page_title: Bach House (Eisenach)
section_title: Collections
hierarchical_section_title: Bach House (Eisenach) / Collections
caption_attribution_description: English: Johann Sebastian Bach / Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Alto voice no. 8, choir I, no. 90 Chorale "Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden". Hand-written choir part, ca. 1829. Deutsch: Johann Sebastian Bach / Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Altstimme No. 8, Chor I, Nr. 90 Choral „Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden“. Handschrift, ca. 1829.
context_page_description: The Bach House in Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, is a museum dedicated to the composer Johann Sebastian Bach who was born in the city. On its 600 m² it displays around 250 original exhibits, among them a Bach music autograph. The core of the building complex is a half-timbered house, ca. 550 years old, which was mistakenly identified as Bach's birth house in the middle of the 19th century. In 1905, the Leipzig-based Neue Bachgesellschaft acquired the building. In 1907, it was opened as the first Bach museum.
context_section_description: As the first and – for a long time – only Bach museum, the museum's mandate by the New Bach Society was to "collect everything that concerns Johann Sebastian Bach, his life and works, and his reception." However, when the museum was founded in 1907, this mandate was already quite impossible to fulfill. 80 percent of all known Bach autographs were (and still are) in the possession of the Berlin State Library, and already at the time, private collectors willing to part with what was left were demanding prices far exceeding the means of a private society. Still, in its early years the following autographs were acquired by the Bach House:
  Subsequently, the collection grew by donations, notably those of Oskar von Hase and the Leipzig music publishers C.F. Peters and Breitkopf & Härtel, and by inheritances, like those from Philipp Spitta, Wilhelm Rust, Paul Graf Waldersee, Aloys Obrist, Wilhelm His, and Christoph Trautmann. Apart from the items on display, the following are particularly noteworthy: a Thuringian Harpsichord from 1715, a harpsichord by Jacob Hartmann (ca. 1765), a second spinet by Johann Heinrich Silbermann (1765), and a pedal clavichord (ca. 1815). Additionally three school notebooks by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a first edition of The Musical Offering (part A) from 1747, the source C of Bach's lost Genealogie der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie (genealogy of the musical Bach family), the only known libretto of the lost Bach wedding cantata Sein Segen fließt daher, wie ein Strom (BWV Anh. 14, Immanuel Tietze, Leipzig 1725), a collection of silhouettes of the Ohrdruf Bach family, letters of 19th century Bach researchers like Karl Hermann Bitter, and documents, measurements and casts relating to the excavation of the (supposed) Bach bones by Wilhelm His and Carl Seffner (including casts of the cranium in plaster and bronze). In 2013, the Bach House acquired 62 of what originally probably had been 152 hand-written choir parts, which the choir sang from when Felix Mendelssohn performed Bach's St Matthew Passion in the Berliner Singakademie on 11 March 1829 for the first time after Bach's death.
  Today, the museum's collecting activities focus on these fields:
  baroque musical instruments
  Bach iconography
  early prints of Bach's music
  theological literature from Bach's time
  Bach research and reception in the 19th century
caption: J.S. Bach / F. Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Chorale Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden. Hand-written choir part (alto), ca. 1829.
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