On Mar 1, 2015, at 9:32 AM, Rainer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Has any lute-netter in Germany or Switzerland seen "Written by Mrs. Bach" on > 3SAT yesterday evening? > > A certain Martins Jarvis claims that Anna Magdalena composed some of Bach's > finest works. Very funny… That would be Martin Jarvis, not the British actor, but a professor at Charles Darwin University (or Chuck D U, as the rappers call it) in Australia. This has come up before on this list. Anna Magdalena, Bach’s second wife, was his copyist. Don’t ask me where she found the time, but I suppose when you’re constantly dealing with a house full of children and you’re pregnant 12 times in 25 years (that’s nine years of pregnancy), you need a hobby you can do sitting down. The Jarvis theory is that her copy of the cello suites shows the sort of errors and whatnot that are made when composing rather than copying. I’m not kidding. (It's rather like my own theory that Beethoven was a talentless hack, and the greatest composer in history was the typesetter who had to decipher his illegible manuscripts; the difference is that I’ve never gone pubic with it. Oops…) Cellist Steven Isserlis discusses (well, disses) the “theory” (Jarvis’s, not mine) here: http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/oct/29/why-bach-wife-cannot-take-credit-for-his-cello-masterwork To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
