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I was ready to turn off NPR this morning and begin work, when the familiar flute movement from Bach’s Orchestral Suite #2 tripped and bubbled from my radio speaker. I expected the announcer to cut in, the way announcers do during the transitional music between news stories, but the melody went on for what must have been a full twenty seconds. At length Bob Edwards introduced a story about the long-delayed restoration of Bach’s original manuscripts in Leipzig. The manuscripts had lain off-limits in the German National Library in Berlin for decades, with not even basic efforts attempted at preservation. But now, with the fragile papers near a state of complete disintergration, a team is finally hard at work preserving them for future study.

According to the report, one of the tasks in which the restoration team at the Bach Library in Leipzig is engaged is to digitally photograph every one of the manuscript pages and make them available online for music historians all over the world to study. The museum official commented on the quality of the digital images, their level of detail, and the information that the erasures, word transpositions, and margin notes could provide to those looking to reconstruct the life and creative mind of Bach. Continued…