Born: 22 September 1701, Germany
Died: 27 February 1760
Country most active: Germany
Also known as: Anna Magdalena Wilcken
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Australian music scholar Martin Jarvis published his book Written By Mrs Bach in 2011. In it, he presents the case that Johann Sebastian Bach’s six unaccompanied cello suites may have been composed by his second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach. The book inspired a documentary in which, as the Washington Post puts it, “a professor of music, a composer and an American expert in document forensics advance the case.” “Prof Jarvis said he aims to overturn the ‘sexist’ convention that recognised composers were always a ‘sole male creator,’ to finally reinstate Mrs Bach into the history books,” wrote Hannah Furness in the Telegraph. “While Anna is known to have transcribed for Bach in his later years, researchers found the handwriting did not have the ‘slowness or heaviness’ usually attributed to someone who is merely copying, but was likely to have flowed from her own mind,” supported by “numerous corrections to scores written in her hand, signalling she is likely to have been composing it as she went along.”