Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach was the last but one son of J.S. Bach and his second wife, Anna Magdalena. A keyboard virtuoso, he wrote a range of chamber and orchestral works in a style that initially echoed the high Baroque language of his father before responding to the prevailing galant and nascent Classical styles, with some of his later music showing the influence of Haydn and Mozart; from 1750 until his death in 1795 he composed a number of secular and sacred cantatas that established his reputation in north Germany. He was born in 1732, the same year as Haydn, and like the Austrian he spent almost all his career in the service of a single court—in his case at Bückeburg, the capital of the tiny Lutheran principality of Schaumburg-Lippe in Lower Saxony. Accordingly he became known as “the Bückeburg Bach” to distinguish him from his eminent relations—one dictionary lists no fewer than 10 composing Johann Bachs! His son Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst (1759-1845) was the last of the musically significant Bachs.