Controversial Darwin professor’s latest research sheds light on sibling’s musical relationship.

Aussie Professor Martin Jarvis from NT’s Charles Darwin University is no stranger to musical controversy. Several years ago he ruffled feathers with his 2006 claim that Anna Magdalena Bach, the second wife of Johann Sebastian, was the likely author of a number of the composer’s best-known works. That theory resurfaced in conjunction with a documentary film earlier this year and drew another chorus of disapproval from musicologists and professional cellists alike. “I find it impossible to contemplate that someone as intrinsically honest as Johann Sebastian Bach would allow this kind of deception,” wrote Professor Winsome Evans in Limelight, while Steven Isserlis in The Guardian inveighed that “Anna Magdalena Bach did not write the Bach suites, any more than Anne Hathaway wrote Shakespeare’s plays, George Henry Lewes wrote George Eliot’s novels, or Freddie Starr ate his friend’s hamster.” Now Jarvis has a new theory, again based on forensic examination of musical handwriting, and this time it involves Mozart and his prodigiously talented sister Maria Anna (or ‘Nannerl’ as she was affectionately known in the Mozart family).