Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit
The Enigma of the Volbach Portrait

No portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach is more controversial than the Volbach Portrait.  In the century since the German conductor, pianist, and musicologist Fritz Volbach acquired it from a Mainz antique dealer, this extraordinary image has been lauded and damned with conviction by generation after generation of Bach scholars and art historians.

Is the Volbach Portrait an accurate depiction of the facial features of Johann Sebastian Bach?  Even if it is, is it a portrait from life or a canny forgery?  If it is genuine, when, why, and for whom was the Volbach Portrait painted, and who painted it?

Teri Noel Towe, '70, the creator and the webmaster of The Face of Bach (www.npj.com/thefaceofbach/) who revealed the miraculous reappearance of the long lost Kittel Portrait of Bach to the world in 2001, began his study of the Bach portraits, real and unreal, before his undergraduate days at Princeton, and he first confronted the original of the Volbach Portrait in 1965.  On Saturday afternoon, March 27, 2004, at 4:00, he will address the enigma of the Volbach Portrait in an illustrated lecture in the Choir Rehearsal Room in the Crypt of the Chapel at Princeton University.  Using the famous 1748 E. G. Haussmann portrait of Bach in the collection of William H. Scheide, '36, as the comparative standard, Mr. Towe will offer his solution to the conundrum that the Volbach Portrait has presented for a hundred years, and present his explanation of its astonishing and poignant significance.

Teri Noel Towe

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The Face Of Bach

"Those in charge are odd and ambivalent towards music, which means I have to live with almost non-stop vexation, envy, and persecution."
Johann Sebastian Bach, October 28, 1730