Forkel was also a student of the music of the polyphonic school. He prepared for the press the scores of a number of sixteenth century Masses, Motets, etc., and fortunately received proofs of them from the engraver. For, in 1806, after the Battle of Jena, the French impounded the plates and melted them down. Forkel’s proofs are still preserved in the Berlin Royal Library. He was diligent in quest of Bach’s scattered MSS., and his friendship with Bach’s elder sons, Carl Philipp Emmanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, enabled him to secure precious relics which otherwise might have shared the fate of too many of Bach’s manuscripts. He took an active interest in the proposal of Messrs. Hoffmeister and Kühnel, predecessors of C. F. Peters at Leipzig, to print a “kritisch-korrecte” edition of Bach’s Organ and Clavier works. Through his friend, Johann Gottfried Schicht, afterwards Cantor at St. Thomas’s, Leipzig, he was also associated with Breitkopf and Haertel’s publication of five of Bach’s six extant Motets in 1802-3.
As a composer Forkel has long ceased to be remembered. His works include two Oratorios, _ Hiskias_ (1789) and _Die Hirten bey der Krippe_; four Cantatas for chorus and orchestra; Clavier Concertos, and many Sonatas and Variations for the Harpsichord.
In 1802, for reasons which he explains in his Preface, Forkel published from Hoffmeister and Kühnel’s “Bureau de Musique” his _Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke. Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst,_ of which a new edition was issued by Peters in 1856. The original edition bears a dedication to Gottfried Baron van Swieten(1) (1734-1803), Prefect of the Royal Library, Vienna, and sometime Austrian Ambassador in Berlin, a friend of Haydn and Mozart, patron of Beethoven, a man whose age allowed him to have seen Bach, and whose career makes the association with Bach that Forkel’s dedication gives him not undeserved. It was he, an ardent Bach enthusiast, who introduced the youthful Mozart to the music of the Leipzig Cantor. “I go every Sunday at twelve o’clock to the Baron van Swieten,” Mozart writes in 1782, “where nothing is played but Handel and Bach, and I am now making a collection of the Fugues of Bach.” The merit and limitations of Forkel’s book will be considered later. For the moment the fact deserves emphasis that, inadequate as it is, it presented a fuller picture of Bach than so far had been drawn, and was the first to render the homage due to his genius.