BACH, CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL: Keyboard Works - Artur Balsam

CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH ARTHUR BALSAM liner notes

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.”