In 1992 Peter Wollny, then a Harvard graduate student in musicology, was researching his dissertation at the Royal Library of Belgium when he came across two unsigned music manuscripts so strikingly original that he had copies made and set them aside.
“This is actually how I work,” Wollny said Tuesday. “Whenever I find something that poses a scholarly problem to me, I keep it. Even if it takes three decades, I don’t put it aside.”
Wollny began to develop a hunch about who wrote these two anonymous, undated works for organ: Johann Sebastian Bach. But finding evidence required years of musical detective work, and it was not until this week, 33 years after the random discovery he made while doing research on one of Bach’s sons, that he officially announced the discovery.
Wollny, now the executive director of the Bach Archive Leipzig in Germany, unveiled the pieces there this week. They were performed at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach once served as cantor, by Ton Koopman, the eminent Dutch conductor, organist and harpsichordist. Wollny had presented his evidence to the other scholars who oversee the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis catalog of the composer’s works and persuaded them that these two pieces were by Bach, and merited the official imprimatur of their own BWV numbers.
The two pieces are now known as the Ciacona in D minor, BWV 1178, and the Ciacona in G minor, BWV 1179.
“Every Bach scholar has to be cautious with doing attributions with pieces,” Wollny said. “Back then in 1992, I was a young graduate student. I didn’t know very much. It was my being attracted to the handwriting and to these manuscripts. It’s hard to describe.”
The music is believed to be by a teenage Bach, composed when he worked as a young organist in Arnstadt. The copies date from around 1705, when Bach turned 20.
The newly discovered pieces are more than a novelty. Several experts who have listened to them said they provided early evidence of Bach’s talent as he began to grow into the composer who is still revered as a titan more than three centuries after his birth.
Koopman said in an interview that he expected the pieces would be performed regularly by organists around the world.
“This is a find,” he said. “Both pieces are very important additions to the repertory of organ. You analyze the pieces and you see that it can only be a great composer. It’s daring music. It’s someone who knows what harmony is.”
Wollny said they are “important pieces that help us understand how a highly gifted young composer is trying to find his own personal voice in composing.”
“Bach didn’t start as someone who merely made duplicates of the works of other composers,” he said. “Even when he was 17 or 18, every piece he composed is individual and tries to do something new.”
Koopman said that even though he and Wollny are longtime friends, drawn together by their admiration for Bach, he had not known about the discovery. The news of Wollny’s research as he tried to track down who had actually copied the music and created the manuscript, in an effort to establish its provenance, came as a surprise.
“He never spoke about this until earlier this year,” Koopman said. “He said, ‘You know I think I found two pieces by Bach. Would you be willing to perform them the first time?’ When I played them through, I said — he is completely right.”
Wollny said he began thinking he had stumbled across early works by Bach because of similarities in the distinctive style and construction found in the pieces. But the manuscripts had no identifying marks — no signatures, no initials, no dates — and were written in an unfamiliar hand. If these pieces were by Bach, they had been copied. So he set out to determine who had written the manuscripts.
A critical clue came when a fellow researcher, Bernd Koska, found a letter in a Thuringian church archive written in 1729 from an organist named Salomon Günther John, who claimed to have studied under Bach in Arnstadt. The handwriting was familiar, and he alerted Wollny to the discovery.
Wollny began searching for more documents written by John, which he said provided a more definitive match to the handwriting of the unsigned manuscripts. He concluded that John had indeed made the copies, in 1705. The combination of the musical clues, and tracing the handwriting to a musician who had studied with Bach, led him to conclude they were genuine.
It was, he said recently, a very long journey. Wollny said that after he returned from the Brussels library, he had stored the copies of the documents in a desk. He never forgot about them.
“I wanted to find out, what are these pieces?” he said. “Who wrote them? Where did the manuscripts come from? It kept me busy — for more than 30 years.”
Adam Nagourney is a Times reporter covering cultural, government and political stories in New York and California.
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