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Good morning. On Monday in St Thomas Church in Leipzig the world heard for the first time for over three hundred years two lost organ pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach. The manuscripts had been discovered in the Royal Library of Belgium in 1992, without any indication of the date of composition or the composer. But they were so like known examples of Bach’s early organ work that the Director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, set out to establish whether they were in fact his. After thirty years research he says he is now 99.9% certain that the two organ chaconnes (in d minor and g minor) are genuine Bach compositions. It’s an exciting discovery for those of us who love Bach’s organ music. For me, being able to play Bach on the organ would be an achievement beyond my wildest dreams. I did once try to learn to play but co-ordinating hands-on keyboards and feet on pedals proved beyond me.
One of the giveaways in establishing the authorship of the two pieces was that they show Bach’s development of the fugue, a fugue being a musical phrase that is repeated and developed in a variety of ways and builds in complexity towards the climax.
Bach was a complex character. He could be bad tempered and over demanding, he quarrelled over his salary, he was in no way a saint. But in his music – and this was his genius – he rose above himself. More than perhaps any other Western composer he managed to blend extraordinary mathematical precision with deep human feeling. From his great settings of the St Matthew and St John Passion and to his apparently modest keyboard pieces there is a message, that our world is at the same time both rationally ordered and deeply felt. We are creatures of both head and heart. The fugue form which repeats and varies itself, always moves onwards. Bach’s music, perhaps again more than that of any western composer, suggests to me that there is a story going on, a narrative, which we are all part of whether we recognise it or not. As the music of time progresses there are discords and dissonances, which are not forgotten or easily resolved. Yet we remain creatures of hope in spite of the conflicts and tragedies of life. For Bach the final note is triumph and peace. Not an easy triumph or a bland peace but one which reflects the core of his faith in a God who loves humanity so much as to become human, and by being human raises us to God. These two new pieces will no doubt become part of the organ repertoire, a discovery that makes it just a bit harder to dismiss the testimony of faith.