Martin Jarvis never meant to be a detective. But his ground-breaking studies that uncovered a dark secret about the music of celebrated German composer Johann Sebastian Bach have made him just that.

Forty years ago, when Jarvis was a young viola player studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he had an inkling something was not right with Bach’s Cello Suites. “It was the relative simplicity, almost naivety of the Cello Suites that caused me great alarm in comparison with the Bach on the violin I was playing, which was immensely complex and difficult and dense,” explains Jarvis.
The issue stayed in the back of his mind for three decades until 2001, when Jarvis confronted it. By then he was the conductor of Australia’s Darwin Symphony Orchestra and an Associate Professor at Charles Darwin University.

Jarvis turned forensic detective, carefully examining Bach’s music for handwriting evidence. In a major breakthrough, Jarvis was able to prove that the Cello Suites were actually written by Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, not just copied down by her, as was the popular belief.

However, the idea that the great classical composer had not authored the Cello Suites shocked many in the music world. “People thought I was crazy,” says Jarvis. “I got some very, very unpleasant and aggressive email traffic, and in fact if you go out to the blogosphere, you can find plenty of people who were happy to abuse me for my theory. I was initially worried that somebody would find my body with a cello spike through it!”

But Jarvis says, “Music has a truism, a specific sound. It’s how we recognise that a song has been written by the Beatles rather than the Rolling Stones. You would never mistake one for the other.”

Given the music was written at a time when women would have been laughed at for even entertaining the idea they were capable of composing, Jarvis argues that there may be other maestros, such as Mozart, whose recognised body of work is not all their own.

Australia’s questioning instinct paved the way for Jarvis to complete his research, he says. “I was just given the go-ahead to go on and carry out the research, and all the travel time I needed to nail it down. I don’t think there is a university in the world outside Australia that would have said, ‘Okay, get on with it’,” Jarvis says. “It really is a demonstration of the significant openness Australia has to  possibilities.” Jarvis travelled to London, Belfast, Berlin and then to Yale University and Harvard University to examine various manuscripts.

The irony of Jarvis’s momentous discovery is that it made him unwittingly follow in his father’s footsteps. “My father was a police detective in the United Kingdom and I now find myself in the forensic sciences in the police laboratories,” says Jarvis. “He’d have been amused by this, especially as I was the son who went off to be a musician despite my father wanting me to be anything but.”

Jarvis has been invited to discuss his research at several international conferences, including the recent International Graphonomics Society Conference in Mexico. His research has been published globally by the Journal of Forensic Document Examination, and he is the author of a recent book, Written by Mrs Bach, published by ABC Books.