Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach, was one of the most original composers of the eighteenth century. Known in his lifetime as the “Berlin Bach” and later the “Hamburg Bach,” he stood at a crucial point between the Baroque world of his father and the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart.

After study in Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder, he served for nearly three decades at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin before succeeding Telemann as music director in Hamburg. His output includes keyboard sonatas, concertos, symphonies, chamber works, passions and sacred vocal music.

C.P.E. Bach’s music is often associated with the empfindsamer Stil, or sensitive style: expressive, quick-changing, intimate and sometimes startling in its harmonic turns. His keyboard writing in particular opened new paths for personal expression and dramatic rhetoric.

He was also a major theorist, whose treatise on keyboard playing became one of the century’s most influential musical documents. To later generations he was not merely a son of Bach, but a founding voice of modern musical sensibility.