“Stop being clever and just play my music!”

- What was it like to grow up as the son of Johann Sebastian Bach?

- I guessed that would be your first question. Why can't I be interviewed in my own right and not just because I am (or was) the son of the "great Johann Sebastian"? Well, obviously it wasn't easy. We had our conflicts but who doesn't with their father? But of all my brothers, I think I really understood clearest just how much he did for us. If needed, he would write audition pieces for our job interviews and he always paid great attention to our careers. It was partly because of us that he moved to Leipzig so we could study at the university, an opportunity denied to him. He hated the city though.

- What was the relationship like between the Bach sons?

- I have always felt that the first-born, Wilhelm Friedemann was my father's favourite. Perhaps that was my good fortune because in the end I became more successful while my elder brother frittered his life away. Where talent is concerned, Friedemann could possibly have enjoyed an even better career than I did. My other two composer brothers were much younger than me: I was at university when Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian were born. After our father died, Johann Christian lived with me for five years in Berlin and that is where he wrote his first compositions. Then he moved to Italy, converted to Catholicism and changed his style. In a way, I'm glad father never lived to hear these superficial, diluted Italianate works.
 

- Can you tell us something about the time spent in the court of Frederick the Great?

- I was twenty-four when I went there and, fifty-four when I moved on to Hamburg. I met my wife in Berlin where my children were born – it was an important period of my life. I have to acknowledge that there were some superb musicians working in Frederick's court: the Graun and Benda brothers, and the King's favourite flautist Johann Joachim Quantz. At the beginning I was overjoyed to have a secure post, but after a while, it bothered me that I was only getting 300 tallers a year like the other musicians while the King's favourite Quantz was on 2000 a year. Other things annoyed me: after a while, the King's monotonous musical taste became boring and I can't deny he was never an easy personality. He was an eccentric figure, sensitive, talented and contradictory. You couldn't talk about it in those days but more than 200 years later I think I can now say that King was attracted to other men, which caused a lot of difficulties in his youth. When he ran away from his music-loathing, military-mad father Frederick William with his lover, a military officer called Katte, they were both imprisoned and his father ordered Katte to be executed in front of Frederick. From then on, his most faithful partner was his flute, which he called his "Principessa" and he played it every day.

- How did you become the director of music in Hamburg?

- By the 1760s, I was pretty well known across Europe through my published works. When my godfather Telemann, director of music in Hamburg, passed away in 1767, I applied for the post and spent the remainder of my life responsible for the music of five churches. In the last decade of my life, I was regarded as the most important composer in Europe. Mozart wrote in a letter that "Bach is the father and we are the children", and he was thinking of you, not Johann Sebastian. I happen to know that this letter is a fake but Mozart could justly have claimed to have emerged from my shadow. All of them. An English admirer of mine wrote to the distinguished music historian Charles Burney in 1774 saying that he was suffering from the unique disease of "Carlphilipemanuelbachomania!" History is a funny thing: audiences totally forgot about my father's music for decades after his death, while I became better known in Europe than he was at anytime during his life. Then after 1800, they rediscovered my father's music and forgot mine instead! Now on my 300th birthday, perhaps the record will be put straight. I am delighted to see just how much enthusiasm there is this year for my compositions. Of course, there are musicians for whom 2014 is not just Philip Emanuel Bach year, who have been au fait with my virtues for decades. For example Miklós Spányi, who teaches at your Liszt Academy. You know, I really regard him highly. I know very few keyboardists who understand my music as profoundly as he does. Are you a musicologist yourself?

- Yes.

- Then permit me to tell you something. And pass it on to your colleagues. It irritates me enormously that even now, many of you talk about me as if I represented a transitory period. As if I were the link between my father and Mozart. A transitory period? Have they not pondered the nature of time? What period is not transitory? As I wrote in my keyboard textbook, which I think is still valid today on my 300th birthday: the aim of music is to touch the heart. So stop being clever and just play and listen to my music! 

Words by Gergely Fazekas, published originally in the Fall 2014 issue of Liszt Academy Concert Magazine