In 1965 a New Jersey girl group called the Toys put out a single called "A Lover's Concerto." It sold over two million copies, went gold, and charted on both sides of the Atlantic. If you know it, you know it from the first bar: that bright, skipping, up-and-down tune that sounds less like 1965 and more like a music box. The reason it sounds that old is that it is. The melody is a Bach minuet from the 1700s, the one every piano student has stumbled through, set to a backbeat and a love lyric.
Except the minuet is not by Bach. And that is the better story.
The pop song is a Bach minuet with a beat
"A Lover's Concerto" was written by two American songwriters, Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, and they did not hide their source. They built the song straight on top of the "Minuet in G major," an 18th-century keyboard piece that turns up in the Bach catalogue as BWV Anh. 114. Play the minuet and then play the Toys and you are hearing the same tune twice, once in a powdered wig and once in a beehive.
The songwriters made one real change. The minuet is in 3/4, the lilting one-two-three of a dance you would do at court. Linzer and Randell recast it in 4/4, the square four-beat of pop radio. That single shift is most of what separates "a Bach minuet" from "a hit single." The notes are old. The pulse is new.
The twist: the Bach tune isn't Bach
For a couple of centuries, everyone called it Bach, because the minuet sits inside a famous Bach household album. In 1725 Johann Sebastian Bach put together a music notebook for his second wife, Anna Magdalena. It was a family scrapbook of keyboard pieces, and the household played from it. The catch is that not everything in the notebook is Bach's own work. It was a collection, the way your phone holds songs you did not write.
The "Minuet in G" was one of the borrowed entries. The "Anh." in BWV Anh. 114 is the giveaway, even before you know the rest. It stands for Anhang, German for appendix, the section of the Bach catalogue reserved for pieces of doubtful or disputed authorship. The number itself is the cataloguer holding the piece at arm's length and saying, we are not sure this one is his.
It is not. The real composer is Christian Petzold, a German organist who was a contemporary of Bach. The proof came from old paper. The musicologist Hans-Joachim Schulze tracked down a harpsichord suite by Petzold that contains the G major and G minor minuet pair matching BWV Anh. 114 and 115. The tune the household had been calling Bach turned out to belong to the man two towns over.
When the credit changed, and why nobody can name the exact year
The reattribution landed late, in the back half of the 20th century, somewhere from the 1970s onward. Pin it to a single year and you will find a source that disagrees. Some accounts say Petzold has held the credit since the 1970s; the fuller catalogue reassignment, built on Schulze's manuscript find, came later, around 1990. The exact date is a scholar's argument. The substance is settled: Bach for two hundred years, Petzold ever since.
Which leaves the Toys in a strange spot. They had a smash built on a Bach minuet, and the minuet was never Bach's. The melody everyone loved was twice removed from where they thought it came from: not a pop original, and not even the famous composer they would have named if you asked. Petzold wrote a pretty minuet for a keyboard suite, watched it get folded into Bach's family album, watched it get filed under the wrong name for two centuries, and then, long after his death and Bach's, watched it go gold on the radio under a third name entirely. Few composers get borrowed from that thoroughly without ever being asked.
Go hear the minuet where it lives
Once you know the tune is the song, you cannot unhear it. The obvious next move is to go listen to the minuet on its own, before the beehive and the backbeat, played the way Petzold's century played it. That bright, skipping, up-and-down line is one of the most recognised keyboard pieces ever written, which is exactly why it ended up on the radio.
It is on the Essential Classics channel, inside our Best of Bach collection below. Catalogue convention still files the "Minuet in G" under Bach, Anhang and all, so that is where the keyboard repertoire of his world sits too. Put it on, listen for the lilting three-beat tune, and you will catch the moment the Toys come back to you uninvited, except now there is no drum kit under it and no one singing over the top. Just the melody, doing in 3/4 what a 1965 single did in 4/4.
The next time "A Lover's Concerto" turns up somewhere, you can be the one who knows the tune is two hundred and fifty years old, that it spent most of that time wearing the wrong composer's name, and that the right one is Christian Petzold.
