Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was born in Weimar on 8 March 1714. He was the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach and his first wife, Maria Barbara. His godfather was none other than Georg Philipp Telemann, then the most famous composer in Germany, whose name he bore. In 1723 he followed his father to Leipzig, where he attended St Thomas’s School. His father was his only music teacher: he taught him keyboard and composition and involved him early in copying and performing his works.

Left-handed, Carl Philipp Emanuel could not play the violin properly and devoted himself to the keyboard. Like his elder brother Wilhelm Friedemann, he first studied law, at the University of Leipzig in 1731 and then at Frankfurt an der Oder in 1734, where he also directed concerts. In 1738 he gave up a legal career and entered the service of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick, a great music lover and flautist himself, then living at Ruppin.

When Frederick became king in 1740 — he would be known as Frederick the Great — Carl Philipp Emanuel followed him to Berlin and Potsdam as court harpsichordist. He stayed nearly thirty years. His main task was to accompany the king’s flute concerts on the harpsichord, almost every evening. But the king had conservative tastes and preferred the music of his flute teacher, Johann Joachim Quantz, who was far better paid. Bach felt underappreciated despite his growing reputation.

In 1742 he published the Prussian Sonatas, dedicated to the king, and in 1744 the Württemberg Sonatas. In 1744 he married Johanna Maria Dannemann, a wine merchant’s daughter. In 1747 it was thanks to him that his father was invited to Potsdam, where Johann Sebastian improvised before Frederick II on a theme given by the king. In 1749 he composed a brilliant Magnificat, perhaps as an application to succeed his father in Leipzig.

In 1753 he published the first part of his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, a treatise that became the reference of its age. In it he explains fingering, ornaments, accompaniment and above all the art of expression: the musician must be moved himself in order to move his audience. Haydn read it avidly, and Beethoven still recommended it to his pupils. Bach was also a master of the clavichord, a small, intimate instrument on which the sound can be shaded and notes made to vibrate.

In 1768 he succeeded his godfather Telemann as director of music for the five main churches of Hamburg. There he composed much sacred music — Passions, cantatas, oratorios — and organised public concerts. But he devoted himself above all to keyboard music: from 1779 to 1787 he published six collections of sonatas, rondos and fantasias “for connoisseurs and amateurs”. His free, unpredictable fantasias, full of silences, sudden changes and surprising harmonies, represent the so-called “sensitive style” (empfindsamer Stil) and foreshadow Romanticism.

He died in Hamburg on 14 December 1788, a few months before the French Revolution. In his lifetime he was far more famous than his father: when people then spoke of “the great Bach”, they often meant him. Mozart is reported to have said: “He is the father, we are the children.” His Solfeggietto in C minor remains a favourite piece of young pianists. He links his father’s Baroque age to the Classicism of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.