Composer of the Week: CPE Bach

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

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An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: CPE Bach (1714-1788): The Sentimental Style

The Sentimental Style

CPE Bach (1714-1788)

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, CPE Bach (1714-1788), The Sentimental Style

Donald Macleod explores the sound of CPE Bach's music, written in the Empfindsamer Stil.

This week we look at CPE Bach's music and reputation in the light of the sensational rediscovery of much his archive in 1999. Throughout the week we'll hear recent recordings of this 'new' music. In this episode, Donald Macleod explores the sound of CPE Bach's music, written in the 'Empfindsamer Stil'. 

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s music sits somewhere between the high baroque of his father, JS Bach, and the stripping back of ornamentation by Haydn and Mozart. It’s often described using the German word for sensitive or sentimental, 'Empfindsam'.

The Empfindsamer style aimed to express ‘true and natural’ feelings, in contrast to the baroque, and drew on a very wide range of cultural influences: poets, painters, philosophers and writers, in particular Laurence Sterne, whose Sentimental Journey was translated into German as Empfindsame Reise. All of that is far from the almost exclusively theological focus of JS Bach. For Carl Philipp Emanuel, music wasn’t about technical brilliance, but all about stirring the emotions of the listener.  Bach believed that music should reflect human nature, and hold up a mirror to the emotional world of man. The emotions should be stirred, and this should have a cathartic effect.

Symphony in D Major, Wq 183 No 1
Marek Toporowski, continuo
Solamente Naturali
Didier Talpain, conductor

Fantasia No. 2 in C Major, Wq 59 No 6
Christine Schornsheim, clavichord

Wer ist so würdig als du; Ach, ruft mich einst zu seinen Freuden, H 805 (Nun danket alle Gott)
Jan Kobow, tenor
Himlische Cantorey
Les Amis de Philippe
Ludger Rémy, conductor

Sonata in C Minor, Wq 78
Laurent Albrecht Breuninger, violin 
Piet Kuijken, fortepiano

Morgengesang am Schöpfungsfeste, W 239
Barbara Schlick, soprano
Johanna Koslowsky, soprano
Rheinische Kantorei 
Das Kleine Konzert
Hermann Max, conductor

Produced by Iain Chambers for BBC Wales

Composer of the Week: CPE Bach (1714-1788)

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod tells the story of the discovery of a lost archive of CPE Bach manuscripts.

Donald Macleod looks at CPE Bach's music and reputation in the light of the sensational rediscovery of a lost archive of manuscripts in 1999.

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