archives to comb through. So who knows? In the years to come, we may yet discover more of Johann Sebastian Bach’s lost works.
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