Tag: organ

You may have heard the big news by now, that a couple of organ works by Johann Sebastian Bach have been rediscovered. New works by Bach! Well, kind of. They were actually uncovered all the way back in 1992, while researcher Peter Wollny was cataloguing Bach manuscripts at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. But the mills of the gods grind slowly, and IT TOOK 30 YEARS, I guess, to confirm their authenticity.

Be that as it may, the “new” Chaconne in D minor, BWV 1178, and Chaconne in G minor, BWX 1179, were performed for the first time in probably 320 years yesterday. A stream of the double debut, at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig – where Bach served as cantor for 27 years (less time than it took for the organ pieces to be authenticated) and where his remains are interred beneath a bronze marker – with Baroque authority Ton Koopman at the organ, has been archived on YouTube.

There’s some annoying A.I. Bach at the start and plenty of German speechifying, but if you want to cut to the chase, the Chaconne in D minor can be heard twice, at 15:28/59:40, and the Chaconne in G minor at 22:45/1:07:02 at the link below.

The undated, unsigned manuscripts are believed to be in the hand of Salomon Günther John, one of Bach’s pupils. The chaconnes are thought to have been composed early in Bach’s career, when he was working as an organ teacher in Arnstadt in Thuringia.

Unsurprisingly, Koopman finds the music to be “of very high quality.”

Here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hXzUGYIL9M