BACH, CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL: The Prussian Sonatas, Wq. 48 - Louis Bagger

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's "Sei sonate per il cembalo" were published at Nuremberg in 1742. Because of their dedication to Frederick the Second (the "Great"), of Prussia, they have come to be commonly known as the "Prussian" sonatas. Frederick II had just succeeded to the throne of Prussia and Bach had just entered his service, where he remained for twenty-seven years. The sonatas, numbers 21 through 26 in Beurmann's chronological listing of Bach's solo sonatas, were composed between 1740 and 1742 and represent his Opus One, his first significant publication and his coming of age as a creative artist. They are also an Opus One for the history of the solo keyboard sonata as a genre. True "sonatas" in the modern, not the Baroque, sense, they are all in three movements, fast-slow-fast, connected by strong, if often intangible, threads of texture and rhetoric. Their forms and musical speech are founded on the modern principle of multiplicity and contrast unfolding in the dimension of time: even in such a relatively unified and, in the ordinary sense, undramatic first movement as that which opens Sonata 5, there is a Haydnesque opposition between, on the one hand, the two rather similar "themes" and, on the other, a short motive, first heard in the "bridge"    passage,    which  is  used  for developmental passages. Formal members, opening themes and closing phrases for example, use specialized kinds of material, and are clearly set off from their surroundings.