At last: 100% Johann Sebastian!

150 years of publication history had to elapse until a music text of the Mass in B minor was published that truly goes back to Johann Sebastian Bach’s “definitive version”, inasmuch as it can be determined.

The new “Breitkopf Urtext” edition by Joshua Rifkin draws on all relevant sources to restore the Mass to the state in which Bach left it for posterity. This means, first, a clear separation of the Kyrie and Gloria from the earlier Missa of 1733. Moreover, in the Credo – the “Symbolum Nicenum” – Rifkin has faced the challenge of sweeping away the overlay of additions by C.P.E. Bach and eliminating his alterations more thoroughly than Friedrich Smend had in the Neue Bach Ausgabe of 1954 and in later editions as well.