Two early organ works by Johann Sebastian Bach have been officially added to the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) following their long-awaited attribution, more than three centuries after they were written. The Chaconne in D minor (BWV 1178) and Chaconne in G minor (BWV 1179), discovered in the Royal Library of Belgium, received their first confirmed performance in 320 years at Leipzig’s St Thomas Church, where Bach once served as Thomaskantor.

The announcement was made on 17 November at a livestreamed ceremony. The confirmation marks a rare expansion of the BWV catalogue, last updated in 2022.

The works were originally found in 1992 by musicologist Peter Wollny, now director of the Leipzig Bach Archive, who has spent more than three decades assembling evidence for their authorship. While the manuscripts were not written in Bach’s hand and lacked signatures or dates, Wollny pursued a long trail of stylistic clues and archival fragments. The breakthrough came through the BACH Research Portal, a major project of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which aims to digitise and cross-reference sources relating to the entire Bach family.

A key piece of evidence surfaced when a colleague uncovered a 1729 job application...