‘With a father who crowned his era with masterpieces in practically every area, the only thing to do was to use inventiveness in order to move on, and that is exactly what Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach did’, writes Christian Ihle Hadland about this evening’s programme, which presents two generations of the Bach family.
It was not until 1731, when his father Johann Sebastian Bach had reached the age of 46, that Carl Philipp Emanuel published his opus 1. It bore the subtitle – unimposing in modern terms – ‘Clavier-Übung’ (Keyboard Exercises), but in fact it consisted of six partitas composed between 1726 and 1731. All of them had actually been published separately before, but then as now opus 1 is a watershed. The period of training is over, and the composer is to be reckoned with. CPE Bach was principally known by his contemporaries as an organist, and the desire to market him additionally as a composer may explain this manoeuvre that appears rather strange to us.
The form of the Baroque suite as defined by the German composer Johann Jakob Froberger (1616–1676) has the Allemande (German dance in 4/4 time), Courante (fast dance in 3/4 time), Sarabande (slow dance first mentioned in Panama in 1539!) and Gigue (fast dance with English origins) as its basis. This was soon to be extended, and in his partitas Johann Sebastian Bach takes considerable liberties, augmenting them with numerous different movements. This may have been in order not to be bettered by Georg Philipp Telemann, the godfather of his second son Carl Philipp Emanuel. In his orchestral suites, of which there are over a hundred, Telemann made a point of always putting together a new combination of movements. The B flat major Partita is relatively traditional: Bach starts with a prelude and lets the sarabande and gigue flank two minuets.
The title ‘English Suite’ has for centuries given musicologists grey hairs, as there is little in the six suites resembling English style. In 1701 Charles Dieupart, a French composer living in London, wrote a collection of six harpsichord suites of which Bach is known to have possessed copies, and it may be these that inspired him when he composed his own suites. Another explanation is that an entrepreneurial publisher in the infancy of globalisation saw an opportunity to cash in on an exotic label. The suites are very traditional in construction, but all are extremely impressive. The dating is uncertain, but they probably stem from Bach’s Weimar period, around the time Carl Philipp Emanuel was born.
Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in A minor is probably no more than an occasional work, but the double fugue towards the end, in which he presents two separate fugue themes and brings them together in an inferno of sound, is truly astounding. The scale of the work indicates that it is likely it was conceived for the organ.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach truly deserves great gratitude. Possibly his greatest achievement was his decision to get rid of long, ornamented melodies in sonata form and replace them with short motifs around which it was possible to spin a movement. This permitted far more frequent changes of tonality and thus atmosphere, while at the same time having a cohesive effect on the movement. He was also a representative of the eighteenth century Empfindsamer Stil (which may be translated somewhat imprecisely as sensitive style), and furthermore he was influenced by Sturm und Drang, leading to constant dramatic changes in his music. However, an explanation may be needed for the concept of an emotionally unstable person who allows himself to be thrown from pillar to post as ideas occur to him. It does not mean that his emotions kneaded him like dough and then in a split second transported him from euphoria to the deepest tragedy: rather that it is a highly conscious game in which Bach has a given set of devices that he knows will affect his audience, and the audience goes along with the game. Truly a wonderful symbiosis.
With his two collections of Sonatas – Prussian Sonatas from 1742 and Württemberg Sonatas from 1744 – CPE Bach made a name for himself as a composer for the keyboard. Each collection consists of six sonatas, which display the composer’s ability, even at a comparatively young age, to combine the purity of the Baroque and the gallantry of the Rococo with deeply-felt expression. He dedicated the Prussian sonatas to the flute-playing King Friedrich II of Prussia (Frederick the Great) in an attempt to gain promotion at the court. His reward was however a cold shoulder, while the king lavished his attention on composers we scarcely hear of today – a fairly typical pattern for monarchs with poor judgement.
The last six sonatas were dedicated to Charles Eugene (Carl Eugen), Duke of Württemberg, and despite the short time lapse between the two collections, his ability as a composer noticeably develops, witnessed both by the liberties he takes with form and the subtlety of his music. The second collection was a far more astute investment of the composer’s time too: in 1746 CPE Bach was promoted to Kammermusikus at the court of King Frederick II in Berlin, where he remained until 1768, when he moved to Hamburg to take over as Musical Director after his godfather, Georg Philipp Telemann, a good friend of his father. He stayed in this post until his death twenty years later.