Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and his Berlin Symphonies
During the eighteenth century, the Prussian capital Berlin became one of Europe’s leading cultural centers. Among the musicians there serving King Frederick II “the Great,” himself an accomplished flutist and composer, were his flute teacher Johann Joachim Quantz, opera composer Carl Heinrich Graun, and keyboard player Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, second son of the great Johann Sebastian.
These were among the first to write examples of the symphony, which had originated as a type of opera overture. All three were influenced by Johann Adolf Hasse, then the leading composer of Italian opera in German-speaking Europe. Hasse had been writing overtures of this type since at least 1730. Compared to the later symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, these overture-symphonies may seem slight. Yet they combine brilliant effects for a virtuoso orchestra—a new phenomenon in European music—with contrasting expressive passages. These symphonies joined the repertory of the concerts that were becoming a regular part of European musical life. Concert halls did not yet exist; performances took place in private homes—the palaces of the aristocracy or the dwellings of the musicians themselves.
C. P. E. Bach, born in Weimar and raised in Leipzig, had come to Berlin in 1738. Three years later he was named chamber musician to Frederick II, serving him until 1767, when he left for Hamburg. Famous for his keyboard sonatas and concertos, Bach (as we can call him) composed in a highly individual version of the galant idiom favored at Berlin. Remote from that of his father, his empfindsam (hyper-expressive) style emerges in the eight symphonies composed during his Berlin years.
The Evolution of the Berlin Symphonic Style
Five of these works were included in a list of symphonies performed at Berlin in royally sponsored concerts alongside works by Quantz, Graun, and the king himself. Therefore it is not surprising that Bach’s first symphony, composed in 1741, closely resembles the overture to Graun’s first Berlin opera, Rodelinda, performed in December of that year. Both compositions open with a quick movement resembling the initial allegro of a concerto, although without soloists. A slow movement in the minor mode follows, then a dance-like finale in binary form, whose two halves are both repeated. Graun’s overture is for the standard Italian opera orchestra of the day: strings (violins, violas, cellos, and basses) plus two oboes and two horns. The winds, however, play only in the quick movements, and even there they are optional. Bach’s first symphony (no. 173 in the early twentieth-century work-list by Alfred Wotquenne) is for strings alone, joined by a harpsichord that adds improvised harmony to the bass line.
Bach wrote no further symphonies until 1755, which saw three such works; four followed during 1756–62. Bach would leave Berlin in 1768, but his early symphonies continued to be heard there. Only one was published, but all circulated in manuscript copies. Among those who owned copies was Sara Levy, grand-aunt of Felix Mendelssohn. She sponsored performances of Bach’s symphonies alongside similar works by his brother Wilhelm Friedemann and even the young Felix, whose early string symphonies might have been inspired by these very compositions.
The present recordings are the first to offer all these works in their original forms without wind parts. (One of Bach’s Berlin symphonies, W. 174, included two horns from the beginning and appears in volume 3 of this series.) The addition of winds amplified the sound and changed the instrumental color. Yet, as in his later Hamburg symphonies for strings (W. 182/1–6), Bach’s imaginative scoring assures constant variety of sonority even without winds, alternating between unison passages for all four parts, quasi-solos for the first violins, and various combinations of two and three parts. It can be refreshing to hear this music without woodwinds and brass (and even timpani in W. 176), which can overwhelm the strings in modern performances.
Bach’s first symphony remains close to the Italian overture tradition. Yet it departs from convention toward the end of the first movement, when the main theme, originally loud (forte) and in G major, is restated quietly (piano), in the minor mode. This might have startled the symphony’s first audiences, accustomed to the blander works of Graun and Hasse. Hasse himself would praise Bach’s E-minor symphony (W. 177) as the finest such work known to him. That symphony is in the so-called Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) style which Bach and Quantz had already adopted in certain sonatas and concertos of the 1730s and 1740s.
Structural Innovation and the Sturm und Drang Influence
Bach’s three symphonies of 1755 did not yet incorporate the most distinctive elements of his style. Caution was advisable in his first contributions of this type to Berlin’s burgeoning concert scene. Nevertheless his second symphony, W. 176 in D, follows examples by Hasse and Graun in linking all three movements through short transitional passages. Long before Beethoven did something comparable in his Fifth Symphony, this made the multi-movement work a single continuous entity; Bach would do the same in most of his subsequent symphonies. The slow movement, moreover, is in the customary binary form, but the repetition of each half is varied: the players put down their bows and play pizzicato, plucking the strings to produce a novel sound that would have charmed the first listeners.
Bach’s fourth symphony, W. 175 in F, opens with a striking chromatic theme, played in unison by the whole ensemble; the music then shifts immediately to the minor mode. A flurry of modulations carries the music further away from the home key, which is not re-established until a grand pause announces the beginning of the recapitulation (the final section of the first movement). The symphony continues with two rondos: in each, a principal theme alternates with secondary ideas. Before 1755 Bach had rarely employed this form, but it became a mainstay in the symphonies of his youngest brother, Johann Christian; he had been living with Emanuel after their father’s death in 1750, but in summer 1755 he left for Italy, later moving to England.
By 1755 Emanuel Bach had published examples of his concertos, sonatas, and songs (lieder). His symphonies, however, did not appear in print before 1759, when W. 177 was published by the firm of Balthasar Schmid, who had issued Sebastian’s Goldberg Variations. Composed in 1756, the E-minor symphony appeared in its original version, without wind instruments; Bach later added pairs of flutes, oboes, and horns, probably for concert performances at Hamburg, if not already at Berlin (this expanded version of the symphony is designated W. 178). Most eighteenth-century symphonies are in major keys; by publishing a symphony in E minor, Bach distinguished himself from other composers. Like W. 174, the E-minor symphony begins with a jagged theme played in unison by the full ensemble. The ensuing modulations are made more dramatic by harsh dissonances and sharp contrasts of forte and piano. Bach, moreover, avoids the customary restatement of the main theme at the beginning of the final section. Only at the end of the movement does the opening theme return in its original form, dying away to form a bridge to the following slow movement. The Andante is a polonaise, a Polish dance that had become popular in German-speaking Europe. Sebastian Bach left examples, and polonaises feature in Emanuel’s keyboard music; this one recurs as the slow movement of one of his keyboard sonatas. Unlike the grand nineteenth-century polonaises of Chopin, the eighteenth-century polonaise was an elegant dance whose music resembled that of a minuet. The present polonaise contains more florid melodic embellishment than most, but the dance’s traditional rhythm is evident in cadences that fall on the second beat of the triple measure (one–two–three).
The two latest symphonies on this program, although composed within two years of W. 177, differ significantly from their predecessors, pointing toward the innovations of Bach’s Hamburg works. Expressivity now mingles with wit; sometimes one cannot be sure whether a surprising detail in the music is serious or humorous. The three movements of each symphony are connected, and the music resembles Bach’s most challenging keyboard works of the period. The challenges lie less in demands made on individual players than in the need for precise coordination of the ensemble, which must execute the same expressive accents and rhetorical pauses that are prominent in Bach’s keyboard music. Although performable by a string quartet, this music was envisioned for a true string orchestra—albeit a small one by modern standards—as is evident from the orchestral effects heard from the very beginning of both works. The brilliant opening themes quickly give way to contrasting passages full of harmonic and rhythmic surprises. In the symphony in E-flat, W. 179, the rushing initial phrase suddenly grows quiet; after a pause, we hear a forte cadence, but then the violins play an unharmonized piano melody, which is echoed by the full string ensemble. This happens in each of the movement’s three main sections, after which a quiet transition leads to the slow movement, in G minor. This Larghetto is full of empfindsam dissonances and sudden contrasts of loud and soft (what Bach and Quantz called “light and shade”). The symphony concludes with a gigue, yet this is more than a boisterous dance. The dramatic development section at its center ends quietly, echoing the bridge heard at the end of the previous movement. The G-major symphony (W. 180) of 1758 is a companion to W. 179 of the preceding year. The concluding Allegro, however, is not a dance, having more the character of an opening movement. Yet its binary sonata form lacks a development section, suggesting that, as seriously as Bach wished to be taken as a composer of symphonies, he preferred to end here with something more witty than weighty.
David Schulenberg
This text will be featured in the liner notes for the upcoming album C.P.E. Bach: Berlin Symphonies, scheduled for release by BIS Records in May 2026.
