There are moments when technology and art achieve something genuinely strange together — when the vessel holding civilization’s greatest music becomes almost absurdly, embarrassingly small. A USB drive the size of a pencil eraser. Inside it, everything Bach wrote that survived him: 153 compact discs’ worth of cantatas, passions, keyboard works, chamber music, organ music, orchestral suites, the great choral monuments. The Mass in B minor. The St. Matthew Passion. All six Brandenburg Concertos. The complete Well-Tempered Clavier. Nearly everything, anyway — because much was lost, scattered, used by his second wife Anna Magdalena to wrap fish, allegedly, or simply swallowed by time.
Bach himself, who spent years petitioning the Leipzig town council for decent choir boys and a livable salary, would have found this incomprehensible. Not the music — he knew what he’d written. The container.
Warner’s Teldec Complete Bach Edition, originally released as a 153-disc set under the Bach 2000 banner in late 1999, is now available on a single USB stick encoded at 320 kilobits per second in MP3. The original discs carried a different catalog number; this is the same music, same performances, same extraordinary scope — just compressed into 25.3 gigabytes of a 30-gigabyte drive. That the remaining space could theoretically accommodate, say, the superb John Butt/St. John Passion on Linn or the Stephen Layton/Polyphony version on Hyperion alongside the core set is the kind of detail that would have had Marlowe’s contemporaries reaching for the kindling.
The recordings themselves deserve scrutiny separate from the novelty of the format. Teldec assembled this edition across decades of work — the project stretches back well before the millennial release — drawing on a roster that included Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Ton Koopman, and others who were, in the 1970s and 1980s, essentially inventing modern historically informed Bach interpretation as they went. The cantata recordings with Harnoncourt and Leonhardt alone — that extraordinary shared project spanning the complete cycle — represent one of the great documentary achievements in recorded classical music. Not uniformly perfect. Harnoncourt’s sometimes willful eccentricities, the uneven boy sopranos, the occasional roughness in ensemble: all present and accounted for. But alive in ways that smoother, more complacent accounts rarely manage.
What strikes you, returning to this material after years, is how much the early music movement’s assumptions — gut strings, natural trumpets, small forces, the exquisite vulnerability of period instruments in slow movements — have simply become our baseline expectation for Bach. We no longer hear Harnoncourt’s string playing as strange. We’ve been educated.
At roughly £120 on release — thereafter closer to £170 — this offers value that requires little argument. Hänssler’s competing complete edition under Helmut Rilling runs to 172 discs and has also appeared in compressed formats, but Rilling’s approach is fundamentally different: larger forces, a more romantic conception of Bach’s rhetoric, performances that have their own integrity but occupy a different aesthetic universe. Rilling’s Bach is civic and communal; Harnoncourt’s is argumentative, sometimes combative, always searching. The Teldec set encodes at 320 kilobits per second, which compares favorably with Hänssler’s somewhat puzzling choice of 128 — a compression level that feels like false economy when the source material is this important.
The St. Matthew Passion sits at the center of any complete Bach edition, emotionally and theologically. Bach revised it at least twice, possibly three times; the version we perform and record is itself an editorial construct. The Teldec account — and I won’t pretend I don’t occasionally find myself wishing for Karl Richter’s dark, grieving 1958 Munich release, with its different set of values entirely — holds up. The recitative writing, those moments when the bass voice delivers narrative over a string accompaniment that sounds like the world quietly cracking apart, remains devastating in any good performance. Here it is, reliably, devastating.
There are gaps, inevitably. Much of Bach’s output simply did not survive. The early keyboard works, the lost concertos, the first versions of pieces he later transformed — all absent for reasons having nothing to do with Warner. What remains is still overwhelming.
Plug it in. Play it direct from the drive. Start anywhere — the Goldberg Variations, the organ toccatas, one of the more obscure church cantatas you’ve never heard. The music will find you where you are.
Essential. Obviously.
