Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Essentials

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach, spent his life in northern Germany, although his influence spread far further. Born in 1714, he straddles the twilight of the Baroque and the heyday of the Classical period. Intent on pursuing his own path, though, he created music that alternates passages of intense lyricism with wildly unpredictable and often eccentric effects. He spent three decades in the service of Frederick the Great—although the flute-playing king preferred the more conventional confections of Johann Joachim Quantz—and a further two as his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann’s successor as Kapellmeister in Hamburg. He composed a range of finely wrought choral music and vivacious symphonies before he died in 1788, but the emotional range of the empfindsamer Stil (sentimental style) he cultivated can best be heard in his highly individual piano works, which had a momentous impact upon subsequent generations of composers, informing the Sturm und Drang movement spearheaded by Haydn, the richly chromatic late music of Mozart and even the virtuoso keyboard style of Beethoven.