CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH: SONATA IN G MAJOR, H. 187

CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH

Keyboard Sonata in G Major, H. 187

I. Allegretto moderato 06:16

II. Andante 03:42

III. Allegro di molto 03:44

ARTHUR BALSAM at the Steinway Piano

Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750. Among contemporaries his only peer, Handel, passed from view in the same decade, when Mozart was barely three years old. Haydn was not yet heard from. Beethoven was not yet born. In this interregnum the more musical sons of Bach effectively prolonged the unique magic that had already attached to their surname. Indeed, they brought to their illustrious escutcheon a European “currency", in the words of Charles Sanford Terry, which "the profounder genius of their father had not been able to achive." Outstanding among the Bach progeny, and in many respects the most logical heir to their great artistic legacy, was Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714-1788).

None less than Mozart was to say of C.P.E. Bach: “He is the father; we are the children. Those of us who can do what is right learned it from him. Whoever does not own to this is a scoundrel.”

Mozart's panegyric was prompted by the justly celebrated book, Versuch uber die wabre Art das Klavier zu spielen, or Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments as it is entítled in the English edition. Nor was he alone in his high esteem for this work. Haydn described it as “the school of all schools" in musical education. And after two centuries it remains, by general assent, a classic. In our own time Wanda Landowska, for instance, has insisted that this treatise should be the Bible of every pianist. It was not as a pedagogue, however, that C. P. E. Bach secured his place of honor in the annals of the tonal art. His fame derives pre-eminently from

his role in "finalizing" of sonata form, most historians would agree. But this was not at all clear in his own day, when he was known chiefly as a virtuoso who, incidentally, was also a prolific composer.

Like many another creative spirit, he had started down the wrong road, preparing for a legal career at the Universities of Leipzig and Frankfurton-the-Oder. But before that he had attended the Thomasschule, and his precocity is amply documented. He was left-handed, which obviated his playing any bowed instrument. By way of compensation, perhaps, he achieved a remarkable proficiency with the clavier and organ at an early age - with or without his father's tutelage we are unable to say. And he seems to have had a kind of eidetic musical memory; it is said that when he was eleven he could glance at a page and then sit down to the

keyboard and reproduce it note for note. So that, having matriculated as studiosus juris, he not surprisingly found plenty of extracurricular time for the Musik Akademíe and Collegium Musicum at Frarkfurt. Being his father's son, he soon enough realized that law was not for him.

Officially, C. P. E.'s musical career began in 1740, when he was twentyfour, with his appointment as cembalist in the King's Kapelle. The King, newly acceded to the Prussian throne, was an amateur flutist of decidedly conservative tastes who had an apparently unlimited capacity for playing, in systematic rotation, a repertoire of some three hundred mostly mediocre concerti. Members of the court had to sit and listen, which must have been boring enough.

But the King's cembalist had to serve as accompanist on these frequent occasions, and he must have died a thou sand deaths as he made his way over and over again through stacks of royal Gebrauchsmusik by such as Quantz and the brothers Graun. Bach repeatedly sought release from his nominally enviable position, to which he was bound as a Prussian subject by marriage. But the monarch liked his accompaniments, and besides it was a point of prestige to have a Bach in one’s retinue. C. P. E. did not gain his freedom for twenty-seven years, as it turned out. So much for his indentured servitude to the man who was to become known, for other reasons, as Frederick the Great.

All this while and before,of course, C.P.E. Bach had been busy composing. Frederick did not much like his music, but others did. Immediately upon his enmancipation in 1767 - mercifuliy occasioned by the death of his godfather, Georg Philipp Telemann, whose directorship of the Hamburg Johanneum passed to him the Princess Amalia appointed Bach her Kapellmeister von Haus aus (i. e., non-resident), which must have infuriated Frederick. But he had already consented reluctantly to let his accompanist go.

Bach spent the remainder of his life in Hamburg as Cantor of the Johanneum, or Latin School, which is to say that he was responsible for all music in the city's five principal churches. This meant providing for some two hundred performances a year. Telemann had enlisted his godson's help, and that of others no doubt, in meeting this challenge regularly: after all, he held the job for fully forty years. C. P. E. made no serious attempt to compose more than a fraction of the music required.

He drew largely on the works of Telemann and, needless to say, the works of the elder Bach. Otherwise he busied himself with conducting, with administratíve detail (ín which he delighted for whatever reason), with playing the clavier and organ to his heart's content, and increasingly sharing with his brother Johann Christian ("the London Bach": 17351782 ) far more fame than ever came to their father until nearly a halfcentury after the last of them was dead.

The peregrinating Dr. Charles Burney, drawn by the excellences of what few C.P.E. Bach works he had heard, made a pilgrimage to Hamburg in 1773 to acquaint himselfpersonally with the composer, who was by then an eminence in his fifties. An engaging account of this hegira may be found in The Present State of Music in Germany, The Netherlands, and United Provinces. The following passage is pertinent:

“His performance today convinced me of what I had suggested before from his works; that he is not only one of the greatest composers that ever existed, for keyed instruments, but the best player in point of expression; for others, perhaps, have had as rapid execution; however, he possesses every style; though he chiefly confines him self to the expressive. He is learned, I think, even beyond his father, whenever he pleases, and is far before him in variety of modulation; his fugues are always upon new and curious subjects, and treated with great art as well as genius... He played me, among many other things, his last six concertos, lately published by transcription, in which he has studied to be easy, frequently I think at the expense of his usual originality. . .these

productions will probably be the better received for resembling the music of this world more than his former pieces, which seem made for another region, or at least another century, when what is now thought difficult and far-fetched will, perhaps, be familiar and natural.”

in the composer's masterwork, the six collections fur Kenner nd Liebbaber ('for connoisseurs and amateurs'. . ) published between1779 and 1787. Here Emanuel displays the sureness of touch and the virtuosity of the mature master.

The estimable Burney was astuteindeed to perceive that C. P. E. Bach composed for another region, or at least another century." Only in the twentieth century have his more forward-looking works begun to come into their own. But it was silly of the good doctor to infer that these were all "former pieces'". On the face of it one is forced to go along with the diametrically opposite view expressed by Karl Geiringer:

Every element of Emanuel's style in the Berlin period reappears in maturer and more concentrated form

Most of these compositions are sonatas which, as a rule, consist of three movements in closely related keys; but when the expressive content demands it the composer does not hesitate to use as unusual a key combination a G-g-E for the successive movements. Occasionally the three movements shrink to two, connected by a few transitional measures, and even a complete integration of all movements into a single unit occurs, anticipating nineteenth- century tendencies. Beginning with the second collection, Rondos join the Sonatas. These compositions, which were particular

favourites with Emanuel's contemporaries, are based on brief and deceptively simple subjects. The composer presents his ideas in ever new transformations, changing their pitch, dissolving them melodically, harmonizing them in different ways, and introducing unexpected rests and rubatos. His sudden changes between pianissimo and fortissimo, his crescendi ending up in piano, his diminuendi leading to a forte, as well as his ingenuity in offering ever new surprises to the delighted and amused listener clearly reveal an exquisite sense of humor.

These rondos are the musical counterpart of his witty and spirited conversations, which made the great intellects of his time seek Emanuel's company.”

Inasmuch as all the Sonatas and Rondos performed herewith are to be

found in the collections fur Kenner und Liebbaber, Professor Geiringer has left me with nothing to say, just as so often happened during the years when I studied under him. But I would like to add my concurrence with an assertion by Lawrence Gilman that the music of C.P.E. Bach in generalis "far too infrequentiy performed, for much of it has great distinction, singular beaury ani expressiveness, and an astonishing degree of what it is convenient (though hardly precise) to call 'modernity'."

The thoughtful listener is commended to the recital at hand for speedy corroboration.

Notes by JAMES LYONS Editor, The American Record Guide