‘Domestic Duty’: The 35-Year Quest to Bring Light to Bach’s Lost Works | JS Bach

TThe best fictional detectives are famous for their intuition, their ability to spot some seemingly indescribable contradiction. Peter Wolney, the musicologist behind last week’s “globally sensational” unveiling of two little-known works by Johann Sebastian Bach, had a funny feeling when he came across two interesting pieces of music in a dusty bookshop in 1992.

The equivalent of Columbo’s transformation, from a mere hunch to the revelation of a secret, would take half his life.

Wolny, now 65 and director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, was a graduate student at Harvard when his doctoral research led him to the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels, where he found two unattributed 18th-century pieces.

“I have to admit that I didn’t even think these were works by Bach at the time,” Wolny said this week, days after the two pieces — Chaconne in D minor BWV 1178 and Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179 — were performed in Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church for the first time.

“I was blown away by the handwriting of the score, and I had a vague feeling that these pieces of paper could one day be interesting. So I made copies and created a file that I dragged with me for 30 years.”

Although he devoted his life to researching the lives and music of the greatest composers of the Baroque era, he said he did not seriously dare to consider that the works could be composed by the man himself until about two or three years ago.

Born in Isum in North Rhine-Westphalia, Wolny studied musicology, art history and German studies at the University of Cologne before embarking on a doctorate at Harvard University, on the music of Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. He joined the Bach Archive in Leipzig as a researcher after obtaining his doctorate in 1993, and has been its director since 2014.

His colleague and co-researcher Bernd Koska said: “Peter Wolny is someone who tends to evaluate things in his mind very carefully before he comes to a conclusion. That’s the way he works.”

In the eyes of a trained musicologist, the two works were unusual from the start. Both are chacon, originally a Spanish dance form that became stylized into its own musical art form around 1700. Their distinguishing feature is a short bass line that is repeated throughout the work, known as an ostinato.

In almost all organ shacones of the same period, each bass ostinato figure is six, seven, or eight bars long – never longer and never shorter. However, in the Chaconne in D Minor that Woolney found in Brussels, the composer set out with a seven-bar bass ostinato and then decided to extend the same form to eight bars, then 12, then 16.

The unknown composer made other bold choices, such as repeating the bass melody in a higher register with a one-bar delay, creating a canon. They also transformed the bass ostinato into a four-part fugue, a musical instrument used to weave one theme into the broader musical fabric.

Woolney describes these distinctive touches as the musical equivalent of music hapax Legumina – Words that appear only once in the text. “These works did not fit into the prevailing authorship scheme of 1703 at all,” he said.

The only other known composition from this early period that used similar bold techniques was Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor BWV 582.

The in-depth study of Bach, who was famous for incorporating elements that function like mathematical puzzles and mysteries into his music, has a reputation for provoking obsessions. There are evil madmen from Bach in the erotic films of Lars von Trier and in the novels of recent Nobel laureate Laszlo Krasznahorkai. In the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter chews off a prison guard’s face to the sound of the Goldberg Variations.

“If you listen to a lot of Bach, it becomes part of you,” said John Butt, a professor of music at the University of Glasgow. “Throughout history, there have been many musicologists who believed they had a more personal connection with his works than anyone else.”

As a result, he said, attempts to validate or date Bach’s works on the basis of musical style alone have had an incomplete record. “There were a lot of red faces.”

However, Woolney had another special skill that helped him in his research. “I want to be careful how I phrase this,” he said. “But I may have a knack for recognizing features of handwriting.”

After discovering the two anonymous works in Brussels, he felt an “inner duty” to determine the identity of their author, so he spent many hours studying the unique features of the lines on the paper. “You have to start by studying the treble clef and the bass, because they have a lot of uniqueness,” he said.

Note that the person who wrote the documents had a unique way of drawing the key of C at the beginning of the staff, with a line at the bottom curling back in a manner not unlike the key of C in Bach’s sheet music. “It’s kind of complicated, you need about 10 strokes to be able to do it right,” Woolney said.

However, after studying Bach’s handwriting in depth, he knew that the two Brussels pieces could not have been personally written by the composer. Before the widespread and affordable use of mechanical reproduction, composers typically had students copy their works—either for the practical purpose of publication, or, if the composer was already famous, to sell copies for commercial gain.

In Bach’s case, these ‘copyists’ or their fathers paid the composer to work with him rather than the other way around – often transcribing his original manuscripts on German organ board into pieces of music with notes – to learn through the process of copying.

Over the years, Wollny found 20 other documents matching the handwriting of the original in the archives of Leipzig, Berlin and Winterthur in Switzerland, covering the years 1705 to 1715. If the two shacontes only contain words on the title pages, others come with lyrics and introductory texts. “The resume started coming in,” Woolney said, “and I got an idea of ​​the transcriber’s duties and professional interests.”

But it still doesn’t have the name. It had been wrongly assumed for years that the score was written by Bach’s cousin. However, in 2012, Wolny’s colleague Koska discovered a letter dating back to 1727, in which a person named Salomon Gunther John applied for a job as organist at a church in Schles, Thuringia.

Not only did the handwriting match the documents in Wolny’s file, but the letter also stated that John had learned to play his instrument from an organist in Arnstadt, the small town where Bach took his first job as an organ teacher. “All of a sudden, things started coming together,” Koska said.

What if both works were written by the young student and not his more famous professor? Researchers have ruled out this theory because there are many small errors in the notation, such as incorrect octave pitches.

However, Woolney wasn’t 100% sure. “I asked myself: Do I see Bach behind this music just because I want to, or is this really true? If a doctor makes a mistake, it’s no big deal. But as a musicologist, if I make a mistake, that mistake will remain in library books for hundreds of years.”

Serendipitously, the final piece of the puzzle emerged from the archives in 2023. A court document written by John dating from 1716 from a feudal estate in Auborg, Thuringia, lost during World War II and now cleaned up and made available to the public, matched the handwriting of the shaconates of Brussels with absolute certainty.

Woolney says he doesn’t remember how he celebrated the milestone. He said: “I am not someone who breathes joy into the air. I sat there smiling and turned the pages contentedly.”

“Maybe AI will mean that what you spent 35 years on will be done in the future in a few days or hours. Maybe it will be easier and give us more certainty. But that’s okay.”