information:classification
Autographs and editions

Two autograph sources exist: the parts for the Kyrie and Gloria sections that Bach deposited in Dresden in 1733, and the score of the complete work that Bach compiled in 1748–50, which was inherited by C.P.E. Bach (the autograph has been published in facsimile from the source in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). However, for his 1786 public performance of the Symbolum Nicenum, C.P.E. Bach, as was typical practice in the era, made additions to the autograph score for performance by adding a 28-bar introduction, replacing the now-obsolete oboe d'amore with newer instruments (clarinets, oboes, or violins) and making other changes in instrumentation for his own aesthetic reasons. C.P.E. also wrote in his own solutions to reading some passages made nearly illegible by his father's late-life handwriting problems.

For this and other reasons, the Mass in B minor poses a considerable challenge to prospective editors, and substantial variations can be noted in different editions, even critical urtext editions. The Bach Gesellschaft edition, edited by Julius Rietz, was published in 1856 based on several sources but without direct access to the autograph. When access was later obtained, the textual problems were so evident that the society published a revised edition the next year. The 1857 edition was the standard for the next century, but was later recognized to be even less accurate than the 1856 version due to inadvertent incorporation of C.P.E. Bach's alterations in the autograph. Similarly, the 1954 edition by Friedrich Smend for the Neue Bach-Ausgabe was shown to have significant faults within five years of publication.

Christoph Wolff's edition, published by C.F. Peters in 1997, uses two copies of the 1748–50 manuscript made before C.P.E. Bach's adulterations to try to reconstruct Bach's original readings, and seeks to recover performance details by using all available sources, including cantata movements that Bach reworked in the B minor Mass. Joshua Rifkin's edition, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 2006, also seeks to remove the C.P.E. Bach emendations, but differs from Wolff in arguing that the 1748–50 work is, to quote John Butt, "essentially a different entity from the 1733 Missa, and that a combination of the 'best' readings from both does not really correspond to Bach's final (and virtually completed) conception of the work"; Rifkin's version seeks to adhere to this final version.

Uwe Wolf 's edition, published by Bärenreiter in 2010, relies upon x-ray spectrograph technology to differentiate J.S. Bach's handwriting from the additions made by C.P.E. Bach and others. Ulrich Leisinger 's edition, published by Carus in 2014, accepts some of C.P.E. Bach's revisions and uses the 1733 Dresden parts as the primary source for the Kyrie and Gloria.