Johann Christoph Bach (jan 1, 1735 – jan 1, 1782)

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The "London" Bach

Bach's youngest and most successful son. Wrote both operas and sonatas in a career resembling Handel's more than his father's. His main teacher was CPE, then Giovanni Battista Martini in Italy. He converted to Catholicism to take a job as organist at the Milan Cathedral. Wrote an opera based on Metastasio's libretto of Artaserse.

Just as in Handel's day, music in London was a apublic, commercial affair. JC's career followed the ups and downs of the market, with his most lucrative prospects for printed music being keyuboard and chamber pieces for domestic use.

Married a leading Italian soprano, Cecilia Grassi. His fame brought operatic commissions from the Continent, not just from the German lands but even from Paris. All in all, JC was a phenomenally versatile and fashionable composer, turning out music in every contemporary medium and for every possible outlet.

Comparing CPE's Fantasy in C Minor with JC's Sonata in D Major reveals two complementary sides of what might be called the domestic music of the mid-eighteenth century. CPE's is solitary, introspective, inner-directed music; JC's is sociable, outgoing. CPE explores personal, private, even unexpressed feelings; we easily imagine this music performed for an audience of one (or even none but the player, seated alone at the clavichord), late at night, in a mood of emotional self-absorption, pondering, p[erhaps, whether "to be or not to be". JC offers party music, implying a surrounding hubbub of conversation. That sums up the different between Empfindung and galanterie, and it is no accident that the one word is German and the otehr French.

It was the convivial spirit of galanterie that gave rise to what we now call chamber music in its modern sense. The first pieces of this kind grew directly out of the keyboard sonata.

The accompanied keyboard sonata was a fully composed, self-sufficient keyboard sonata to which a violin or flute part could be added ad libitum, "at the pleasure of the performer." By the 1760s, accompanied keyboard sonatas were being written everywhere, and JC and his London colleague Abel had become preeminent in this typically galant genre. In fact, JC published nearly twice as many accompanied keybaord sonatas as unaccompanied ones, which gives an idea of the genre's quick ascendancy. Even CPE was moved to try his hand at this profitable genre, if only half-heartedly. According to a famous quip of JC's (like all such reported comments, possibly of questionable authenticity), "my brother lives to compose and I compose to live." It would be hard to come up with a better encapsulation of Empfindsamkeit in relation to galanterie!

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