Lost Bach Pieces Performed For First Time In 320 Years: ‘Great Moment For The World Of Music’

Lost Bach Pieces Performed For First Time In 320 Years: ‘Great Moment For The World Of Music’

Two musical pieces written by Johann Sebastian Bach were recently performed for the first time ever, more than 300 years after they were composed.

Both written for the organ, they are believed to date from the great composer’s very early career, when he worked as a organ tutor in Thuringia.

Germany’s Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer called the discovery of the two pieces a “great moment for the world of music.”

Both pieces were unsigned and undated when they were found in the 1990s by Mr. Peter Wollny, a Belgian Bach researcher working at the Royal Library in Brussels. Entitled Chaconne in D minor and Chaconne in G minor, Wollny wasn’t sure who had written them, but suspected they might have been Bach’s.

That hunch needed 30 years to be realized, as the archivist, now director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, wanted to absolutely sure of it.

“Stylistically, the works also contain features that can be found in Bach’s works from this period, but not in those of any other composer,” Wollny told the BBC, adding he was “99.99% sure that Bach had written the two pieces.”

Given the Bach catalogue identification tags BWV 1178 and BWV 1179, they were played for the first time in 320 years by Dutch organist Ton Koopman at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig where Bach worked for 27 years as a cantor. Koopman, as one might imagine, said he was proud to be the first person to play them, and described them as being of “of a very high quality” and ideal for both large church organs and small ones.

A Mount Rushmore composer without a shadow of a doubt, Bach is generally considered to have stood at the pinnacle of his art, with the senior classical critic at the New York Times calling him the greatest. By 1802, there were already biographies of Bach made, and manuscripts of his works being bought at huge expense. In 1850, the first of several Bach societies was organized in Leipzig.

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Claude Debussy described Bach as “a benevolent God” to whom musicians should pray before setting to work. Not one, nor two, but three Bach pieces were included on the NASA Voyager’s Golden Record.

A recent concert in Austria saw a 200-year-old Mozart piece performed for the first time when it too was discovered by an archivist under similar circumstances.

LISTEN to the piece below…