Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

C.P.E. Bach's music is defined by the Empfindsamer Stil (sensitive style) — music of intense, rapidly shifting emotions with dramatic pauses, unexpected harmonic detours, and improvisatory freedom. His keyboard fantasias sound like someone thinking out loud at the instrument, veering between tenderness, fury, and wonder. His orchestral writing is equally unpredictable, with sudden dynamic contrasts and theatrical gestures that anticipate Beethoven.

He was J.S. Bach's second surviving son and most prominent student, but his style deliberately broke from his father's Baroque idiom. He served Frederick the Great in Berlin for nearly 30 years before succeeding Telemann in Hamburg. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all studied his keyboard works and his influential treatise Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments.

His Berlin period (1738–1768) produced brilliant keyboard sonatas, concertos, and the famous Essay. Moving to Hamburg, he expanded into large-scale choral works and symphonies. His late works are his most daring — the keyboard fantasias and late symphonies push emotional expressivity to extremes that make Haydn sound restrained by comparison.

When C.P.E. Bach improvised at the keyboard, contemporaries described the experience as almost frightening in its emotional intensity — he would weep, tremble, and seem possessed by the music. Frederick the Great reportedly found it a bit too much. This deeply personal, almost confessional approach to keyboard playing was revolutionary and pointed directly toward the Romantic era.

C.P.E. Bach's Hamburg symphonies (the 'String Symphonies,' Wq. 182) are extraordinary — six works of furious intensity and wild emotional contrasts that rival anything in the pre-Beethoven symphonic repertoire. They're compact, thrilling, and inexplicably neglected.

The Cello Concerto in A Major is a staple. The keyboard works are increasingly performed by both harpsichordists and fortepianists. His symphonies are appearing more frequently as period-instrument ensembles champion them. He's been undervalued for centuries — overshadowed by his father and his Classical successors — but a genuine revival is underway. Every performance reveals music of startling freshness and emotional power.