Espousing a belief in Mrs. Bach

WERE Bach’s famous cello suites and other works really written by his second wife, Anna Magdalena? That’s what Martin Jarvis, a professor at the Charles Darwin University school of music in Darwin, Australia, believes. Using police forensic science techniques and some internal musical evidence, Jarvis claims that Anna Magdalena was the composer of the six suites, not merely the copyist, as traditionally believed.

Jarvis points to “what he regards as the uniquely symmetrical nature of the work, and to the fact that the manuscripts included many corrections and adjustments, suggesting that they were original composing scores,” according to a recent account published in the British newspaper the Telegraph. He believes that Anna Magdalena also composed the C-major Prelude of the Well-Tempered Klavier, Book I, and part of the aria from the “Goldberg Variations.” She also, he asserts, was part of the Bach household earlier than believed.

Not everyone is buying his arguments.

“If this is a working copy, where she’s changing things as she’s going, she’s one of the cleanest working composers I’ve ever seen,” says cellist Matt Haimovitz, who played the suites in Los Angeles in 2002. “There are hardly any changes in the manuscript.”

Besides, Anna Magdalena “copied a lot of his music,” Haimovitz says. “Joseph Kellner, another student of Bach’s, wrote another copy, one that’s different from hers. The two versions are different enough that most musicologists agree they’re based on different sources.”

As for the symmetries, “that doesn’t ring right to me,” he says. “Johann Sebastian wrote many series of pieces where the number 6 keeps coming up -- the keyboard partitas, the violin sonatas and partitas, the cello suites. Each follows a certain kind of symmetry. You’d have to question the partitas and sonatas written in the same period.”

At any rate, “if Anna Magdalena wrote this, it doesn’t change my opinion. It’s still some of the greatest music ever written.”

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Chris Pasles