It wasn’t until the Bach revival movement in the early 19th century—of Johann Forkel’s Bach biography of 1802, and Felix Mendelssohn’s performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829—that the name Bach began to mean J.S., rather than C.P.E. This Bach, his second surviving son, was a prolific composer, who, in 1740, gained employment at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin as a harpsichordist. 

C.P.E. Bach is one of those composers who falls between the cracks of periodised musical history. Yet, his influence is constantly understated, perhaps because his most influential work was not a composition, but an aesthetic treatise: On The True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, which was essential in shaping performance practices in the early Classical period. In particular, Philipp Emanuel was important in suggesting performers should align themselves emotionally with the music they are performing. (“A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved,” he wrote, such as in sad passages, where “the performer must languish and grow sad.”) He also helped codify some performance trends that we still come across today. “Ugly grimaces are, of course, inappropriate and harmful, but fitting expressions help the listener to understand our meaning,” he wrote. If you’ve ever remarked on why performers regularly perform with unsightly or unusual facial expressions, blame Philipp Emanuel! 

Bach was a prodigious composer both in the concerto form, and for the flute, a particularly popular instrument at the time—especially in the court of Frederick the Great—which Bach often rearranged existing concerti for. This concerto in D minor, written as early as 1747, is no different. Versions exist for harpsichord and flute, with contrasting scholarly arguments as to which came first. Spanning three movements—fast, slow, fast—the first is declamatory and technical, the second lilting (with liberal uses of ornamentation) and the third comes with a fluttering, nervous vitality. With its darting runs, juddering repetitions, crunching discords and loud ensemble exclamations, the concerto’s conclusion seems to prefigure some of the Sturm und Drang tempestuousness that Mozart and Haydn would deploy so effectively later that century. 

Hugh Morris 2024