Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Among the prodigiously gifted Bach musical dynasty, its second surviving son from J.S. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, emerged as the most inventive and singular voice. Rather than establishing a period style like his father or the composer he later shaped, Haydn, his output instead expressed a highly individual reaction to the prevailing musical norms of his era.

By age seven C.P.E. Bach could already sight-read the technically formidable keyboard works of his father. Although he excelled academically beyond music, he entered the University of Leipzig in 1731 to pursue law, later moving to the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, where he completed his degree in 1734; he stayed on in the city to give keyboard instruction, participate in public concerts, and master compositional technique.

Bach reached Berlin in 1740, serving as harpsichordist to Frederick the Great of Prussia. There he first encountered Italian opera seria, whose dramatic manner soon permeated his instrumental writing. Little of that influence surfaced at court, however, where he repeatedly accompanied the flutist-king in Quantz’s conservative concertos. Repeated efforts to secure another post proved fruitless, yet the pressure of royal disapproval eased somewhat in 1756 once Frederick became absorbed by the Seven Years’ War and often left the court. During these years Bach cultivated a discerning public for his bold and exploratory keyboard compositions, among them the “Prussian” and “Württemberg” sonatas of the early 1740s and the Sonatas with Varied Repeats of 1760. He finally secured release from Frederick’s service in 1768, succeeding Telemann as cantor at Hamburg’s Johanneum and assuming music directorship of the city’s five principal churches, positions he retained until his death.

Far removed stylistically from his father’s dense polyphony, C.P.E. Bach anticipated Romantic sensibilities and excelled at Empfindsamkeit, or “intimate expressiveness.” The brooding, theatrical, quasi-improvisatory episodes found in certain works by Mozart and Haydn owe something to his example, and his reputation eventually spread throughout Europe. His volatile solo-keyboard pieces, which veer into unforeseen tonalities, shift tempo and dynamics without warning, and propel themselves through expansive thematic material, remain especially arresting. Contemporary reports of his postprandial improvisations portrayed the perspiring, transfixed performer as “possessed,” a term later attached to comparably fervent and eccentric artists of the Romantic era. Numerous symphonies display the same daring.

Within chamber music Bach elevated the keyboard from its subordinate Baroque position, granting it equal or even leading status alongside other instruments. In this sphere, as in his sacred works, he nevertheless tempered his language to suit prevailing public taste. He wrote abundantly across genres, though much of the output still awaits broader rediscovery.

He also left a seminal treatise on mid-eighteenth-century performance practice, rendered in English as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments.