Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

(b Weimar, 8 March 1714; d Hamburg, 14 Dec 1788). German composer [46 in Bach family genealogy], second son J. S. Bach. He studied music under his father at the Leipzig Thomasschule and law at university. In 1738 he was summoned to become harpsichordist to the Prussian crown prince, moving to Berlin when his employer became King Frederick in 1740. There he was accompanist to the royal chamber music, with the particular task of accompanying the king's flute solos. The most important of his compositions of this period were his keyboard sonatas; he also wrote his famous Essay on the True Art of Keyboard Playing (1753-62), which established him as the leading keyboard teacher and theorist of his time. He was however discontented in Berlin, because of the poor salary, the want of opportunity and the narrow scope of his duties. Not until 1767 did he move, and then Frederick released him only reluctantly. He succeeded Telemann as Kantor and music director in Hamburg, with responsibility for teaching, for some 200 performances of music each year at five churches and for ceremonial music on civic occasions. He now produced much church music as well as keyboard music and sets of symphonies and concertos. But the openness of Hamburg intellectual life was agreeable to a man of his wide interests.

C. P. E. Bach, the best-known member of his family in his lifetime, was greatly respected for his treatise - which summarized the musical philosophy and the musical practices in north Germany at the middle of the 18th century - as well as for his music. His keyboard sonatas (he composed c 150 as well as countless miscellaneous pieces) above all break new ground in their treatment of form and material, (e.g. in their ‘varied reprises’ and their handling of motifs); he also wrote improvisatory fantasias of intense expressiveness. His symphonies are in the fiery, energetic manner favoured in north Germany, with dramatic breaks, modulations and changes of mood or texture; usually the movements run continuously. He wrote c 20. There are twice as many concertos (and more concerto-like sonatinas), also vigorous in style; all were written for harpsichord and some were adapted for other instruments. His chamber works are numerous; there are many songs, as well as choral works from his late years, including two fine oratorios (Die Israeliten in der Wüste, Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu) as well as Passion settings and other church works which often include adaptations of his own and other composers' music.

works:
Keyboard music

• c 150 sonatas, incl. 6 Prussian Sonatas (1742-3)
• 6 Württemberg Sonatas (1744)
• 6 sonatas ‘with altered repeats’ (1760)
• fantasias, rondos, fugues, variations, minuets

Chamber music

• over 30 sonatas, duets with obbligato kbd
• 3 kbd qts
• 18 solo sonatas
• c 20 trio sonatas
• duets, wind music

Orchestral music

• 20 syms.
• c 50 hpd concs.
• concs. arr. from hpd concs. 12 sonatinas, hpd, orch

Vocal music

• Magnificat (1749)
• Die Israeliten in der Wüste, oratorio (1769)
• Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu, oratorio (1780)
• Morgengesang am Schöpfungsfeste, ode (1783)
• Passions
• church cantatas, motets
• occasional cantatas
• c 300 secular and sacred songs
• chamber cantatas, arias

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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), a German composer, keyboard performer, and theorist, was a prolific composer of vocal and instrumental music, especially for keyboard instruments. He contributed to the formation of the so-called Viennese classical style.

The second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach studied with his father and musically was the most important and influential of the sons. His career as a whole has been said, by E.F. Schmid, to mark a development "halfway between the world of his father and that of the Viennese classics." After schooling at Leipzig, he took a law degree at Frankfurt an der Oder in 1735. He moved to Berlin in 1738 and became keyboard player for the young crown prince, Frederick of Prussia, who in 1740 became King Frederick II. Bach remained in Frederick's service until 1767 as keyboard performer, composer, and accompanist to other members of the royal musical entourage, which included Frederick himself as flutist and a very distinguished circle of musicians.

Two early sets of keyboard sonatas, the "Prussian" Sonatas (1740) and the "Württemberg" Sonatas (1743), show that by the age of 30 Bach had achieved a fully mature style of composition, less rigorous in its contrapuntal organization than that of his father but with considerable power of invention and formal design and with evident stress on bringing to keyboard composition some of the intense expressivity associated mainly with vocal music; for example, the first of the 1740 Sonatas has an instrumental "recitative" as the slow movement.

The publication of his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1753) made Bach the most renowned authority of the 18th century on keyboard pedagogy and composition; along with the treatises by Johann Joachim Quantz on the flute and by Leopold Mozart on the violin, it remains one of the principal monuments of 18th-century musical thought and practice. The essay also reflects Bach's preeminence as a keyboard performer, for which he was acclaimed throughout his life. When Charles Burney visited him in Hamburg in 1773, he wrote vividly of Bach's performance on his "Silbermann clavichord, his favorite instrument, upon which he played three or four of his choicest and most difficult compositions, with the delicacy, precision, and spirit for which he is so justly celebrated. … "

In 1767 Bach moved from the court of Berlin to a position in Hamburg as director of music at the major churches of the city, and he remained in Hamburg until his death in 1788. His duties called for extensive composition of sacred music, and his Hamburg works include two oratorios and a number of motets and cantatas. He also wrote more than 250 religious and secular songs. But by his own admission he attached the greatest importance to his instrumental music, and he continued in later years to set himself new problems in keyboard composition. The principal later works in this field are his Sonatas, Fantasias, and Rondos for Connoisseurs and Amateurs, published between 1779 and 1787.

A measure of Bach's importance to the inner development of 18th-century style may be seen in the unequivocal claim by Franz Joseph Haydn that he owed a great debt, which dated from his earliest apprentice years, to the music of C. P. E. Bach; and in Beethoven's remark in a letter of 1809 that works by C. P. E. Bach "should certainly be in the possession of every true artist, not only for the sake of real enjoyment but also for the purpose of study."

Further Reading

The best approach to the music and thought of C. P. E. Bach is through his own Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1753; trans. 1949). Other important early writings are his Autobiography (1773; trans. 1967) and Charles Burney's account of his visit with Bach in The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces (1773; 2d ed. 1775). A valuable recent study is Philip Barford, The Keyboard Music of C. P. E. Bach Considered in Relation to His Musical Aesthetic and the Rise of the Sonata Principle (1965).

Additional Sources

Ottenberg, Hans-G'nter, C.P.E. Bach, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

For more information on Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, visit Britannica.com.

• Period: Classical (1750-1819)
• Country: Germany
• Born: March 08, 1714 in Weimar, Germany
• Died: December 14, 1788 in Hamburg, Germany
• Genres: Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Keyboard Music, Symphony

Biography

The second surviving son of J.S. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel was the most innovative and idiosyncratic member of an extremely talented musical family. His music, unlike that of his father or that of the master he influenced, Haydn, did not define an era so much as reveal a deeply personal response to the musical conventions of his time.

C.P.E. Bach could play his father's technically demanding keyboard pieces at sight by the time he was seven. Also an exceptional student in areas other than music, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1731 to study law, then transferred to the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. He graduated in 1734, but remained in that backwater town giving keyboard lessons, involving himself in public concerts, and learning the composer's craft.

By 1740 Bach was in Berlin as harpsichordist to Frederick the Great of Prussia. Here he was first exposed to Italian opera seria, and its dramatic style infiltrated his instrumental music. Little of this was heard at court, where Bach accompanied the flutist-king in one reactionary concerto after another by Quantz. He made several attempts to find a new position, but the stress of the king's disfavor was partially relieved in 1756, when Frederick became distracted by the Seven Years' War and was frequently away from the court. Bach found a select audience for his remarkable and experimental series of keyboard works such as the so-called "Prussian" and "Württemberg" sonatas (composed in the early 1740s) and the Sonatas with Varied Repeats (1760).

Bach finally got himself released from Frederick's service in 1768 in order to succeed Telemann as cantor at the Johanneum in Hamburg, also serving as music director for the city's five major churches; he held this post until his death.

Stylistically distant from his father's rigorous polyphony, C.P.E. Bach was something of a proto-Romantic; he was the master of Empfindsamkeit, or "intimate expressiveness." The dark, dramatic, improvisation-like passages that appear in some of Mozart's and Haydn's works are due in part to his influence; his music in time became known all over Europe. His impulsive works for solo keyboard, which lurch into unexpected keys, change tempo and dynamics abruptly, and fly along with wide-ranging themes, are especially compelling. One account of Bach's after-dinner improvisations described the sweaty, glazed-eyed musician as "possessed," an adjective that would be applied to equally intense and idiosyncratic musicians in the Romantic age. Many of his symphonies are as audacious as his keyboard pieces.

In the area of chamber music, Bach pulled the keyboard out of its subsidiary Baroque role and made it a full partner with, or even leader of, the other instruments. Yet here he fashioned the music to the public's conservative expectations, as he did with his church music. He composed prolifically in many genres, and much of his work awaits public rediscovery.

Bach also produced an important account of performance practice in the second half of the eighteenth century, translated into English as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments. ~ James Reel, All Music Guide

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