'I had a feeling' How Bach's lost works were uncovered

The best fictional detectives are famed for their intuition. Peter Wollny, the musicologist behind last week’s “world sensational” revelation of two previously unknown works by Johann Sebastian Bach, had a strange feeling when he chanced upon two sheets of music in a dusty library in 1992. Unravelling their secrets would take half his life.

- Philip Oltermann European culture editor

Wollny, now 65 and the director of Leipzig’s Bach archive, was a graduate student at Harvard University when his PhD research took him to the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels, where he came across two unattributed scores from the 18th century. “I have to confess that I didn’t even think these were works by Bach at the time,” Wollny said days after the two pieces - Chaconne in D minor BWV 1178 and Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179 - were performed at Leipzig’s St Thomas church for the first time.

“The handwriting of the score just fascinated me, and I had this vague feeling that these bits of paper could be interesting some day. So I made photocopies and created a file that I dragged around with me for 30 years.”

Despite having dedicated himself to researching the life and music of the greatest composers of the baroque era, he said he did not seriously dare consider that the works could be by the man himself until recently.