C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg: The Son Who Inherited Telemann’s City

When Georg Philipp Telemann died in Hamburg on 25 June 1767, aged 86, the city lost the musician who had run its church music for 46 years. The man chosen to replace him was his own godson, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian. Emanuel, as he was known, came to Hamburg in 1768 after almost three decades at the Prussian court, and he spent the last twenty years of his life there, so completely identified with the city that he is still called “the Hamburg Bach”. His story shows how the Bach legacy travelled far beyond Leipzig, carried by a son who was, in his own lifetime, more famous than his father. Hamburg is the final stop on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, with a visit to the museums of the city’s Composers’ Quarter.

A merchant republic’s music

Hamburg in the eighteenth century was a free imperial city, a wealthy Hanseatic port governed by its own senate and merchant families rather than by a prince. There was no court to pay for music. Instead, the city itself employed a director of music, who was also cantor of the Johanneum, the city’s Latin grammar school, and who was responsible for the music in Hamburg’s five principal Lutheran churches: St Peter, St Nicholas, St Catherine, St James and St Michael. The schoolboys of the Johanneum sang, the city’s salaried musicians played, and the director composed and organised the music for the churches’ calendar of services, feast days and civic ceremonies.

It was in many ways the same kind of office Johann Sebastian held in Leipzig, with a school, a group of city churches and a council as employer, but on a larger scale and in a richer, more cosmopolitan city. Hamburg also had a strong tradition of public music beyond the churches: Germany’s first public opera house had opened on the Gänsemarkt in 1678, and concerts open to anyone who could buy a ticket were part of city life well before they were common elsewhere in Germany.

Johann Sebastian’s Hamburg

The Bach connection with Hamburg did not begin with Emanuel. As a teenager, Johann Sebastian walked there from Lüneburg to hear the great organist Johann Adam Reincken at St Catherine’s Church, and in late 1720, as Kapellmeister at Köthen, he returned to apply for the post of organist at St James. During the visit he played the organ at St Catherine’s, one of the largest in Europe, before the elderly Reincken. According to the obituary later written by Emanuel and Bach’s pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola, he improvised for almost half an hour on the chorale “An Wasserflüssen Babylon”, and Reincken told him: “I thought this art was dead, but I see that it lives in you.”

Bach did not get the job. He left Hamburg before the final audition, and the post went to a candidate who paid the church a substantial sum for it, a practice the musician and critic Johann Mattheson mocked in print. Two years later, when Leipzig needed a new cantor, the council’s first choice was Telemann, who had been in Hamburg since 1721. He was offered the post, used the offer to win a pay rise from Hamburg and stayed, and the Leipzig job eventually went to Johann Sebastian, the story told in our overview of Bach’s Germany.

Telemann’s forty-six years

Telemann was the most productive composer of the age, and Hamburg kept him busy. As director of music he was expected to provide cantatas for the main churches through the year, a new Passion every Lent, and grand music for civic occasions, such as the anniversaries of the city’s militia or the installation of a new pastor. He also ran public concert series and was involved with the Gänsemarkt opera. He wrote well over a thousand sacred cantatas in his career, and he was still writing music in his eighties.

He also had a personal link to the Bach family. When Carl Philipp Emanuel was born in Weimar in March 1714, Telemann, then working in Frankfurt and a friend of Bach’s, was one of his godparents, and the boy was given his second name, Philipp, after him. Half a century later, the godson would take his godfather’s place.

From Frederick’s court to the Hanseatic city

Emanuel had spent most of his career in Berlin and Potsdam as harpsichordist to Frederick the Great, joining the royal musicians in 1740. He accompanied the king’s flute playing, wrote his influential treatise on keyboard playing, the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments), and was at court in 1747 when his father came to Potsdam and improvised for the king, the encounter described in our article on the Musical Offering and Bach’s Potsdam visit.

He was well respected but poorly paid and, by his own account, frustrated by a king whose musical taste had stopped developing. In 1750 he had applied to succeed his father in Leipzig, and he was turned down. When Telemann died, Emanuel applied for Hamburg and was elected in November 1767. After some difficult negotiations, Frederick released him, and his patron, the king’s sister Princess Anna Amalia, made him her honorary court composer. He began work in Hamburg in the spring of 1768, at the age of 54.

Twenty years as director of music

The Hamburg post was demanding. Emanuel was responsible for some two hundred performances a year across the five main churches, as well as music for civic occasions. Between 1768 and his death he wrote 21 Passion settings, one for each Lent, following Hamburg’s custom of rotating through the four Gospels, along with about seventy cantatas, motets, litanies and other church works. Like his father in Leipzig, he made extensive use of existing music, including works by Telemann and other composers, to keep up with the demand.

His most ambitious works were written for concerts rather than services. His oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste (The Israelites in the Wilderness) was first performed in 1769, and Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu (The Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus) became one of his best-known works, performed in Vienna in 1788 under Mozart’s direction. His double-chorus Heilig of 1776, a setting of the angels’ song from Isaiah, was a favourite of his own.

Emanuel also continued Telemann’s practice of public concerts, presenting oratorios by Handel, Haydn, Telemann and the Graun brothers alongside his own works, and often playing as a keyboard soloist. Under him Hamburg remained one of the leading musical cities in Germany. He was part of a lively literary circle that included the poets Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Matthias Claudius, and his house became a place that visiting musicians and writers made a point of calling on.

Burney’s visit, 1772

One of those visitors was the English music historian Charles Burney, who was touring Europe to gather material for his history of music. In 1772 he spent an evening at Emanuel’s house, and his account of the composer at the clavichord is one of the most vivid descriptions of any eighteenth-century musician. Emanuel played for hours, and Burney wrote that as he played he “grew so animated and possessed” that he looked like a man inspired. That intense, improvisatory style, full of sudden changes of mood and harmony, is heard in the fantasias Emanuel published in his later years in the six collections “für Kenner und Liebhaber”, for connoisseurs and amateurs.

Keeper of his father’s music

Emanuel’s most lasting service to the Bach legacy may have been as its guardian. When Johann Sebastian died in 1750, his manuscripts were divided among his family, and Emanuel received a large share, including the autograph score of the Mass in B minor. He co-wrote the obituary of his father, published in 1754, which remains a key source for Johann Sebastian’s life; he oversaw the publication of his father’s four-part chorales; and late in life he answered questions from Johann Nikolaus Forkel, whose biography of 1802 was the first full-length life of Bach.

He also performed his father’s music. On 8 April 1786, at a benefit concert in Hamburg for a medical institute for the poor, he conducted the Credo from the Mass in B minor, together with music from Handel’s Messiah and his own Heilig, in what is thought to have been the first performance of any part of the Mass before an audience. For the opening he wrote a short instrumental introduction of his own.

After Emanuel’s death, much of his collection passed through his widow and daughter to collectors, and a great deal of it eventually reached the Royal Library in Berlin. It was in that city, among musicians who had grown up with these manuscripts, that Felix Mendelssohn would revive the St Matthew Passion in 1829, the story told in our article on Mendelssohn and the 1829 St Matthew Passion. Mendelssohn’s great-aunt, Sara Levy, a keyboard player in Berlin, had been one of Emanuel’s last patrons.

Death and burial

Emanuel died in Hamburg on 14 December 1788, aged 74, and was buried in the crypt of St Michael’s, the great Baroque church whose tower, known locally as the Michel, has long been a landmark of the city. Over time the exact site of his grave was forgotten, and it was identified again only in the twentieth century. Today a plain slab marks it, and visitors often leave flowers there.

What is in Hamburg’s Composers’ Quarter?

The Composers’ Quarter, or KomponistenQuartier, is a group of small museums on Peterstraße, a short walk from St Michael’s, dedicated to composers who lived and worked in Hamburg: Telemann, Emanuel Bach, Johann Adolf Hasse, Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. The Emanuel Bach museum, opened in 2015, recreates a room of his era around a clavichord and uses audio stations to introduce his music, including a virtual conversation with Charles Burney. On the tour, the visit follows a morning walking tour of the historic centre and includes the Brahms Museum.

How accessible are the Composers’ Quarter museums?

Largely accessible, with one exception. The museums say most of their exhibition spaces can be reached without difficulty, but the historic Brahms Museum building has uneven floors, a steep staircase and no lift, so it needs a sure footing. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of activity on most days, and the Hamburg walking tour is mostly on level paved streets.

Can you visit C. P. E. Bach’s grave?

Yes, his grave is in the crypt of St Michael’s Church, which is open to visitors on payment of an entry fee. It is not part of the tour’s programme, but the church is a short walk from the Composers’ Quarter, and you may have time on your arrival afternoon in Hamburg, which is at leisure. Check the church’s opening times, as services and events can close parts of it.

Hamburg on the Bach route

Hamburg is a fitting end to a journey through Bach’s Germany. It is where the young Johann Sebastian came to hear the great northern organists, where his godfather-colleague Telemann flourished, and where his most celebrated son spent his last twenty years carrying the family’s music to new audiences, and its manuscripts to future generations.

Standing beneath the tower of St Michael’s at the end of the tour, it is worth remembering that for Emanuel’s contemporaries, “the great Bach” usually meant him. That his father’s reputation would one day eclipse his own is partly his doing: he was the son who made sure the music survived.