7/8 – Father and Son: Music of J.S. and C.P.E. Bach

Several of the sons of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1700) achieved musical distinction: Wilhelm Friedemann (1710-1784), known as the “Halle Bach;” Carl Philipp Emanuel (hereafter referred to as Emanuel) (1714-1788), one of the composers represented in today’s program, and known as the “Hamburg Bach;” Johann Christoph Friedrich (1732-1782). known as the “Bükeburg Bach;” and the eleventh and youngest son, Johann Christian (1735-1782), who was known as the “London Bach,” and who had a major influence on the young Mozart when the latter visited London.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, gave birth to Emanuel; he was their second son. The great German composer Georg Philip Telemann, the father’s good friend, was the newborn’s godfather (thus Philip for the second of Emanuel’s given names). The young man learned the rudiments of music from his father, but Law was to be his profession until a 1738 meeting with the music-loving Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia (King Friedrich II, two years later) changed things. Emanuel was appointed court harpsichordist in Berlin in 1740, but eventually finding the king most interested in flute music (and favoring Johann Joachim Quantz), he moved in 1767 to the cosmopolitan city of Hamburg, where he became Kantor of a prestigious school and music director of five prominent churches. Things came full circle as Emanuel became regarded as the worthy successor to the mantle of his great Hamburg predecessor, Telemann.

Like his father, Emanuel was a prolific composer, also in virtually every form except opera. There are 20 sinfonias for chamber orchestra; 84 concertos; roughly 135 chamber works of various varieties; some 350 pieces for keyboard solo (his keyboard works are considered to be a bridge between the Baroque and Classical schools of composition, his work typifying the so-called “affective style” of the period); 110 choral pieces; and close to 300 solo songs. Just as Wolfgang Schmieder catalogued his father’s works (with “BWV” or “S”-preceded numbers), Emanuel’s compositions have been catalogued by one Alfred Wotquenne (their listings designated with the prefix “Wq.”)

Today’s sonata by C.P.E. Bach was the first of two he wrote (around 1783) usually designated as “Hamburg Sonatas.”

The J.S. Bach G Minor sonata we hear has been transcribed for oboe and continuo from a work originally for flute and continuo, one of a group of six such, composed between 1718 and 1723.

In his book Reverberations (1976), Robert Jacobson reported that famed conductor Carlo Maria Giulini told of observing composer and conductor Paul Hindemith rehearsing music of J.S. Bach with a German orchestra, whose strings played with a constant staccato, without vibrato or variations in dynamics. After some minutes, Hindemith stopped the orchestra and asked for a more beautiful sound. The orchestra’s concertmaster apologized but insisted, “We descend from the Bach tradition and this is his style, the right way.” Hindemith responded, “I don’t know how, with no vibrato, Bach could have so many sons.”

A bit of Bach sibling rivalry was reported by one Johann Friedrich Reichardt, in his 1796 Musikalischer Almanach:

“(Johann) Christian Bach was a very lighthearted and merry man. When a serious friend reproached him for his easy ways – he would toss off the light and ephemeral pieces demanded of him and throw away the money they earned on frivolities and sensual delights – he would point to his elder brother in Berlin (C.P.E. Bach), who wrote big works and held on to what he earned, and say, ‘My brother lives to compose while I compose to live; he works for others, I work for myself’.”