C.P.E. Bach

Biography

German composer, keyboardist, and writer, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was the fifth child, the second son, of the Baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach. After his death in Hamburg, Germany, where he had lived for the last twenty years of his life, he was buried at Michaeliskirche in that city. He is credited with about 900 works, including sonatas, fugues, rondos, and symphonies.

His manner of composition, influenced by rhetoricians and dramatists, is sometimes called the sensitive style, or Empfindsamer Stil. It diverged from that of the Baroque era, differed from both the Italian and the Viennese Schools of his day, and helped usher in a new age in music, the Classical period. His works are generally known by their “H” numbers, after a catalog compiled in 1989 by Eugene Helm. For example, H1, “Marches & polonaises for keyboard,” H3, “Keyboard sonatas in B flat major,” and perhaps the best known today, H220, “Solfeggietto in C minor.”