Behind every great musician…

… is a great second wife.

Australian professor Martin Jarvis thinks Anna Magdalena Wilcke, Johan Sebastian Bach’s second wife, wrote some of the music attributed to him, including the cello suites.

The self-styled music detective became suspicious about Bach’s work when he was a teenaged student at the Royal Academy of Music in London. While playing Bach’s “cello suites” he became convinced there was something wrong.

“In 2001, I deconstructed the ‘cello’ pieces and came up with 18 reasons why they weren’t written by Bach,” Jarvis said.

Over the years, he said he found two famous 1713 Bach manuscripts in Anna Magdalena’s handwriting.

Including manuscripts that apparently pre-date Anna and Johan’s meeting. The smoking gun, according to him, is a manuscript with “Written by Mrs. Bach” on the cover.

I’m not sure how smoking a gun that is, but the back-dating of the manuscripts and the handwriting analysis are certainly intriguing (if accurately reported).