Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with a concertino consisting of three instruments. However, throughout the concerto the harpsichord takes the leading role among the soloists, with, for instance, a long solo passage for this instrument near the end of the first movement: neither of the other soloists has a comparable solo passage. In this sense the concerto has been called the first keyboard concerto ever written. Vivaldi, and other composers, had occasionally given solo passages to keyboard instruments in their concertos before Bach, but never had a concerto been written which gave the harpsichord a soloist role throughout on the scale of the fifth "Brandenburg
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,