Review Summary: "Bach is the father, we are the children."
Make Forgotten Composers Great Again. No. 2
History is a strange thing; you can go years, decades, or even a lifetime believing that historical facts are set in stone. But as it turns out, Julius Caesar never said ‘E tu Brute', Cleopatra was not Egyptian, and Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire—that was Theodosius, google it. This last one really gets me. I’ve
never heard a single person get it right. I’ve seen everyone from Noam Chomsky, to the guy who daily wore a drug-rug in my philosophy class, to those stupid pamphlets Christian nutjobs hand out, all get it wrong. It drives me nuts. I mean, never has information been so easy to access, and yet easily refutable myths continue to persist. It’s a tired cliché but history is often written by the victors, or at least by whoever possesses the power to control the narrative. #fakenews amirite？It’s unfortunate, but to “control the narrative” also necessarily means the exclusion of XY&Z, and since there are winners and losers in every facet of history, there’s a large amount of it that everyone, including myself, just gets plain wrong.
In all my years spent enjoying classical music never was the saliency of this dictum clearer to me than when I first listened to C.P.E. Bach and the North Germans of the late 18th century. I had spent my entire musical life thinking that from the mid 18th century to the early 19th century there were only four or five composers worth listening to, and, more importantly, that each had neatly built off the accomplishments of the last. But, and if I do say so myself, it’s really not my fault. This is how the evolution of music was presented to me, and I dare you to find a music history textbook that indicates otherwise. What’s worse is that C.P.E Bach’s name actually
isn’t ever omitted. It’s always there just long enough to mention that he was a son of Johann Sebastian, but just short of anything he ever did. So, you could imagine my surprise when I learned that there was an equally vibrant school of music located in North Germany coexistent with the big three of the Viennese, and headed by none other than our man, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
Born in 1714 in Weimar, C.P.E.’s style encompassed what was known as
Empfindsamer Stil or ‘The Sensitive Style’, a style which employed grand dynamics, a range of wide emotions, tone painting, harmonic color, an improvisatory nature, and finally, an emphasis on the avoidance of monotony. It’s true, qualities such as these in a musical style aren’t unique. But if these qualities aren’t impressive in and of themselves, consider the epoch in which Emanuel composed, the Galant. Emanuel’s style stood in stark contrast, intentionally might I add, with the musical gallantry then in vogue, c.1725-1775, (interestingly enough, popularized by one of Emanuel’s brothers, Johann Christian Bach), and the Viennese school of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, c.1760-1830.
One of the best pieces which exemplifies C.P.E.’s style is the mischievously delightful D Minor Keyboard Concerto, Wq. 23. The first thing to note about Wq. 23 is the year of its composition, 1748. That Emanuel composed a work so wildly at odds with the then madly popular Galant movement speaks volumes about his originality. In 1748 Baroque masters Johann Sebastian Bach and Handel had two and nine more years to live respectively, Haydn was sixteen and wouldn’t compose his first keyboard concerto for another eight years, and the world would have to wait eight and then twenty-two years respectively for Mozart and Beethoven to be born. In other words, we are smack dab in the middle of the transitory period between the late Baroque and the early Classical.
Emanuel’s D Minor Keyboard Concerto is a wild ride. The first thing you’ll notice about C.P.E is his emphasis on freshness. In just about every facet of musical composition does Emanuel Bach choose to be the sworn enemy of monotony, and the ritornello that opens Wq. 23 is no exception. What you have is striking: sudden stops and starts, jaggedness in the strings, dotted rhythms, trills, sforzandos, and lush autumnal harmonies all of which whiz by at an
allegro pace. But it is the ensuing melody that features the peculiarities singular to Emanuel Bach. You, of course, have your wide leaps, wide skips, and tons of accidentals. But, CPE takes care to
never have a melody repeated in the same way twice, and how refreshing it is! Nevertheless, beneath the rainforest of embellishments, the melody is too memorable not to recognize. Again, such an emphasis on variation allows the music to breath much freer than some of the best that high Classicism had to offer.
Once the ritornello concludes Emanuel showcases his magnificent ability to balance the solo and the orchestra. The keyboard opens with a repeat of the ritornello’s motif before the tutti comes together to trade the theme between the orchestra and the keyboard. This is quite impressive considering the highly irregular nature of the theme. Next, the keyboard goes on an extended rhapsodic and virtuosic interlude that will quite literally have you at the edge of your seat, for multiple times does Emanuel have the keyboard pretend to lead into the orchestra. In effect, your ear keeps expecting the return of the main theme, only to have the rug ripped right out from under you. As I said, there is perpetual freshness here that the highly regular and streamlined nature of Classicism cannot offer. Finally, Bach has the solo neatly lean into the return of the ritornello which bounces the theme’s motifs around in different shapes and sizes, never doing the same thing twice.
Bach now brings us to the second solo, more expansive than the first. Here, Bach explores all the expressive possibilities of the material in a sort-of quasi “development” that later composers would make use of in sonata form. The motifs are reshaped and resized in all forms and manners. Next, an abbreviated form of the ritornello returns right before leading into the third solo which features new material and brilliant figurations. Finally, we have the return of the final ritornello, except now, in order to fulfil the demands of a genre that features both a solo and an orchestra, Bach returns to the version of the theme shared between the two, cadenza and all.
The culprit of CPE Bach’s reputational demise is a now familiar one; 19th century Romanticism. If Robert Schumann and his ilk had relegated Joseph Haydn to the back pages of music history, C.P.E. Bach was a footnote. Here are only some of the derogatory things that have been said about C.P.E. over the centuries. Beginning with Schumann in the 1830s: “as a creative musician he remained very far behind his father”, “immature”, “historically interesting [rather than musically]”, “a somewhat feeble imitator of his father’s style”, and Charles Rosen’s notorious quip, “C.P.E. Bach’s breadth lacks grandeur just as his passion lacked wit.” What does that even mean？
It will forever remain strange to me why the classical community
still lets the opinions of a small group of mid-19th century men dictate current repertoire in perpetuity. What’s even more confounding is CPE’s reputation as a musical giant among the Viennese masters. Beyond simply admiring and esteeming C.P.E.’s genius, Beethoven demanded that his nephew find a copy of Bach’s treatise,
An Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, which both he and Haydn swore by. Moreover, in his old age Haydn finally acknowledged both the importance of Emanuel’s symphonies and their influence they had on his own. The encyclopedia Britannica goes on to say, “from them [Haydn] certainly learned the form of the sonata and symphony, of which [CPE] may fairly claim to have been the originator, though Haydn enriched it and gave it permanence.” But it is Mozart who gives us the most salient indication of Bach’s stature during his lifetime. Responding to a question about CPE’s influence Mozart retorted, “Bach is the father, we are the children.”
