Director’s cut praised at US film festival

The reworking of a documentary based on the research of Charles Darwin University Professor Martin Jarvis received a warm reception at the second annual Classical Arts Film Festival in California earlier this month.

“Written By Mrs Bach”, tells the story of Professor Jarvis’ research into whether Anna Magdalena Bach – Johannes Sebastian Bach’s second wife – actually composed some of the music that has been attributed to the Baroque maestro.

Originally screened at the Leipzig Film Festival in 2014 and on BBC Television in 2015, the film caused some furore among Bach scholars and some musicians around the world.

“I understand that Andrew Lloyd Webber and his brother, Julian, actually demanded the BBC not broadcast the film,” Professor Jarvis said.

The version of “Written By Mrs Bach – Broken Silence” shown at the festival in Napa Valley is feature-length and expands upon Professor Jarvis’ thesis that women have made a far greater contribution to the musical canon than many are willing to acknowledge.

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

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