Bach Archive receives unique private collection
The New York shipowner and music researcher Elias Kulukundis has amassed the world's largest private collection on the Bach family. He has now donated the most valuable part of the collection to the Bach Archive in Leipzig.
Kulukundis comes from a Greek-American shipping family and worked for many years in the New York branch of the family business. He laid the foundations of his collection as a musicology student at Yale University in the 1950s. Even before the donation, Kulukundis loaned his collection to the Bach Archive in Leipzig for academic analysis.
The collection comprises a total of around 1000 documents, mostly music manuscripts, first and early prints and letters from the four Bach sons, who themselves embarked on a career as musicians. There are cimelia such as the long-lost autograph score of the opera Zanaida by Johann Christian Bach, letters from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to the Leipzig publisher Breitkopf (with a well-preserved Bach seal) and the first Bach biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel as well as documents from Johann Christian and Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, in addition to artistically hand-colored aria collections and family registers from the second half of the 18th century.
