Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Trained by his father and then sent to read law at Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach formally entered the service of Frederick II of Prussia in 1740 and spent nearly three decades at the keyboard in Berlin and Potsdam, accompanying a flute-playing king. Born at Weimar in 1714, the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian, he made his own language out of the empfindsamer Stil: sonatas, fantasias, concertos and symphonies full of abrupt contrast, irregular phrase lengths, rhetorical silences and harmony that turns where the ear expects rest. In 1768 he succeeded his godfather Telemann as director of music for the five principal churches of Hamburg, a post that brought a flood of sacred works and the late string symphonies. His Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, published in two parts from 1753, is a guide to ornamentation, fingering and accompaniment, and is still consulted by performers. Haydn worked through his sonatas; Mozart and Beethoven acknowledged the debt. He completed his university studies in 1738, and in Berlin, where he was known as the Berlin Bach as his brother Johann Christian was the London Bach, he wrote a Magnificat, ten symphonies and concertos for harpsichord, flute, oboe and cello, and moved among writers and thinkers such as Lessing. In Hamburg he also knew Klopstock. The Hamburg years brought more than twenty Passions alongside cantatas, litanies and motets, and the oratorio Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu, which Mozart conducted three times in Vienna in 1788 at Baron van Swieten's expense.