Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

Eldest son of Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann was born in Weimar in 1710 and had the most rigorous training his father ever devised — the Clavier-Büchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach preserves its opening stages — before reading law and philosophy at Leipzig University. He became organist of the Sophienkirche in Dresden in 1733 and music director and organist of the Marktkirche in Halle in 1746, resigned that post in 1764, and thereafter lived without a permanent appointment, moving between Halle, Braunschweig and Berlin. Contemporaries admired his improvising above everything else, and something of it survives in the keyboard fantasias, polonaises, sonatas and concertos: learned construction broken by abrupt contrast, and a freedom of line that belongs to no one else in the family. He died in Berlin in 1784. The course his father laid out for him took in the French Suites, the Inventions, the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the organ trio sonatas, and after the Thomasschule, which he left in 1729, he read law and mathematics at Halle as well as in Leipzig. From 1753 he sought other employment without success, his Enlightenment turn of mind sitting badly with Pietist superiors; he taught Friedrich Wilhelm Rust and Johann Samuel Petri, and among his works are church cantatas and duets for two flutes.