Lot 178: Bach, Johann Sebastian

first edition, second issue, of the St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, oblong 4to (25 x 33.5cm), 190 pages, engraved throughout, subscribers' list and index, plate number 1571 (corrected on pp.143 and 157), publisher's stamps to title, ownership inscriptions to front free endpaper, modern pencil annotation to p.112, nineteenth-century moiré cloth, small tear to front free endpaper repaired, some spotting and browning, including to title,This is a clean crisp copy, with strong impressions from the plates, showing it to be an early issue; it contains two corrected plate numbers which were wrongly printed in the first issue, as well as the index, which Fuld calls for in the first edition. The St. Matthew Passion, one of Bach's supreme masterpieces, was first published in the wake of the famous performance in Leipzig by Mendelssohn on 11 March 1829, the most important event in the Bach revival of the nineteenth century. The arrangement for the vocal score was made by Mendelssohn's friend A.B. Marx.