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The Search for Mrs. Bach

In 2006, Martin Jarvis, a Welsh-born musician who teaches at Charles Darwin University, in Australia, aired a startling theory about Johann Sebastian Bach, the undisputed arch-magus of the Western classical tradition. Jarvis proposed that Bach’s six suites for solo cello—of which Pablo Casals once said, “They are the very essence of Bach, and Bach is the essence of music”—are, in fact, the work of Anna Magdalena Bach, the composer’s second wife. In 2011, Jarvis elaborated his ideas in a book entitled “Written by Mrs Bach”; he is now presenting them in the form of a documentary film, also titled “Written by Mrs Bach.” Various publications, including theWashington_Post_,U.S.A Today, and the Web siteJezebel, have propagated Jarvis’s views. “Obviously, Bach is not a complete fraud,” Isha Aran wrote on Jezebel, conceding that Bach’s résumé remains an impressive one even without the cello suites.

This is not the first time that doubts have surfaced about famous works in the Bach catalogue. For example, the attribution of theToccata and Fugue in D Minor,which will reverberate in many a haunted house this Halloween, has been repeatedly questioned, with many scholars detecting features that are atypical of Bach’s style. Nowhere else in his organ music does Bach make prominent use of octave doubling, as in theopening measuresofthe Toccata: it’s a showy, brazen gesture that suggests a quite different creative personality from the one who produced theSt. Matthew Passion. The formidable Bach scholar Christoph Wolff argues, however, that such flamboyance could be the product of a “youthful and unrestrained” composer—bad-boy Bach, as it were. The debate remains unresolved.

With that and other controversies in mind, I wanted to give Jarvis’s provocative thesis a fair hearing. Anna Magdalena Bach was a well-trained musician, a singer of substantial gifts who, as a 1790 source notes, gave up her career for the sake of her husband. She married him in 1721, when she was twenty, and bore him thirteen children, seven of whom died young. It may well be that she had influence on Bach’s later period; certainly, she served him assiduously as a copyist. As the musicologist Yo Tomitapoints out,in some manuscripts the handwriting of husband and wife is intertwined, “in such a manner that they must surely have discussed something about the copies they were making together.”

There is, however, no evidence that Anna Magdalena composed music, nor that she studied a string instrument. How, then, did Jarvis become convinced that she wrote the cello suites? He reports that when he was studying the works in his youth he had the nagging sense that they differed from other music by Bach. Later, he fixated on a phrase that appears in the lower-right-hand corner of the title page of Anna Magdalena’s copy of the suites, one of two principal manuscripts through which the pieces have come down to us. “Ecrite par Madame Bachen, Son Epouse,” it says. (The aigu accents are missing.) Here, Jarvissays,was the “coup de grâce of my prolonged and intensive research”: the phrase “literally translates as ‘Written by Mrs Bach, his wife’ –that is to say, composed by Anna Magdalena.”

This is suggestive stuff. But when you look at the manuscript itself you see something quite different. (There is ascanin the digital archive of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.) The cello suites are found together with a copy of the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin; thetitle pageforthe collection was written out by Georg Heinrich Ludwig Schwanberg, a Bach pupil. It says: “Pars1. Violino Solo Senza Basso composée par Sr. Jean Seb. Bach. Pars 2. Violoncello Solo Senza Basso composée par Sr. J. S. Bach. Maitre de la Chapelle et Directeur de la Musique a Leipsic.” Only then, in the lower corner, do we see “ecrite par Madame Bachen.” The not insignificant detail that the cello suites are described as being “composed by Sr. J. S. Bach” is missing from Jarvis’s popular expositions of his theory, and, by extension, from the media coverage, which has tended to ignore Bach scholars and jump to sensational conclusions (“Bach Didn’t Write His Greatest Works”).Jarvis’s 2007 thesis is abit more judicious, though still perplexing.

There is a further problem. If, as Jarvis proposes, “ecrite” really means “composed” (and, presumably, “composée” means something else), wouldn’t it follow that Anna Magdalena Bach should also be considered the true author of the Sonatas and Partitas? The positioning of the text in the corner of the page suggests that it applies to both pieces. Yet, as Jarvis does not deny, amanuscriptof the Sonatas and Partitas in Bach’s own hand exists. Indeed, Jarvis says that his doubts about the authorship of the cello suites arose when he perceived “vast differences” between these works and the ones for solo violin. The suites didn’t strike him as “musically mature,” he said inoneinterview. In all, Jarvis’s reading of this title page is irrational in the extreme. Looked at upside down or sideways, it still says the same thing: the Sonatas and Partitas and the suites were composed by Bach and copied by his wife.

Jarvis went about his project with noble intentions. He declares, rightly, that women have been suffering for centuries under the misogynistic assumption that composition belongs exclusively to the male gender. He mentions the cases of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, who exhibited considerable talent but was discouraged by her father and brother; and of Alma Schindler, who was ordered to stop writing music by her first husband, Gustav Mahler. Closer to our own time, the pianist Johana Harris played a crucial role in the development of Roy Harris, one of the leading American composers of the mid-twentieth century.

That said, no one is well served by wild speculation that distorts the historical record—or, for that matter, ascribes a piece of music to a woman on the grounds that it lacks maturity. And while classical music displays an excruciating gender imbalance—arecent studyby Ricky O’Bannon found that 1.8 percent of works programmed by leading American orchestras in the 2014-15 season were by women—the most efficient way to address that imbalance would be to commit more resources to contemporary music. As Amy Beth Kirsten hassaid, "Perhaps if we are going to fixate on equality in programming it should be to balance out the division between living composers and dead ones.” A classical-music world dominated by the past will, inevitably, be one dominated by men. Instead of trying to invent a female Bach in prior centuries, let’s seek her in the present.