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

[ahinton]

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

That's a very good point, EA - the unanswerable question, indeed!

[vinteuil]

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

... but then why didn't JS Bach complete it? The last extant bit is in his handwriting, ie before his failing eyesight wd have made writing impossible for him, say 1748/1749. He had plenty of time to dictate an ending before he snuffed it...

[ahinton]

... but then why didn't JS Bach complete it? The last extant bit is in his handwriting, ie before his failing eyesight wd have made writing impossible for him, say 1748/1749. He had plenty of time to dictate an ending before he snuffed it...

Perhaps because the only person readily available to him to undertake that task was Anna Magdalena who might not, after all, have been capable of accomplishing it; whilst I'm sure that such an answer would go down like a lead balloon with Professor Jarvis and might risk damaging the fence upon which Sally Beamish sits, JSB did, after all, as you point out, have sufficient time to do just that...

[Richard Barrett]

"Genius" & "Masterworks" ?

It's as if there are two questions being discussed here. Firstly, did Anna Magdalena Bach compose the cello suites attributed to her husband? Probably not, on the strength of the evidence presented so far. The second, more hypothetical, question is: could anyone else ever have written those glorious pieces which it's self-evident could only have flowed from the pen of the most exalted genius in the whole of music history? And it seems with quite a few contributors to this thread that in answering the second question to their own satisfaction they think they have somehow answered the first.