A Partita in D minor, numbered BWV 1178, and Partita in G minor, BWV 1179, were finally attributed to the renowned composer after more than 30 years of research, Peter Wollny, director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, revealed during a press conference.
The musicologist himself discovered these manuscripts from the period at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels in 1992.
These two works, belonging to a prevalent musical genre of the time, exhibited “stylistic characteristics found in Bach’s works from that period but not in any other composer,” Wollny explained, adding that they were neither dated nor signed.
For three decades, the musicologist searched for “the missing piece to attribute these compositions,” specifically “the identification of the copyist,” he explained.
The creation of a research portal on the composer, undertaken by the Saxon Academy of Sciences, allowed the certainty that the copies found in Brussels were indeed made around 1705 by Salomon Günther John, a student of Bach.
According to Peter Wollny, Bach composed these pieces roughly in the same year in Arnstadt, Thuringia, where he was an early-career organist at just 18 years old.
The two works were publicly presented for the first time by Dutch organist Ton Koopman, president of the Archive, at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, in the presence of State Secretary for Culture Wolfram Weimer.
The German official highlighted the event as a “world sensation” and a “great moment for the music world.”
