"The best fictional detectives are famed for their intuition, an ability to spot some seemingly ineffable discrepancy. Peter Wollny, the musicologist behind last week's world sensational revelation of two previously unknown works by Johann Sebastian Bach, had a funny feeling when he chanced upon two intriguing sheets of music in a dusty library in 1992. His equivalent of the Columbo turn, from mere hunch to unravelling a secret, would take up half his life."
"I have to confess that I didn't even think these were works by Bach at the time, Wollny said this week, 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."
"Despite having dedicated his life 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 about two or three years ago. His colleague and co-researcher Bernd Koska said: Peter Wollny is someone who tends to weigh things up in his mind very thoroughly"
Peter Wollny discovered two unattributed 18th-century scores in the Royal Library of Belgium in 1992 and preserved photocopies in a personal file for three decades. The manuscripts included two chaconnes, later identified as Chaconne in D minor BWV 1178 and Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179, which were performed at Leipzig's St Thomas church for the first time in about 300 years. Wollny initially did not think the pieces were by Bach, but a fascination with the handwriting prompted long-term study that led to attribution only two or three years ago. Wollny studied in Cologne and at Harvard, joined the Bach archive in 1993, and has directed it since 2014. A colleague describes Wollny as prone to thorough deliberation.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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