Controversial documentary heads for Prime time

A provocative forensic investigation (and PhD thesis) undertaken by Charles Darwin University music scholar Martin Jarvis into the provenance of musical compositions attributed to Johannes Sebastian Bach, will soon be available as a video documentary on streaming service Amazon Prime.

The first public iteration of “Written by Mrs Bach” came in the form of a book – published in 2011 – that suggests some, if not all, of Bach’s acclaimed “Cello Suites” were composed by J.S. Bach’s second wife Anna Magdalena.

The research was picked up by chance by UK producer Pamela Kaufman who, with film director Alex McCall acquired the rights for Glasgow Films to make a documentary titled “Written by Mrs Bach”, which first screened at the Leipzig Film Festival and on BBC Television in 2015.

The film, which caused a furore among Bach scholars and some musicians around the world, also won the Gold Award at the New York Film Festival in the same year.

In 2016 Alex McCall and executive producer Pamela Kaufman-Wagman recut the documentary under the title “Written by Mrs Bach: Broken Silence”, which incorporated additional research findings from Dr Jarvis and his forensics expert collaborators.

Dr Jarvis said: “You’d be hard-pressed to recognise it as being the same documentary as the BBC version.

“It has been completely recut in a way that uses my original premise about Anna Magdalena Bach as a starting point for acknowledging the significance of women in music across history and up to the present.

“It focuses much more broadly on women’s largely unrecognised contributions to the musical canon from the time of J.S. Bach to the present and includes some fantastic female composers and players who are performing around the world today.”

“Written by Mrs Bach: Broken Silence” won a Best Documentary award after being screened at the 2017 Classical Arts Film Festival in California USA, which was sponsored by Napa Valley’s Jarvis (no relation to Dr Jarvis) Conservatory.

In 2017 the film was also shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Written by Mrs Bach: Broken Silence” made its UK premiere at The British Academy of Film and Television Arts in September 2018.

The film will debut throughout the English-speaking world on Amazon Prime on 28 January.

Dr Jarvis is a former Conductor and Artistic Director of the Darwin Symphony Orchestra.