ABSTRACT
Only rarely had a musicological study been awaited with such interest as Friedrich Smend's edition of the Mass in B minor in the Neue Bach-Ausgabe. The call for a new edition of Bach's works would have been justified by this effort if it had merely represented the culmination of two and one-half decades of continuous research, whose first, far-reaching results the editor published in the 1937 Bach-Jahrbuch. 2 But there was more: the rich significance of this work and the well-known scholarship of its editor seemed to ensure that crucial issues in recent Bach scholarship would be dealt with. Particularly pressing was the question of whether the same methods that revealed the need for a new chronology of Bach's works could also corroborate it. By this we mean, primarily, the source-critical methods of Philipp Spitta, upon which the majority of dates were once founded. Furthermore, the wide-ranging critical report promised to touch on numerous philological problems that affected editorial problems of Bach's music in general. What could be more desirable for the independent development of a new collected edition, still in its beginnings, than such a volume? The intensely provocative and illuminating effect that had been predicted has indeed occurred. Since the appearance of Smend's critical report, Bach scholarship has entered a period of flux unlike any since Philipp Spitta completed his fundamental biography of Bach eighty years ago.
