Peter Phillips

Our hero worship of Bach is to blame for rubbish like ‘Written By Mrs Bach’

‘Professor’ Martin Jarvis’s thesis that the wife of J.S. Bach wrote the cello suites is obviously rubbish — but so is the idea that Bach was a flawless genius

My impression that Bach has come to rival Shakespeare as a flawless reference point in the cultural life of the nation has recently received some further corroboration. Remember the fuss that some academics, in the hope of recognition, created around the authorship of the bard’s works and where it got them? I don’t know how far the non-specialist public has been swayed by the BBC4 television programme entitled Written By Mrs Bach, but the Earl of Oxford came to mind as I watched it. The claims in the programme are so obviously rubbish that I would have thought the average film company might have thought twice about filming it, let alone the BBC airing it. But if it hadn’t been Bach in question no one would have taken it up. Who cares who wrote Haydn’s piano trios?

The film was the result of an obsession that an Australian academic, Martin Jarvis, developed some years ago about the manuscript of Bach’s cello suites. On a technicality about the meaning of an 18th-century French word used by a German-speaking woman (Anna Magdalena Bach), he bases a whole rigmarole of sensational extrapolations about Bach, which include suicide, destruction of property and extramarital relations, as well as the idea that Anna Magdalena must have written these suites. Perhaps the real traction of Jarvis’s arguments — his claim to be a ‘professor’, as he is called rather too often in his film, has been called into question — is bound up in something much more tediously modern and self-aggrandising than pure research. At one point the narrator says, ‘J.S. Bach is big business and big business means big money, and that means vested interest. Allegedly, genuine Bach documents have huge value to certain people and organisations. Martin’s research could seriously devalue this specialist marketplace. The very authenticity of some Bach signatures may now be called into question.

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