Search Results

This chapter explores the nature of the filial and sibling relationships that prevailed between and among J. S. Bach and his five musical sons: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Gottfried Bernhard, Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian. By examining the often unflattering explicit (and implicit) testimony contained in the surviving epistolary and musical sources, the author seeks to understand how these uniquely privileged, and uniquely challenged, musicians came to terms with their paternal legacy and to determine how, and with what degree of success, they sought to emerge from their father’s artistic shadow.

The keyboard music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, commonly described as being for clavichord or generic “clavier,” reveals great variety of idiom, implying significant changes in players’ technical and interpretive approaches to performance of compositions from across the composer’s sixty-year career. This essay analyzes numerous sonatas, rondos, and fantasias, demonstrating the capabilities of both harpsichord and fortepiano for representing metaphoric speech in instances of instrumental recitative and in compositions that represent dialogues between opposing characters. Only the piano, however, can facilitate romantic effects appropriate to certain pieces through dynamics, legato articulation, and manipulation of dampers. Works that the composer described as “comic” actually juxtapose the serious and the farcical, as in the composer’s famous Empfindungen, a late work realizable only on a dynamic instrument.

This chapter takes a detailed view of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s singers, vocal performance materials, and pay records in Hamburg. Particular attention is paid to the occasional choral music for which both pay records (from the Hamburg Rechnungsbuch der Kirchenmusik [D-Hsa, Hs.462]) and vocal parts survive, especially the cantatas written for the installation of pastors at the Hamburg churches. While noting that there are several fascinating examples indicating the sharing of single parts by multiple singers, Cortens ultimately concludes that as in most other parts of Germany of the time, one singer per part was the norm for Bach’s performances of liturgical music after 1767.

The final chapter of the book broadens the horizon and explores how themes from the oratorio return in works Bach composed in the following months, leading up to the creation of the Ascension Oratorio for May 1735. The horizon is further widened in an overview of the reception history of the Christmas Oratorio, beginning with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s use of some of the movements in the 1770s and ending with the revival of the entire oratorio in the middle of the nineteenth century. This revival focused in particular on those parts that seemed to support the nineteenth-century view of Christmas as a domestic feast that celebrated childlike innocence and the “sweet baby Jesus” in the manger.

Because of its inherently abstract nature, untethered to the demands of language or representation, instrumental music was the art form that more than any other was deemed capable of revealing glimpses of a creator’s “true” self. Fantasy, humor, and irony were the three qualities perceived as most readily capable of revealing that self. These happen to have been the three qualities heard more often in the music of Beethoven than of any other composer of his time: contemporaries frequently found his music obscure. In retrospect, we can see that Beethoven was moving further and further from the long-standing framework of rhetoric toward a framework of hermeneutics, which challenged audiences to understand what they were hearing by listening from the perspective of the composer.