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Music

Our hero worship of Bach is to blame for rubbish like ‘Written By Mrs Bach’

‘Professor’ Martin Jarvis’s thesis that the wife of J.S. Bach wrote the cello suites is obviously rubbish — but so is the idea that Bach was a flawless genius

4 April 2015

8:00 AM

4 April 2015

8:00 AM

My impression that Bach has come to rival Shakespeare as a flawless reference point in the cultural life of the nation has recently received some further corroboration. Remember the fuss that some academics, in the hope of recognition, created around the authorship of the bard’s works and where it got them? I don’t know how far the non-specialist public has been swayed by the BBC4 television programme entitled Written By Mrs Bach, but the Earl of Oxford came to mind as I watched it.

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