The ' Cello Suites Were Written by Mrs. NOT Mr. Bach.

[Stanfordian]

"Only" ?

Is that because someone who plays the cello says ?
Or because we all know it to be 'true' ?

So tell me who is this other genius that just happened to be around writing masterworks? If I was to say Robert Schumann's works were really written by Clara just think how hard that is to prove.

[Stanfordian]

Not exactly a reasoned argument there. As I understand it the only one of the Suites to still be found in JSB's hand is the ornamented transcription of the 5th (for lute). Even that could just possibly have been an arrangement of a work by someone other than JSB himself. Think I'll give Anner Bylsma's arrangements for violoncello piccolo of BWV 1003, 1006 and 1013 a spin after Rob Cowan's programme. They are stylistically so very different from/to/than/against* BWV 1007 to 1012.

* "different against" was apparently briefly in vogue during the 17th Century.

It's not supposed to be a reasoned argument. So tell me who is this other genius that just happened to be around writing masterworks?

[MrGongGong]

So tell me who is this other genius that just happened to be around writing masterworks?

"Genius" & "Masterworks" ?

(Don't get me wrong, Bach was/is a wonderful composer)

[Mary Chambers]

I then found myself watching the Who Killed the Princes in the Tower programme, the tone of rhetorical, tendentious conjecture flowed seamlessly from one to the other.

That's what I felt.

[Bryn]

So tell me who is this other genius that just happened to be around writing masterworks? If I was to say Robert Schumann's works were really written by Clara just think how hard that is to prove.

Hmm, I thought that was just what your man Jarvis was trying to sort out, and had suggested AMB as the likely candidate. Still, she couldn't have been a genius, could she? The last thing JSB would have been looking for in a replacement life partner was some one of similar intellectual capacity to him, after all.

[doversoul1]

- grateful thanks to ahinton for posting the link to the Ruth Tatlow article, which might have saved me the bother. No wonder they gave her such short shrift.

Thanks from me too, and now I am glad I watched the programme, or I wouldn’t have believed Ruth Talow’s article, as the programme was just so unbelievably inane. .

The idea of Anna Magdalena as a composer appeals to a modern sense of gender equality and to the widespread desire to raise the status of misrepresented women of the past (RT p2)

I felt this was oozing out from the programme.

Just in case, for those who missed the link:

http://www.bachnetwork.co.uk/ub10/tatlow-pre-release.pdf

I find it rather depressing to think that this was offered by BBC4.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

i found the programme interesting and, from time to time, thought-provoking. I had to keep telling myself how much people believe what they want to believe, and then seek out arguments to back this. However, this works both ways.

The thing that has interested me for a long time is the apparent neglect of Anna Magdelena by the Bach children after her husband's death. Perhaps the children of Maria Barbara would have had less sympathy for their step-mother, but surely there was a modicum of humanity amongst her own children?

[Flosshilde]

Only J.S. Bach could have written his cello sonatas.

That is, of course, absolutely true. But I thought the discussion was about whether they are 'his' cello sonatas, or, indeed, suites.

[Nick Armstrong]

Just watching this. It is a load of conjectural hogwash isn't it?!

"...so she may well have committed suicide" ...

And the Tatlow article provides interesting and mildly shocking... counterpoint. That grossly misleading section in the documentary about being banned from the Leipzig Archiv is disreputable programme-making; and there are all the hallmarks of desperate attempts to forge a silk purse from a sow's ear. The loaded but ultimately meaningless phrases ("so it now seems possible that..." ..."this has huge implications"....); the stitching together of lots of disparate comments and clips and scattergun subjects (cello suites, Jarvis's dad was a copper, the first Mrs Bach might have committed suicide, 'we were banned from the Archive', etc etc) - as well as the slightly bewildering criss-crossing of the planet (what did the grinning Aussie goon in the room full of fine art add?!) plus some wildly differing soundlevels.

The only reasonably satisfying contribution came from Ruth Tatlow (and credit to Jarvis, I agree, for getting her involved - although her input seemed to be set up just for Jarvis to attempt to knock down); the linguistic implications of the words 'écrite', 'composée' etc were interesting. And there were other pockets of interest - I didn't know about the five missing bars from an early version of the Prelude No 1 from 'the 48'...; the facial reconstruction; John Butt talking about the instrument for which the "Cello" suites were written.

But by the end, I reached the position of basically not crediting a word said by the buffoon with the bouffant hair and the bowtie.

I wonder if Ms Beamish (and BBC4) are regretting having anything to do with this tosh.

[BBMmk2]

The BBC probably wouldn't, if it were right in front of them, Cali!

[ahinton]

Just watching this. It is a load of conjectural hogwash isn't it?!

I think that it would be hard to argue that such is the principal substance of the programme.

"...so she may well have committed suicide" ...

As in the old cliché "but for an accident of birth, I might have been the Prince of Wales"...

And the Tatlow article provides interesting and mildly shocking... counterpoint.

Not entirely inapposite in a programme about JSB, one might argue...

That grossly misleading section in the documentary about being banned from the Leipzig Archiv is disreputable programme-making

Yes; sometimes statisitcs are prefarable to damn' lies...

and there are all the hallmarks of desperate attempts to forge a silk purse from a sow's ear.

Well, a "pig's ear" certainly crossed my mind on a few occasions when watching, certainly...

The loaded but ultimately meaningless phrases ("so it now seems possible that..." ..."this has huge implications"....); the stitching together of lots of disparate comments and clips and scattergun subjects (cello suites, Jarvis's dad was a copper, the first Mrs Bach might have committed suicide, 'we were banned from the Archive', etc etc) - as well as the slightly bewildering criss-crossing of the planet (what did the grinning Aussie goon in the room full of fine art add?!) plus some wildly differing soundlevels.

Quite - not to mention some poorly edited music extracts with beginnings of phrases carelessly clipped off.

The only reasonably satisfying contribution came from Ruth Tatlow (and credit to Jarvis, I agree, for getting her involved - although her input seemed to be set up just for Jarvis to attempt to knock down); the linguistic implications of the words 'écrite', 'composée' etc were interesting. And there were other pockets of interest - I didn't know about the five missing bars from an early version of the Prelude No 1 from 'the 48'...; the facial reconstruction; John Butt talking about the instrument for which the "Cello" suites were written.

Indeed - and Butt is undoubtedly a real Bach scholar!

But by the end, I reached the position of basically not crediting a word said by the buffoon with the bouffant hair and the bowtie.

It didn't take me that long, try as I might...

I wonder if Ms Beamish (and BBC4) are regretting having anything to do with this tosh.

I don't know. Sally Beamish is a composer to be reckoned with (and doesn't pass her work off under the name of some bloke!), but I have to admit that I would not have expected so much apparent special pleading from someone whose music displays such consistent integrity.

[Nick Armstrong]

Goodness I have never felt so exhaustingly... errr... exhaustively quoted!

[ahinton]

Goodness I have never felt so exhaustingly... errr... exhaustively quoted!

"Ca-ca-Caliban..."...

[ahinton]

One of Beamish's voice-overs

Equal Voice-overs, peut-être?...

stated that it was Jarvis himself who insisted that she get the views of Ruth Tatlow - which I think was the most respectable contribution to the programme he made.

Arguably the only one...

So much else was surmise and conjecture ("it could have been", "it might well have been") - leading to the suggestion that Maria Barbara committed suicide because of her husband's infidelity. The evidence being that, as there is no evidence anything could have happened - Jarvis has missed a trick: why not have JS and Anna Magdalena murdering Maria Barbara? There's a three-week ITV miniseries starring Martin Clunes there - with Daniel Radcliffe as the young constable who defies the orders of his superiors to investigate this suspicious death in the household of a man with a history of violence and a prison record!)

I'm surprised that there hasn't already been a Miss Marple on this - or perhaps a Morse, using a fugue derived from Barrington Pheloung's Morse-code inspired beeps from the sig music for that series; that said, perhaps a recently discovered Sherlock Holmes tale might have been at least a little closer chronologically to the circumstances. Crime passionnel de Saint-Jean, anyone?

What happened to the portrait of Anna Magdalena after her death? We don't know (repeated three times) - so let's suggest that the family destroyed it - and, if they destroyed it, they must have really hated her, so that's evidence that she wrote the 'cello suites

Hmmm - evidence that another Scottish researcher of my acquaintance, namely Sorley Hamish, could - had he been invited to do so - have discounted by providing proof that the portrait was not in fact destroyed as such but buried under what is now a car park in Lübeck. Just think about it; resentful and perhaps jealous Bach family members remove AM's portrait from history purely in order to avoid the risk that JSB's international reputation (which he had not in any case acquired during his lifetime) might one day be damaged by an entirely unrelated "discovery" that he had fraudulently passed off his second wife's work as his own. It doesn't quite add up, does it?...

Bach's daughter Catharina Dorothea must have hated having to call AM "mother" (evidence for this?) becuase she was 15 and AM was only a few years older, and you know what 15-year-olds are like. Any evidence for this conjecture? Nothing given in the programme - but Jarvis had previously (and rightly) been very pleased with himself for discovering evidence to show that Anna Magdalena had been a "member" of the Bach household since she was 12 (and Catharina 7) - the children would have known her and grown up with her; the equally evidence-lacking conjecture could be formed that the two were excellent friends and that Catharina "must/might/could have" gone frequently throughout her childhood to get comfort from AM when her father's grumpy moods (which JEGger's BBC4 documentary last year "proved"!) upset her.

...and when Bach's first wife was still alive; hmmm. And in any case couldn't those "grumpy moods" on JSB's part be understood in the context of his likely fear of the consequences of disloyalty from members of his household who were savvy enough to know that he was passing off AM's work as his own?

What I missed was forensic evidence of Anna Magdalena's handwriting (in the sort of detail that Bach's "signature" was illustrated) - what exactly are those "fingerprints" that show that she is the writer (to use a word that Jarvis also tripped over) - that would have been a fascinating documentary in itself

Yes, but the fingerpint expert helpfully declared her hand at the outset by claiming that she had no expertise as a musician and therefore came to the exercise without preconceptions, which was fine as far as it went, but it also meant that the disproportionate amount of time devoted to her part in it all gave a kind of prominence to someone who had neither hope nor wish nor ability to use her ears to help enable her to form educated conclusions as to who might have composed what.

A pity; I so enjoyed his readings of the William books ...

Or Wilhelm Friedemann, to give him his full name...

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

If Anna Magdelena had been what is being suggested, then why did she not complete The Art of Fugue?