C. P. E. Bach, the son who carried keyboard music from Baroque to Classical
Haydn and Beethoven both swore by a keyboard manual written by Johann Sebastian Bach's second surviving son. Known to friends simply as Emanuel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach spent three decades at Frederick the Great's court in Berlin and then succeeded his godfather Telemann in Hamburg, bridging his father's world and Mozart's.
He was born in Weimar on 8 March 1714 to J. S. Bach and his first wife Maria Barbara, and entered Leipzig's St. Thomas School at ten, trained in music almost entirely by his father. Like his brothers he studied law, since a degree helped stop court musicians being treated as servants. He graduated in 1738 at 24, never practised, and within months joined the household of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, moving into the royal orchestra when Frederick became king in 1740.
Berlin gave him rich company, including the playwright Lessing, who became a close friend. By then he ranked among Europe's leading keyboard players, and dedicated sets of sonatas published in 1742 and 1744 made his name. His Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments was quickly accepted as the definitive guide, laying out fingerings and ornaments such as trills and mordents, and it reached a third edition by 1780. He favoured the clavichord and wrote nearly two hundred sonatas and solos while at court.
His style became the leading voice of the so-called sensitive style, expressive and restless in deliberate contrast to Baroque grandeur, pointing ahead to Romanticism. One of his symphonies famously avoids confirming its home key until late in the piece. Contemporaries called him the Berlin Bach, to tell him apart from his brother Johann Christian, the London Bach.
In 1768 he finally won release from court to become music director in Hamburg, where church duties turned him toward choral writing: twenty-one Passion settings and roughly seventy cantatas and other liturgical works by 1788. In 1773 he became one of the first composers to write an autobiography. His oratorio on the Resurrection and Ascension was so admired that Mozart conducted it three times in Vienna. He died in Hamburg on 14 December 1788.
Source: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
