SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Nearly three centuries after his death, Johann Sebastian Bach is still dropping new tracks.
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PETER WOLLNY: The two new pieces helped me to understand more deeply how Bach's musical language developed in his early years. I learned a lot about this genius.
SIMON: Peter Wollny directs the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany. And the quote-unquote new pieces are chaconnes - Baroque-era compositions with melodic variations atop repeated bass lines. Wollny has been trying to identify them as Bach's for, well, a long time.
WOLLNY: When, as a young graduate student in the early 1990s, I worked at the Royal Library in Brussels, I, of course, looked at all the Bach manuscripts they had. But I also ordered a number of anonymous pieces, just being curious about what they were. And when I had two manuscripts one day on my desk, the musical language of these two pieces - Bach is the only composer with whom you can connect them in a convincing way. And it took me a long time - more than 30 years.
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SIMON: The manuscripts were undated and unsigned, copied down by somebody else before being filed away. Wollny's break came when a 1729 job application surfaced with matching handwriting. It was from a man who'd been one of Bach's pupils in the composer's first job as an organist.
WOLLNY: This discovery brought the two manuscripts in the immediate vicinity of J.S. Bach.
SIMON: Peter Wollny says that Bach was about 18 years old at the time.
WOLLNY: Bach behaved like an energetic young man. He got involved into fights on the marketplace. It said in the town protocols he took a foreign young woman into the church and had her sing on the organ loft. And in Lutheran Germany, women singing in churches was strictly forbidden at the time.
SIMON: A rebel in a curly wig. Wollny says that spirit also imbued Bach's compositions.
WOLLNY: He doesn't simply take over traditional forms and genres. According to the standards, he was always trying to do something new to integrate his new ideas...
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WOLLNY: ...Experimenting with genres, with forms, with styles. And no other composer is doing that at the time. And when we go later, we see that he is doing this all the time - always the question of combining different genres.
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SIMON: This week, Bach's chaconnes got their first performance in three centuries at Leipzig's St. Thomas Church, where the composer worked and where he is buried.
WOLLNY: When we had the two pieces performed on the organ of St. Thomas' Church, everybody was very moved to listen in Bach's own church. The great joy of listening to Bach - his music doesn't seem to get old. There are always different angles from which you can approach Bach's music. And it's like walking around a medieval church and looking up at the windows, and you always discover something new.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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