Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 "Brandenburg Concertos" takes a central place. Nonetheless around half a dozen of Bach's extant concertos, including some of the "Brandenburg Concertos" and lost models of his later harpsichord concertos, seem to have had their roots in his Weimar period. Most of what Bach may have left with his employer in Weimar perished in a fire destroying Schloss Weimar in the 1770s. In 1719 a new large two-manual harpsichord arrived in the residence of Bach's then-time employer at Köthen. BWV 1050a, an extant early version of the fifth "Brandenburg Concerto", may have been conceived for this instrument, but that seems unlikely
Brandenburg Concertos of silver. The autograph manuscript of the concertos was only rediscovered in the archives of Brandenburg by Siegfried Wilhelm Dehn in 1849; the concertos were first published in the following year. The manuscript was nearly lost in World War II, when being transported for safekeeping to Prussia by train in the care of a librarian. The train came under aerial bombardment, and the librarian escaped the train to the nearby forest, with the scores hidden under his coat. In the modern era these works have been performed by orchestras with the string parts each played by a number of players,