NOTE: This article first appeared in National Review Online of 24 October 2014 (where it presently has more than 150 comments). Musicology Now is grateful for the kind permission to republish. See below, following the author credit, for other links concerning this “dustup.”
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| Anna Magdalena Bach |
A musicologist who posits that J.S.
Bach’s second wife was a homewrecker who drove his first wife to suicide
has become an improbable celebrity to feminists and international
media, but his theory is extremely tenuous and has no support from
experts in his field.
Martin Jarvis, a music professor in Australia’s northern territory,
has used handwriting evidence to deduce not only that the Bach family
was more troubled than history has previously known but that Anna
Magdalena Bach, the second wife of Johann Sebastian Bach, composed his
beloved
Cello Suites, as well as the aria from the
Goldberg Variations for keyboard and the first prelude from the collection known as
The Well-Tempered Clavier.
“My belief is that Anna composed the Cello Suites as a composition
student of J S Bach,” Jarvis, music professor and director of the
Confucius Institute at Charles Darwin University, tells
National Review Online. “She is therefore the principal composer but not necessarily without any of Bach’s input.”
Jarvis’s authorship
thesis has received media attention going back at least to 2006, but it is resurgent thanks to an upcoming documentary,
Written By Mrs Bach, on which he collaborated with the British composer
Sally Beamish and Arizona-based forensic document examiner
Heidi Harralson.
The film will be screened by the British Academy of Film and Television
Arts next week. Since the beginning of this week, Jarvis’s thesis has
received fully credulous treatment from the
Telegraph,
Jezebel,
The Washington Post,
USA Today, the
Daily Mail,
France Musique, and other media.
But there is no persuasive evidence for the theory, which rests on a
very subjective analysis of manuscripts that have long been recognized
as having been handwritten by Anna Magdalena Bach. In his subsequent
promotion of the thesis, Jarvis has presented no new evidence, though he
has
expanded his claims to include
accusations about the personal history
of the Bach family. These are purely conjectural and have no documented
support, even though the Bachs were a highly literate and musical
family, some of whose members left personal records.
Experts in the field have grown impatient with Jarvis’s claims.
“I am sorry you have to deal with this,” Harvard professor Christoph Wolff, one of the preeminent living Bach scholars, tells
National Review Online.
“I am sick and tired of this stupid thesis. When I served as director
of the Leipzig Bach Archive from 2001 to 2013, I and my colleagues there
extensively refuted the basic premises of the thesis, on grounds of
documents, manuscript sources, and musical grounds. There is not a shred
of evidence, but Jarvis doesn’t give up despite the fact that several
years ago, at a Bach conference in Oxford, a room full of serious Bach
scholars gave him an embarrassing showdown.”
Wolff is referring to a
2008 conference
during which Jarvis clashed with Yo Tomita, a music professor at
Queen’s University Belfast. The episode was recorded in the very cordial
and collegial minutes of the conference:
Yo Tomita had published ‘Anna Magdalena as Bach’s Copyist’ in
Understanding Bach 2 (2007), in response to the publicity afforded to
Martin Jarvis’s claims that Anna Magdalena had composed rather than
copied the Cello Suites. Since Jarvis was present and since the Dialogue
meeting had just heard his description of Forensic Document Examination
Techniques, Tomita used the opportunity to demonstrate the Dialogue
format at its best: incisive, good humoured, uncompromising, and
intellectually playful. Jarvis admitted that he felt like Galileo, on
trial whilst still believing passionately that another explanation lay
behind the calligraphic changes. Tomita responded deftly, and as the
conversation turned towards the incontrovertible evidence that there
were indeed women composers in the eighteenth century, the session ended
with magnanimity.
Jarvis has adopted the Galileo persona more fully since then, telling
numerous interviewers that he has become a “pariah” in the Bach
community. But he hints that he may just be getting started in
reassigning authorship of works usually attributed to the
Thuringian composer
who has been called “the immortal god of harmony,” “the beginning and
end of all music,” and “a benevolent god to which all musicians should
offer a prayer to defend themselves against mediocrity.” When asked for
the total number of J. S. Bach works he believes should be credited to
his second wife, Jarvis responds, “I cannot give you a full answer
because much research still needs to be undertaken.”
Tomita, an expert on the manuscript sources of Bach’s works, says
Jarvis’s problem is not that he has been shunned by Bach scholars but
that his evidence has been disproved by them.
“It seems that he examined neither the great corpus of Bach sources
nor the validity of methodology and research outcome by Dr Georg von
Dadelsen of The University of Tübingen and Dr Yoshitake Kobayashi of
Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Institut in Göttingen, Germany,” Tomita tells
National Review Online.
“They are revered Bach scholars who founded the new chronology of
Bach’s works through the identification of copyists, which took them and
their followers several decades to perfect. It is simply impossible for
a scholar who is so isolated in a corner of Australia (Darwin) where
there are no resources to carry out such an extensive research in less
than a decade.”
At the heart of Jarvis’s thesis is a comparison of documents regarded
as Bach’s autograph manuscripts and those regarded as Anna Magdalena’s
copies. Jarvis argues that errors, corrections, and the quality of the
writing in Anna’s copy of the
Cello Suites result from her
compositional process, rather than copying efforts. Bach married Anna
Magdalena Wilcke 17 months after the death of his first wife, Maria
Barbara Bach. Anna Magdalena is known to have worked as a singer and
musical copyist, though there is no record of her having composed
original music. In the course of their marriage, she is also known to
have done considerable copying work for Johann Sebastian, in addition to
bearing 13 children. (Maria Barbara had already given birth to seven
children, four of whom survived into adulthood and two of whom became
prominent musicians.)
In effect, Jarvis claims that the quality of the handwriting and
corrections shows that Anna was writing in a creative mode rather than
merely copying from Johann Sebastian’s own manuscript, and thus her copy
of the
Cello Suites should be considered her composing score rather than a copy.
Asked about the nebulousness of this claim, Jarvis expresses
confidence that a person’s frame of mind can be assessed clearly through
handwriting analysis centuries after the fact. “A significant amount
depends on if the copy is an attempt at simulation,” he tells NRO, “less
if it is an emulation and zero if the composer is copying her own work,
which is why the Cello Suite manuscript appears as if the composer
herself is rewriting her own music from a first draft of the works.”
Harralson, founder of Spectrum Forensic International and president
of the National Association of Document Examiners, seconds this view.
Anna Magdalena Bach’s writing in the manuscripts, she tells
National Review Online, is “not the manner of somebody copying or transcribing.” Although she was quoted in the
Telegraph
expressing a high degree of certainty that Anna was the composer,
Harralson is more guarded in speaking with NRO. “Within a reasonable
degree of scientific certainty, we can say that Anna Magdalena, not
Bach, is the person penning the documents,” she says. “It’s up to others
to say if this is the original or not.”
Harralson also points out that “Johann and Anna Magdalena have very
distinctive hands,” which seems to be at odds with a claim made by
Jarvis in a
2008 monograph, which asserts, “[T]he writing styles of Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena Bach are remarkably similar.”
In fact, it is not entirely clear how seriously anybody involved in
the Anna Magdalena authorship theory actually takes the theory. Speaking
with the
Telegraph, the composer Sally Beamish did not take a
firm stance on the authorship question but asserted that the theory,
according to arts correspondent Hannah Furness, “raised important
questions about female composers, and had huge implications that could
‘transform’ the confidence of young women hoping to make it today.”
Beamish did not respond to a request for comment from
National Review Online, but she told the
Telegraph,
“What I found fascinating is the questions it raises about the
assumptions we make: that music is always written by one person and all
the great masters were male by definition.”
The positioning of the Jarvis thesis as a step forward for feminism
is also strange, however, given that Jarvis has taken his theory to the
point of making claims about two women that would be considered libelous
if made against living persons.
“As I have said already, nothing is known directly of the situation
that led to Johann Sebastian marrying Anna Magdalena,” Jarvis
wrote in April.
Whether they were involved romantically before the death of Maria
Barbara or whether they became lovers after her untimely death is simply
unknown. It does appear, though, that there is a strong likelihood that
they were in some way involved prior to Maria Barbara’s death in 1720:
my own research has placed Anna Magdalena firmly in Johann Sebastian’s
life in 1720 – perhaps even living in the Bach household. Some
interesting questions arise. For example, did Anna Magdalena accompany
the Prince and his Kapellmeister Johann Sebastian Bach on the Prince’s
sojourn to Carlsbad in 1720? That was the year that Maria Barbara died
mysteriously. Given the very odd circumstances surrounding her death and
burial the question is: did Maria Barbara commit suicide?
Elsewhere, Jarvis claims that despite her clearly full schedule as a
mother and assistant, Anna had ample time for composition thanks to help
with chores from the sister of Maria Barbara, who continued to live in
the extended Bach household for years after Maria Barbara’s death —
apparently untroubled by the suicide-inducing adultery between her dead
sister’s husband and his current wife. Jarvis also does not specify what
was mysterious about her burial, or for that matter her death — for
which there is no definitely known cause but which has been explained by
either an illness or complications during pregnancy.
It is worth noting that Anna Magdalena Bach has long had an honored
place in history as the composer’s wife and musical associate, as well
as the namesake of the instructional keyboard masterpiece
Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. The claim that she engaged in an adulterous affair with Johann Sebastian Bach is, as Jarvis acknowledges, wholly unsupported.
Maria Barbara Bach, a cousin of the composer, also has a prominent position in Bach history. In his 2013 book
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,
John Eliot Gardiner notes that she actually had a more direct claim
than her husband to the family’s longstanding musical lineage.
“Sebastian, the acknowledged musical genius of the family,” Gardiner
writes, “did not carry the DNA of the more creative family line and of
[Johann Christoph Bach of Eisenach] in particular (though his first two
sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, did, their mother
being the daughter of Johann Michael Bach).” There is also no reason to
believe that Maria Barbara wasn’t a Lutheran in good standing, making
the insinuation of suicide an affront to a notable woman.
“There are numerous errors as regards the account of Bach’s life,”
Tomita tells NRO of Jarvis’s Ph.D. thesis. “There is nothing new that he
uncovered from his own archival research. All new is his imagination.
There is no objective evidence he has uncovered through his archival
work. He found it in his head.”
Tim Cavanaugh is news editor of National Review Online. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
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