The music collections of the BCUL, partner of the Lausanne Bach Festival

The BCUL is pleased to be associated once again with the Lausanne Bach Festival, offering a targeted selection of documents directly linked to the program of this ^24th edition. Bach and his works will no longer hold any secrets for you!

The BCUL puts music in the spotlight on the Riponne site: books, sheet music, CDs, DVDs, magazines and archives. Over 120,000 musical documents are available to the public free of charge. Bach fans and the simply curious can also try out two music composition software programs and a digital piano. And don’t miss our remote access service: take the BCUL with you wherever you go!

“All Bach! from November 4 to 25, 2022

Bach fans, are you ready for a treat? The ^24th edition of the Lausanne Bach Festival will not disappoint! Numerous masterpieces by the Leipzig Cantor will be performed by exceptional names on the international Baroque scene.

The complete set Brandenburg Concertos, the Musical Offering, Overtures/Suites for orchestra, Suites for solo cello, Sonatas for harpsichord and violin, a Sonata and two Partitas for solo violin, as well as Concertos for organ, harpsichord or two violins, for instrumental music. The Christmas Oratorio and three famous Cantatas, for vocal music.

Did you know that…

• has the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major (BWV 1047) arrived in space? Its first movement, under the experienced baton of Karl Richter, was recorded and included in the Voyager Golden Record. This record, entitled The Sounds of Earth, was taken on board NASA’s two Voyager space probes, launched in 1977. Its purpose? To be the “interstellar bottle to the sea”, containing a wealth of information about the Earth and its inhabitants, in the form of images and sounds, intended for possible extraterrestrial beings.

• Christmas Oratorio is “musical recycling”? At least in part. In fact, the work is partly composed of secular and sacred cantatas that Bach had previously written. The composer has taken them up, developed them, rewritten them and integrated them into the new musical material, demonstrating the mastery of his art. The result is a musical self-parody, an extremely common procedure that has probably existed for as long as music has existed.

• the Cello Suites, like other major Bach compositions, were composed by his wife? At least, this is the much-criticized and controversial theory of a Welsh musicologist from Charles Darwin University in Australia, Martin Jarvis, based on the work of an American graphologist, Heidi Harralson. It is known that Anna Magdalena Bach, an accomplished singer from a musical family who probably knew how to compose too, transcribed several of her husband’s scores towards the end of her life. But researchers maintain that the Suites for Solo Cello, for example, do not have the “slowness or heaviness” of a simple copy: they could rather be the fruit of her imagination. It was common for female composers of the time to sign their works with the name of a male relative. This theory is developed in the documentary “Written by Mrs Bach ”, which also raises many questions about the role of women musicians in the world of music.

Learn more about Bach and his works.