C.P.E. Bach - Wq 22:3 - Concerto for Flute in D minor - James Galway

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (8 March 1714 – 14 December 1788), also formerly spelled Karl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, and commonly abbreviated C. P. E. Bach, was a German Classical period musician and composer, the fifth child and second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach. His second name was given in honor of his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann, a friend of Johann Sebastian Bach.

C. P. E. Bach was an influential composer working at a time of transition between his father's Baroque style and the Classical style that followed it. His personal approach, an expressive and often turbulent one known as empfindsamer Stil or 'sensitive style', applied the principles of rhetoric and drama to musical structures. Bach's dynamism stands in deliberate contrast to the more mannered galant style also then in vogue.

To distinguish him from his brother Johann Christian, the "London Bach", who at this time was music master to the Queen of Great Britain, C. P. E. Bach was known as the "Berlin Bach" during his residence in that city, and later as the "Hamburg Bach" when he succeeded Telemann as Kapellmeister there. To his contemporaries, he was known simply as Emanuel.

He was probably the first composer of eminence who made free use of harmonic color for its own sake. In this way, he compares well with the most important representatives of the First Viennese School. In fact, he exerted enormous influence on the North German School of composers, in particular Georg Anton Benda, Bernhard Joachim Hagen, Ernst Wilhelm Wolf, Johann Gottfried Müthel, and Friedrich Wilhelm Rust. His influence was not limited to his contemporaries and extended to Felix Mendelssohn and Carl Maria von Weber.

Bach was also an influential pedagogue, writing the ever influential "Essay on the true art of playing keyboard instruments", which would be studied by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, among others.

Through the later half of the 18th century, the reputation of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach stood very high, surpassing that of his father. Haydn and Beethoven admired him and "avidly" collected his music. Mozart said of him, "Bach is the father, we are the children."

His work is full of invention and, most importantly, extreme unpredictability, and wide emotional range even within a single work, a style that may be categorized as empfindsamer Stil. It is no less sincere in thought than polished and felicitous in phrase. His keyboard sonatas, for example, mark an important epoch in the history of musical form. Lucid in style, delicate and tender in expression, they are even more notable for the freedom and variety of their structural design; they break away altogether from both the Italian and the Viennese schools, moving instead toward the cyclical and improvisatory forms that would become common several generations later.