[1] From 1951 until his retirement in 1983 he was an employee of the Johann Sebastian Bach Institute in Göttingen, West Germany, from 1962 to 1981 its deputy director.
He was a principal editor of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, a project which was divided between the Johann Sebastian Bach Institute and the Bach-Archiv Leipzig in East Germany.
Dürr received honorary doctorates of music from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,[2] the University of Oxford and Baldwin–Wallace College in Ohio.
[4] Dürr wrote standard works on the Bach cantatas (1971) and on The Well-Tempered Clavier, which are of interest not only to specialists, but also to the general public.
[6] The musicologist John Butt remarked: If one had to single out the scholar who has done most to establish the new chronology of Bach's vocal works and who appears most often as an editor within the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, this would surely have to be Dürr.