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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Philip Oltermann European culture editor

‘An inner duty’: the 35-year quest to bring Bach’s lost organ works to light

Two men standing in front of a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach
Peter Wollny (right) and his co-researcher Bernd Koska at the Bach archive in Leipzig, Germany. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt/The Guardian

The best fictional detectives are famed for their intuition, an ability to spot some seemingly ineffable discrepancy. Peter Wollny, the musicologist behind last week’s “world sensational” revelation of two previously unknown works by Johann Sebastian Bach, had a funny feeling when he chanced upon two intriguing sheets of music in a dusty library in 1992.

His equivalent of the Columbo turn, from mere hunch to unravelling a secret, would take up half his life.

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