275 Years After Bach's Death, New Music

A musicologist's hunch three decades ago has led to the rediscovery of two previously unknown works by legendary composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Peter Wollny, now head of the Bach Archive Leipzig, stumbled upon the unsigned organ manuscripts at the Royal Library of Belgium while a Harvard graduate student in 1992 and suspected they might be the work of Bach. However, it took 33 years of research and analysis, including handwriting comparisons and archival sleuthing, to confirm his suspicions and convince other experts, reports the New York Times.

One problem was that the manuscripts, carrying no signatures or dates, weren't written in Bach's hand. A key breakthrough came when a colleague found that the manuscripts' handwriting matched that of Salomon Günther John, who claimed to have been a student of Bach's. Wollny concluded John had copied the works in 1705, when Bach was about 20. He says Bach likely composed the pieces—now officially cataloged as the Ciacona in D minor (BWV 1178) and the Ciacona in G minor (BWV 1179)—when he was a teenager working as an organist in Arnstadt, Germany.

Wollny says they offer a rare glimpse into Bach's early creative development. "Even when he was 17 or 18, every piece he composed is individual and tries to do something new," he says. The pieces were performed for the first time since the discovery this week at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach once worked, by Dutch conductor and organist Ton Koopman. "When I played them through, I said—[Wollny] is completely right," Koopman tells the Times, noting the "daring music" could only come from "a great composer." "They are quite identifiable with Bach's early style," adds Bach specialist Angela Hewitt, per the Guardian. "The imagination, grandeur, and sheer joy in playing are all there in abundance."