Our hero worship of Bach is to blame for rubbish like ‘Written By Mrs Bach’

My impression that Bach has come to rival Shakespeare as a flawless reference point in the cultural life of the nation has recently received some further corroboration. Remember the fuss that some academics, in the hope of recognition, created around the authorship of the bard’s works and where it got them? I don’t know how far the non-specialist public has been swayed by the BBC4 television programme entitled Written By Mrs Bach, but the Earl of Oxford came to mind as I watched it. The claims in the programme are so obviously rubbish that I would have thought the average film company might have thought twice about filming it, let alone the BBC airing it. But if it hadn’t been Bach in question no one would have taken it up. Who cares who wrote Haydn’s piano trios?

The film was the result of an obsession that an Australian academic, Martin Jarvis, developed some years ago about the manuscript of Bach’s cello suites.