18 November 2025
‘Important’: Catalog of Bach’s works receives two new entries
The Bach Archive in Leipzig has definitively attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach two organ works discovered three decades earlier in Belgium.
After decades of research, the collection’s director, musicologist Peter Wollny, identified the two Chaconons in D minor and G minor as the works of the renowned German composer, who lived from 1685 to 1750, spending the last 27 years of his life working in the East German city.
Chaconne is a piece of music that takes a short repeated bass line or harmonic progression as the foundation of variations. It was a highly popular form in the Baroque era and was often used by Bach in his works, including the famous D minor Chaconne for solo violin.
Volney said Bach was about 18 years old when he wrote the compositions, handwritten copies of which Volney found in the Royal Library of Belgium in the early 1990s.
Volney’s research led him to establish that the copies were made around 1705 by a little-known disciple of Bach.
He said that the works displayed “characteristics found in Bach’s compositions at the time, but not in the work of any other composer”, adding that his confidence in the attribution is now “99.99%.”
German Culture Minister Wolfram Weimar called the discovery “a momentous occasion for the musical world” that Bach had written the compositions and described Volney’s work as “almost detective-like in its subtlety.”
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Both works, each lasting about 14 minutes, were performed on Monday by renowned Dutch organist Ton Koopman at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach served as music director, or Thomaskantor, from 1723 to 1750.
The demonstration, which was streamed on the Internet, was attended by Burkhard Jung, the mayor of Weimar and Leipzig.