The first exhibition room describes the invention of regular Bach festivals in 1899 in order to “make propaganda for Bach”, the founding of the New Bach Society to regularly organize such festivals in 1900, its first Bach festival in Berlin in 1901, and the anxieties, controversies and political machinations surrounding the festivals in the first half of the 20th century.

The two-day celebrations for the inauguration of the Eisenach Bach monument in 1884 served as a model for how Bach festivals should be organized.

The first German Bach Festival opened on March 21, 1901, in Berlinʼs Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. It was organized by three prominent Berlin members of the Bach Society: Siegfried Ochs, director of the Philharmonic Choir; Joseph Joachim, director of the Royal Academy of Music; and Georg Schumann, director of the Berlin Sing-Akademie. London had already held Bach Festivals in 1895, 1897, and 1900, organized by the London Bach Choir, but these were held only sporadically thereafter, with the tradition being revived in 1990. Leipzig held its first independent Bach Festival in 1908, since 1999 it has been an annual event.

The program books of the now 100 Bach festivals of the New Bach Society form the common thread that leads chronologically through the history of Bach festivals.

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Bach Choir, founded by John Frederick Wolle in 1898, had performed the Mass in B minor on March 27, 1900; now, in May 1901, it celebrated its three-day “Second Bach Festival”; the third to sixth Bach Festivals there followed from 1902 to 1905, and since 1912 they have been held annually. In Germany, in the meantime, at the Bach festivals run by the New Bach Society of 1904, 1907, 1908, and 1910, debates raged about the “correct” performance of Bachʼs music and whether the festivals should continue to be “wandering” from city to city in Germany or whether a permanent location like Eisenach or Leipzig would be more ideal musically. The decision to remain “wandering” led to the emergence of the first regular Bach Festivals independent of the Bach Society in Germany: Leipzig held further independent festivals in 1911 and 1914; Eisenach began with its own independent festivals in 1925 (both traditions were later disrupted due to political events). Baldwin Wallace University, Ohio, launched regular Bach festivals in 1933 that continue to this day.

In 1911, the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska from Paris was invited to a “duel” at the small Bach festival of the New Bach Society in Eisenach: the same pieces were performed successively on the harpsichord and on the piano. The Bach Society had probably hoped for a diplomatic verdict, that is, that Bach could be played either way, but Landowska received endless ovations, and the international press proclaimed the victory of the harpsichord. It was the breakthrough for the use of the harpsichord in Bach concerts. The day before the “duel”, Landowska had also visited the Bach House and tried out the historical instruments, which are still demonstrated hourly today.

In 1934, the New Bach Society successfully fended off attempts to impose on it National Socialist aims and integrate it into Nazi cultural organizations. However, it could not, or would not, prevent its 22nd Bach Festival in 1935, commemorating Bachʼs 250th birthday, from being celebrated propagandistically as the “Reich Bach Festival” in Leipzig. At the opening concert, Hitler, Goebbels, and Gauleiter Mutschmann sat in honored seats in the Gewandhaus with Mayor Goerdeler. Prior to the concert, Hitler had been awarded the newly established Bach Plaque of the City of Leipzig. One of these plaques is on display here.

The New Bach Society had been co-founded in 1900 by Jewish and Jewish-descended members. During the Nazi era, they were banned from practicing their professions, persecuted, forced to flee, or murdered (such as Siegfried Ochsʼ widow in Theresienstadt in 1943). The Bach Societyʼs offices in Leipzig were destroyed in 1943. Its future in the Soviet zone remained uncertain for a long time, and it did not hold any Bach festivals until 1950. The International Bach Festival Schaffhausen (from 1946), the Greifswald Bach Week (from 1946), and the Ansbach Bach Week (from 1947) filled the gap. New Bach festivals were founded in Winter Park, Florida, and Carmel, California, in 1935, followed by Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1942; all continue to be held annually.

The second exhibition room makes it visually abundantly clear: the snowball that the New Bach Society launched in 1901 had triggered an avalanche, with new Bach festivals springing up all over the world. The New Bach Society itself, however, initially found itself entangled in the ideological confrontation between East and West after 1950.

In 1949, the New Bach Society had joined the Cultural Association of the Soviet Zone in order to continue holding festivals also in the East. This move then compelled it to participate in the colossal state-run Bach Festival in Leipzig in 1950, the 200th anniversary of Bachʼs death, where, under the patronage of GDR president Wilhelm Pieck, Bach was declared the “National Musician of the Soviet Zone”. The Bach Society also participated in the competing festival in Göttingen in 1950, held under the patronage of West Germany's president Theodor Heuss. In the 1950s, just one new Bach Festival seems to have been established that continues to this day: in Tilford, Surrey, England, since 1952. Many new Bach festivals were founded in the 1960s: in Saint Donat, Halle/Westphalia, Mazamet-Castres, Köthen, the Thuringian Bach Weeks (then called Bach Days), and the Würzburg Bach Days.

The example of musicologist Harry Hahn demonstrates that freedom of travel was by no means guaranteed in divided Germany in 1950: Before attending the GDRʼs “German Bach Celebration” in Leipzig, numerous documents had to be provided and entry permits obtained. The small Bach Festival in Prades in 1950, however, faced no such problems, apart from its remote location in France on the border with Spain. It had been founded by Pau Casals to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Bachʼs death. The exhibition presents concert posters, recordings, souvenirs, and a medal from this event.

In the West and East, the Bach festivals of the New Bach Society took very different paths from 1950 onwards: While in the West Hindemith and Adorno controversially debated and questioned the understanding of Bach, and ensembles with new instrumentations, arrangements, tempi, and above all, historically informed performance practice courted Bach enthusiasts, the festivals in the East had to conform to the rigid constraints of state cultural policy. Only with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification in 1990 did the surveillance, paternalism, and the constant exploitation of scholarly and artistic achievements for propaganda purposes come to an end.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many new Bach festivals were founded in the West: in Aachen, Wiesbaden, Sonora (California), Victoria (Texas), Lüneburg, Heidelberg, Wiblingen (Ulm), Scranton (Northern Pennsylvania), Thun (Switzerland) and Aschaffenburg.

In the 1990s, new Bach festivals emerged in Budapest (Hungary), Harrisburg (Virginia), Georgetown (Washington), Lausanne (Switzerland), Combrailles (France), the Hudson Valley (New York), and Stuttgart. The London Bach Festival, which has been held annually since 1990, was not included here in the exhibition, but rather placed at the very beginning, as London has the longest Bach festival tradition, even though it took several attempts to establish it as a regular event.

A niche displays remnants from Bach festivals: numerous programs, T-shirts and other souvenirs, the “Bach Lamp” of the Thuringian Bach Weeks, a poster signed by all the musicians of the Oregon Bach Festival, and the bust of the Micheli brothers from around 1875, which stood in the center of the hall at the Paris Conservatoire during Charles Widorʼs celebratory concert for the bicentenary of Bachʼs birth in 1885. Around the niche are posters for new Bach festivals from the 2000s and 2010s: Gliwice (Poland), Montreal (Canada), Armidale (“New England Bach Festival”, Australia), Arnstadt, Weimar, Dordrecht (Netherlands), Toul (France), Ohrdruf, Chișinău (Moldova), Idaho, Appenzell (Switzerland), Asunción (Paraguay), Malaysia, and Jerusalem. The Vienna Bach Days (Austria), which have been held since 2005, have since been added. Since 2019, Lüneburg has even had a second regular Bach festival, the ultraBACH festival.

The 2020s arenʼt even over yet! Since 2020 new regular Bach festivals have started in Rostock (following a Bach Festival by the New Bach Society in the year before), Barmen (near Wuppertal), Göttingen, Cologne, Karlshorst (near Berlin), Hamburg, and Agathenburg (near Stade). The exhibition also explains how organizers from Germany and neighboring countries can apply to host one of the Bach festivals of the New Bach Society and what support the society offers.

A display case at the end shows further remnants of Bach festivals: A letter from Albert Schweitzer about the Bach festival in Mühlhausen in 1959, a Helmuth Rilling bobblehead from Oregon, a bus ticket to the first Bach festival in Saint Louis in 1942, admission tickets, medals, a pin for the Tri-Bach Festival in Canada, postcards, a letter from Werner Heisenberg about the Bach festival in Göttingen in 1958 and many other memorabilia recall the long tradition of Bach festivals and the enthusiasm of their organizers and their visitors.

Many Bach festivals no longer exist today. Some were one-offs or ran for only a few years. Others enjoyed success for decades, such as the English Bach Festival (1963–2009), the New England Bach Festival in Vermont (1969–2004), the Berlin Bach Days (1970–2000), the Bach Week in Chicago (1974–2024), and the Bach Festival in Tver, Russia (1993–2023). Program booklets on this wall commemorate these earlier Bach festivals.

The Bach House poster collection has grown considerably as a result of our project. Many past Bach festivals are commemorated in the stairwells leading up to the special exhibition. A heartfelt thank you to all the organizers who contributed their posters to the exhibition!

The New England Bach Festival in Vermont was once the largest in the world. A poster from 1986 welcomes visitors.

Thanks to a horn player from Oregon who was enthusiastic about the project and a German acquaintance of his who was equally enthusiastic about Bach, there are six beautiful old posters of the Oregon Bach Festival in the hallways and in the exhibition.

Some posters remain a mystery to us: Bach festivals were held in Ulm three times until 1950 (only the dates of 1933 and 1950 are known), but when did the “Ulm Bach Week” originate, and when and why did it end? The Wiblingen Bach Days have continued the Bach tradition in Ulm since 1985.

Carmel, a Leipzig poster design, Thuringia, Leningrad, Oregon: Not only musicians, but also many graphic designers obviously love Bach.

The only space in the stairwells for a poster of this size was snatched up early by the Bachwochen Thun (Switzerland).

Carmel, Mühlhausen (Thuringia) and Munich: Some of the posters for the Bach festivals of the New Bach Society were also eye-catching.

Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Salamon Kamp, the Hungarian Bach Society and the Evangelical Church of Pest have been organizing annual Bach Weeks in Budapest since 1990. The poster was too large for the actual exhibition and is now prominently displayed at its entrance.