Top cellist refutes evidence, describing Australian academic’s material as “shoddy”.

Leading British cellist Steven Isserlis has taken a pugnacious pop at the resurfacing claims that Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena wrote her husband’s famous Cello Suites. In a cogent article in The Guardian he labels Charles Darwin University professor Martin Jarvis’s research presented in a new documentary as “shoddy” and those who believe it as “credulous”.

“Anna Magdalena Bach did not write the Bach suites, any more than Anne Hathaway wrote Shakespeare’s plays,” Isserlis writes. The cellist, who along with Julian Lloyd-Webber was one of the musicians to publically refute Jarvis’s research when it first emerged back in 2006, describes the Welsh-born, Australian conductor and academic as “a charming and sincere man” but considers his theory to be “pure rubbish”.

Isserlis begins his critique with Anna Magdalena’s notoriously error-laden manuscript, which clearly states (in her own hand) that the suites were composed by JS Bach and contain no crossings out or corrections as one might expect in an original composition. “Certainly to my eyes – and incidentally to those of the two musicians I know who were interviewed for the film, neither of whom...