New Sources from the National Library of Poland: Keyboard Concertos by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Organ Chorales by Johann Jeremias du Grain

The paper discusses two musical sources kept in the National Library of Poland that have to date not been discussed in the literature. The first of those is a collection of handwritten copies of ten keyboard concertos by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, made by Georg Amft based on materials that originated from the music collections of Sara Levy and Zippora Wulff. This paper primarily focuses on the Concerto in A Minor, W 26. Amft’s copy of that piece was made in 1900, based on a manuscript kept in the Royal Library in Berlin (Königliche Bibliothek); it bears an inscription attesting that the copy was made from an autograph. Seeing as Amft’s Vorlage is now lost, the Warsaw document appears to be an important indirect source for an early version of W 26. The second part of the paper is a discussion of a collection of organ chorales compiled by Johann Jeremias du Grain (a singer, organist, harpsichordist, composer, and a student of Georg Philipp Telemann based in Elbląg and Gdańsk). The manuscript was known before World War II; it went missing during or after the war, but has now been rediscovered in Warsaw. It features organ arrangements of psalm and chorale melodies performed as part of the Calvinist service in St. Elisabeth’s Church, which makes this collection a one-of-a-kind source on the musical life of Gdańsk’s Reformed Evangelical congregation in the first half of the eighteenth century.