‘An inner duty’: the 35-year quest to bring Bach’s lost organ works to lightNEWS | 24 November 2025The best fictional detectives are famed for their intuition, an ability to spot some seemingly ineffable discrepancy. Peter Wollny, the musicologist behind last week’s “world sensational” revelation of two previously unknown works by Johann Sebastian Bach, had a funny feeling when he chanced upon two intriguing sheets of music in a dusty library in 1992.
His equivalent of the Columbo turn, from mere hunch to unravelling a secret, would take up half his life.
Wollny, now 65 and the director of Leipzig’s Bach archive, was a graduate student at Harvard University when his PhD research took him to the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels, where he came across two unattributed scores from the 18th century.
“I have to confess that I didn’t even think these were works by Bach at the time,” Wollny said this week, days after the two pieces – Chaconne in D minor BWV 1178 and Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179 – were performed at Leipzig’s St Thomas church for the first time.
“The handwriting of the score just fascinated me, and I had this vague feeling that these bits of paper could be interesting some day. So I made photocopies and created a file that I dragged around with me for 30 years.”
Despite having dedicated his life to researching the life and music of the greatest composers of the baroque era, he said he did not seriously dare consider that the works could be by the man himself until about two or three years ago.
Born in Issum in North Rhine-Westphalia, Wollny studied musicology, art history and German studies at the University of Cologne before embarking on his Harvard PhD, on the music of Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. He joined the Bach archive in Leipzig as a researcher after gaining his doctorate in 1993 and has been its director since 2014.
1:01 Chaconne in D Minor: two long-lost organ pieces by Bach performed for first time in 300 years
His colleague and co-researcher Bernd Koska said: “Peter Wollny is someone who tends to weigh things up in his mind very thoroughly before he reaches a conclusion. That’s the way he works.”
To the eyes of a trained musicologist, the two works were unusual from the outset. Both are chaconnes, originally a form of Spanish dance that became stylised into its own musical art form around the year 1700. Their distinguishing feature is a short bass line that is repeated throughout the work, known as an ostinato.
In almost all chaconnes for organ from the same period, each ostinato bass motif has a set length of six, seven or eight bars – never longer, never shorter. Yet in the Chaconne in D Minor that Wollny had found in Brussels, the composer had set off with a seven-bar ostinato bass and then decided to stretch the same motif to eight bars, then 12 and then 16.
The anonymous composer had made other bold choices, such as repeating the bass melody in a higher register with a one-bar delay, creating a canon. They had also turned the ostinato bass into a four-part fugue, a musical tool used to weave a single theme into the broader musical tapestry.
View image in fullscreen A page from the manuscript of Bach’s Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179. Photograph: Royal Library of Belgium/AFP/Getty Images
Wollny describes these idiosyncratic touches as the musical equivalent of hapax legomena – words that only appear once in a body of text. “These works didn’t fit into the scheme of mainstream composition around the year 1703 at all,” he said.
The only other known composition from this early period to use similarly bold techniques was Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor BWV 582.
In-depth study of Bach, who was famous for incorporating elements that function like mathematical riddles and puzzles into his music, has a notoriety for yielding obsessions. There are sinister Bach maniacs in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac films and in novels of the recent Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai. In the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter chews off a prison guard’s face to the strains of the Goldberg Variations.
“If you listen to a lot of Bach, he becomes a part of you,” said John Butt, a professor of music at Glasgow University. “Throughout history there have been a lot of musicologists who believed they had a more personal relationship with his works than everybody else.”
As a result, attempts to authenticate or date works by Bach on the basis of the musical stylistics alone had a patchy track record, he said. “There have been a lot of red faces.”
Wollny, however, had another special skill that helped his research. “I want to be careful how it put this,” he said. “But it could be the case that I have a talent for recognising handwriting features.”
After discovering the two anonymous works in Brussels, he felt an “inner duty” to identify their author, spending several hours studying the unique traits of the lines on paper. “You start by studying the treble and bass clef, because they contain a lot of individuality,” he said.
He noticed that the person who had written the documents had a unique way of drawing the C clef at the start of a staff, with a line at the bottom that curled backwards in a manner not dissimilar to the C clef in Bach’s musical notations. “It’s fairly complicated, you need about 10 strokes to get it right,” Wollny said.
View image in fullscreen A detail of Bach’s Wedding Quodlibet, showing his distinctive C clef in the top left. Photograph: The Bach Archive Leipzig/Manfred Gorke Collection
Having already studied Bach’s handwriting in depth, however, he knew that the two Brussels scores couldn’t have been written by the composer personally. Before the widespread and affordable use of mechanical reproduction, composers commonly had students who copied their works – either for the practical purpose of dissemination or, if the composer was already famous, to sell copies for commercial gain.
If a doctor makes a mistake it’s not such a big deal. But if I make an error it will sit in books for hundreds of years Peter Wollny
In Bach’s case, these “copyists” or their parents would have paid the composer to work for him rather than vice versa – often transcribing his original manuscripts in German organ tablature into scores with notes – to learn through the act of transcription.
Over the years, Wollny found 20 more documents that matched the handwriting of the original document in archives in Leipzig, Berlin and Winterthur, in Switzerland, covering the years 1705 to 1715. If the two chaconnes only had words on the title pages, others came with lyrics and introductory texts. “A profile started to emerge. I developed an idea of the copyist’s professional duties and interests,” Wollny said.
View image in fullscreen A statue of Bach outside St Thomas church in Leipzig. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt/The Guardian
But he still didn’t have the name. He erroneously assumed for years that the score had been written by a cousin of Bach. In 2012, however, Wollny’s colleague Koska discovered a 1727 letter in which a certain Salomon Günther John applied for a job as organist at a church in Schleiz, Thuringia.
Not only did the handwriting match that of the documents in Wollny’s file but the letter also stated that John had learned his instrument under an organist in Arnstadt, the small town where Bach had taken his first job as an organ teacher. “Suddenly, things started to click together,” Koska said.
What if the two works were composed by the young student rather than his more famous teacher? The researchers discounted this theory because there were too many small mistakes in the notation, such as incorrect octave layers.
Still, Wollny wasn’t 100% sure. “I asked myself: do I only see Bach behind this music because I want to, or is it really true? If a doctor makes a mistake it’s not such a big deal. But as a musicologist, if I make an error it will sit in books in libraries for hundreds of years.”
By chance, the final piece of the puzzle emerged from the archives in 2023. A court document written by John dated 1716 from a feudal estate in Oppurg, Thuringia, lost during the second world war and now cleaned up and made publicly accessible, matched the handwriting of the Brussels chaconnes with absolute certainty.
Wollny says he doesn’t remember how he celebrated the breakthrough. “I am not someone to punch the air in delight. I just sat there with a grin and contentedly turned the pages,” he said.
“Perhaps artificial intelligence means that what I spent 35 years on will in the future be done in a couple of days or hours. Maybe it will be easier and give us even more certainty. But that’s OK.”Author: Philip Oltermann. Source
