Accompanist to Frederick the Great and an eminent theorist, the second son of JS Bach was also a composer of rare inventiveness and beauty, as George Pratt explains

Dr. Charles Burney, the distinguished music historian, undertook two tours of Europe in search of first­ hand information for his ground-breaking A General History of Music. A high point, in 1772, was Hamburg and a visit to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Burney “had long contemplated, with the highest delight, his elegant and original compositions; and they had created in me so strong a desire to see, and to hear him, that I wanted no other musical temptation to visit this city”. His description,in The Present State of Music In Germany, of three meetings with Bach, from 9-11 October, gives us a rare and intimate picture of CPE Bach the man. He was witty and amusing, ready from the start with alight-hearted comment - that some of his music was to be performed in St Catharine’s Church that Sunday, and that Burney shouldn’t bother to go, because it would be badly performed (he went, and it was!).

Bach claimed that he had more-or-less stopped composing by the time he moved to Hamburg in 1767. After I was 50, he wrote, ‘I gave the thing up, and said let us eat and rink,for tomorrow we die!’.In fact, he wrote some significant music in his later years, including six immensely powerful ‘Hamburg’ Symphonies (1773) for Baron Gottfried van Swieten, later a patron of both Haydn and Mozart. He also produced an annual Passion for Good Friday. But certainly, more of his attention was now given to teaching, performing, fulfilling the duties of director of church music, and revising his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments.

This two-part treatise (1753and 1762) was immensely influential in his lifetime and remains an invaluable source of post-baroque keyboard techniques. For instance, Bach encouraged the use of the thumbs previously, scales had generally been played by second to fourth fingers, running up and down the keyboard like three-legged sprinters. His innovation remains standard technique for keyboard players. He devoted a lengthy chapter to the interpretation of ornaments such as trills, turns and mordents.

Most telling, though, are his thoughts on “Performance”, the third chapter. These reveal a great deal about both his intentions as a composer and also his approach to performing. Any passage can be so radically changed by modifying its performance that it w ill be scarcely recognisable. [Performers must take note of] loudness and softness… touch, the snap, legato and staccato execution, vibrato [applicable to the clavichord, his favourite instrument], arpeggiation, retard and accelerando. Lack of these elements or inept use of them makes a poor performance. Above all, lose no opportunity to hear artistic singing. In so doing, the keyboardist will learn to think in terms of song. Indeed, it is a good practice to sing instrumental melodies.’

Burney confirms that Bach played as he preached. As Bach’s guest for a whole day, he was shown into his ‘large and elegant music room, furnished with pictures, drawings, and prints of more than a 150 eminent musicians…

M Bach was so obliging as to sit down to his Silbermann clavichord, and favourite 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 the pathetic and slow movements … he absolutely contrived to produce… a cry of sorrow and complaint, such as can only be effected upon the clavichord, and perhaps by himself. After dinner … he played till near eleven o’clock at night. He grew so animated and possessed, that … he looked like one inspired. His eyes were fixed, his under lip fell, and drops of effervescence distilled from his countenance. He is now 59, rather short in stature, with black hair and eyes, and brown complexion, has avery animated countenance, and is of a chearful [sic] and lively disposition.

Carl Philipp Emanuel was the second surviving son of JS Bach and his first wife, Maria Barbara. The revolutionary style of these mature years is all the more surprising because, he makes clear in his autobiography, ‘in composition and keyboard performance, I have never had any teacher but my father.’ Emanuel sang and played in St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, and in return was dragooned into copying out parts less often than other members of the family. Like several of his distinguished predecessors, including Handel and Telemann, he initially studied law, reading for a degree at Leipzig University.

His first major post was as harpsichordist to Frederick the Great in Berlin. The Prussian King was passionate about music, an accomplished flautist and a polished if predictable composer - his compositions include 100 flute sonatas and four symphonies. Bach proudly describes accompanying the King in a flute solo in 1740, and was taken onto the Court pay-­roll in 1741. On most evenings in the week Frederick summoned his court musicians, with Bach at the keyboard, to play usually six concertos and a sonata. H is teacher, Johann Joachim Quantz, composed around 300 royal concertos, as well as 200 sonatas. This lifestyle continued for about 15years, though the King’s taste remained rather static and his breath control suffered over the years.

The absolute monarch exercised the absolute right to control the musical tempo, with some wayward results as he paused to re-inflate his lungs. It’s said that one sycophantic royal admirer commented ‘What rhythm!’, at which Bach muttered: ‘What rhythms!’.

Bach was decently paid but under-valued by the King , who preferred, as composers, others including Johann Adolph Hasse, the brothers Graun, and above all Quantz. So Bach was retained principally as keyboard accompanist among the King’s private chamber musicians, though he also gained the experience of playing in the Hofoper, the Opera House commissioned by Frederick.

Bach’s first published collection, six Prussian Sonatas (1742), were dedicated to the King, presumably to enhance the composer’s standing with him - though they seem not have made a lasting impression. They do, however, show some remarkable signs of Bach s forward-thinking and imagination, in form and structure and, above all, in what Burney called expression’. The First Sonata opens in a disarmingly predictable manner - simple two-voiced texture which could have come from his father’s pen as a ‘two-part invention’. But structurally, it is written in that epitome of ‘classical’ patterns, so-called ‘sonata form’, which was to remain the norm of virtually every solo, chamber and symphonic first movement until well into the 20th century: an opening exposition moving to a nearly-related key, a middle section exploring the potential of the opening themes, and
a return to the first section, all now remaining securely in the home key. The movement includes a characteristically ‘expressive’ moment as the music lurches suddenly from major to minor.

The following Andante is extraordinarily daring: a naive-enough melody over gently repeated chords is abruptly interrupted by wordless ‘recitative’. It wanders through widely-ranging keys reaching, in five bars, from F minor to B major and back - about as distant as tonal music can stretch. It is all emphasised by dramatic dynamic contrasts between sudden forte and piano, and including a pause for an improvised cadenza before the end. All six Sonatas mix the reassuringly predictable with the totally surprising - in harmony, melody, texture, rhythms. They are not beyond the technical powers of quite modest pianists and richly repay investigating at the keyboard.

Bach’s second published set of six Württemberg Sonatas for his pupil Carl Eugen of Württemberg displays similar surprises. The slow movement of No. 5 is in the rare key of E flat minor; the opening movement of No. 6 contains dramatic contrasts of forte and piano within a single bar; and the technical demands throughout have become more patently pianistic, wide-spread arpeggios and fast semiquavers using most of the keyboard’s full compass.

The most extraordinary example of Bach’s passion, romanticism, ‘expression’, is a Fantasia, the final musical illustration in the Essay…. It is marked ‘Allegro moderato’, in common time (4/4) but without bar lines. Instead, huge arpeggios climb up nearly four octaves, madcap semiquaver runs scamper across the page, rhythmic palpitations, abrupt changes of dynamics and key, dramatic moments of silence, all demonstrate the intensity of his ‘Empfindsamer Stil’ (‘sensitive style’)- his deeply personal, subjective expression in which, as one critic has aptly put it, ‘the only expectation is the unexpected’.

Bach’s out put, totalling over 1,000 works in his lifetime, was largely keyboard-based - solo

sonatas, keyboard concertos and chamber music, not surprisingly including several sets of flute sonatas for his royal employer in Berlin. Then, in 1767, he moved to Hamburg, replacing his godfather, Telemann, as director of music for the principal churches there. Frederick at first refused to release him from his post; Burney supposed ‘that his wife and children, being all subjects of his Prussian majesty, could not retire out of his dominions without his permission. ’While Bach’s particular responsibility lay in organising music in the Hamburg churches, he involved himself in the city’s wider musical life, arranging several series of subscription concerts from 1768-9 onwards.

He gradually played less in public, giving up completely from 1769, aged 65, and formally retired in 1786, though still composing. In his Final year, 1788, he wrote a concerto for piano, keyboard and orchestra, arranged a collection of songs, and produced three pieces for the curious ensemble of harpsichord, flute and viola.

He retained a deep respect for older music, especially that of his father. The ‘Crucify’ choruses in his 1785 Matthew Passion are note-for-note transcriptions of his father’s setting 58 years earlier. But his lasting contribution lay in his revolutionary style, breaking all the prehvious bounds of musical ‘expression’, his heart on his sleeve, his nervous ‘Sturm und Drang’ (storm and drive) energy both as composer and performer. He profoundly influenced Haydn and then Beethoven and, although neglected in the 19th century, his passion and romantic spirit contributed to the gene-pool of Western music until Romanticism breathed its last in the mid-20th century.