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Alles Gute zum Geburtstag Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach! 📯🍷 Composer: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) Work: Sinfonia in C-Dur (1755), HelB 649 / Wq 174 Performers: Gοttingеr Barockorchеster; Antοnius Adаmskе (conductor) Painting: Ludwig de Witte (fl. 1737-1738) - Stable-Boy with Piebald Stallion in a Wide Landscape HD image: Painting: Johann Philipp Bach (1752-1846) - Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach HD image: Further info: Listen free: No available --- Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Weimar, 8 March 1714 - Hamburg, 14 December 1788) German composer and church musician, the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach and his first wife, Maria Barbara. He was baptized on 10 March 1714, with Telemann as one of his godfathers. In 1717 he moved with the family to Cöthen, where his father had been appointed Kapellmeister. His mother died in 1720, and in spring 1723 the family moved to Leipzig, where Emanuel began attending the Thomasschule as a day-boy on 14 June 1723. J.S. Bach said later that one of his reasons for accepting the post of Kantor at the Thomasschule was that his sons’ intellectual development suggested that they would benefit from a university education. Emanuel Bach received his musical training from his father, who gave him keyboard and organ lessons. From the age of about 15 he took part in his father’s musical performances in church and in the collegium musicum. He appears relatively seldom as a copyist, no doubt because, as an able musician himself, he was usually excused such duties. The one large-scale work of sacred music in Leipzig mainly copied by him is the anonymous St Luke Passion (bwv246), obviously arranged by J.S. Bach to an urgent deadline for Good Friday 1730. On 1 October 1731 Emanuel matriculated at Leipzig University. Following his godfather’s example, he studied law, although he was obviously destined for a musical career. His first compositions were probably written about 1730. They consisted mainly of keyboard pieces and chamber music. Deciding to become a musician, he was recommended to Crown Prince Frederick in Rheinsburg, and upon the crown prince’s crowning as Frederick II of Prussia, he moved to Berlin as a chamber musician, a formal title granted in 1746. As an active member of the Berlin School, he participated in the intimate inner circle of musicians and writers of the period, producing a seminal treatise on keyboard playing, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, in 1752. The death of his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann in 1767 offered him the opportunity to seek the appointment as city Kapellmeister in Hamburg (a post that was temporarily occupied by Georg Michael Telemann). From 1768 to his death, he was the leading musician in the city, whose friendship with major literary figures such as Friedrich Gottlob Klopstock and Johann Heinrich Voss, his pedagogical efforts at the Johanneum, and the maintaining of his close ties to colleagues in Berlin made him one of the most prominent figures in music of the period. Over the course of his long career, he composed almost 900 works in all genres save opera (and there is an indication that he may have made an abortive attempt at one). One of the main figures in the emerging empfindsamer Stil (Empfindsamkeit) with its emphasis upon emotion and drama in music, he created compositions that were far ahead of his time in terms of harmony and form. For example, the introduction to the oratorio Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu is both monophonic and atonal, while his free fantasies move rapidly from tonal center to tonal center using sometimes harsh dissonance, extreme changes in tempo and dynamics, and effective musical moods, all without metrical regularity. Ludwig van Beethoven lauded him as his spiritual father, and almost all other composers of the period imitated his style. He published works, such as the Klopstock’s Morgengesang, by subscription, having control over much of his own creative output. His compositions include 370 miscellaneous works for keyboard (sonatas, fantasias, etc.), 69 keyboard concertos (plus 20 “sonatinas” for keyboard and orchestra), 11 flute concertos, 19 symphonies, two keyboard quartets, six pieces for Harmoniemusik, 37 sonatas for various instruments (violin, viola da gamba, harp, flute, etc.), 48 trio sonatas, 30 pieces for musical clockwork, 277 songs and secular cantatas, a Magnificat, two Psalms, 22 Passions/Passion cantatas, an oratorio, 13 large-scale choruses, an ode, 14 chorales, four Easter cantatas, 26 pieces for Hamburg celebrations, and nine cantatas. He was the most important composer in Protestant Germany during the second half of the 18th century, and enjoyed unqualified admiration and recognition particularly as a teacher and keyboard composer.
