'Father and Son' at the Leipzig Bach Festival

It is a little-known fact that Johann Sebastian Bach was part of a large musical family. Around 80 Bach relatives were active as musicians during the Baroque era, many of them organists, just like JS Bach himself.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the many branches of the Bach family would gather once a year in the central German region of Thuringia to celebrate and make music. These family concerts can be seen as the very first Bach festivals.

The current Bach Festival director, Michael Maul, took these musical family reunions as inspiration and invited 30 choirs from around the world to come to Leipzig to perform Bach's cantatas. Thus, the motto of the 2022 Bach festival was, "We are family."

The guest choirs are just a few members of today's global Bach family: There are many other choirs, musical groups and societies dedicated to Bach's music all over the world, in Europe, the United States, South Africa and Malaysia, among many other places. 

Festival opens with the 'Dorian' toccata

It's tradition that one of Bach's organ compositions kick off the Leipzig festival. This year, it was his moody and fascinating Toccata and Fugue in D minor, known as the "Dorian" toccata — a reference to one of the historic tonal modes. Johannes Lang, the new organist of St. Thomas Church, performed in the first recording in this episode.

The festival's opening concert also featured the renowned Thomaner choir, conducted by its new Thomaskantor, or music director, Andreas Reize. He is the 18th person to hold the position after Johann Sebastian Bach, who served from 1723 until his death in 1750. During that time, Bach was responsible for all the church music.

Reize has been music director of the singing group since September 2021, and he's the first Catholic to ever hold the position. Everyone before him was Protestant. Reize, who is from Switzerland, sang in a boys' choir as a child and later studied church music, organ and choral conducting. Before coming to Leipzig, he led Switzerland's oldest boys' choir.

Music by Bach's son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel

Carl Philipp Emanuel was a very influential composer in the second half of the 18th century, which was the early days of the Classical era — as opposed to the Baroque, which came before it. He composed more than 50 piano sonatas and 20 passion pieces, and also wrote pedagogical material such as "An Essay on the True Art of Playing the Keyboard." The text included sections on technique but also on the types of articulation or embellishments that should be used.

In this episode, we'll also listen to an Easter choral work by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach entitled "Gott hat den Herrn auferwecket," or "God has raised the Lord."

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote the Easter choral music in 1756. At the time, Carl Philipp Emanuel was the cembalo player at the court of Prussian ruler Frederick the Great. He had applied for the position of music director at St. Thomas after the death of his father, but he didn't get it. That's why he sent his Easter music to Hamburg, and more specifically, to the famous Baroque composer Georg Friedrich Telemann.

Telemann happened to be Carl Philipp Emanuel's godfather and was also the church music director in Hamburg. After Telemann's death in 1768, Carl Philipp Emanuel took over the position. In other words, he knew how to use his connections. He then went down in history as the "Hamburg Bach."

Carl Philipp Emmanuel's music sits right at the transition from Baroque to Classical, so it has a different sound than his father's. He uses less polyphony, or multiple voices, and more musical motifs and unusual harmonies — elements that went on to influence an entire generation of composers.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart supposedly once said of Carl Philipp Emanuel that "he is the father, we are the children."  

The most famous of Bach's sons

Carl Philipp Emanuel had his own unique style, and it fascinated people.

According to Michael Maul, the artistic director of the Bach Festival, he was the most famous of all of JS Bach's sons. "Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was celebrated by his contemporaries as a 'creative genius' who had invented his own unique style of sound. He made it his principal goal to describe big feelings in a musical and original way. He was quite avant-garde for his time. He really experimented in order to, as he himself put it, 'first and foremost touch the heart,' and to find a musical sound that spoke to people."

Despite his popularity, only a fraction of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's works had been published by the beginning of the 20th century. The Bach Archive in Leipzig spent years working with the American Packard Humanities Institute and Saxony's Academy of Sciences to put together a modern annotated edition of Carl Philipp Emanuel's complete works, which was available at the 2022 Bach Festival.

Back to Johann Sebastian Bach

The program returned to the music of Carl's father, Johann Sebastian Bach, as the concert drew to a close. For the finale, the audience in St. Thomas Church was treated to Bach senior's final oratorio, entitled "Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen," or "Praise God in all his kingdoms." But it's more commonly known as the Ascension Oratorio.

The work is an example of the musical term "parody," which doesn't have to do with satire. Instead, a parody in music is when a composer takes a pre-existing piece and reworks it for a new purpose. Reusing melodies and motifs like this was actually a common practice in the Baroque era. So don't be too surprised if, when listening to the Ascension Oratorio, you feel like you might have heard the music somewhere else before — you very well may have!

That's all for this episode of DW Festival Concert, hosted by Cristina Burack. You can listen to this program online at www.dw.com or on the radio if you live in the US. More details on radio programs can be found here.

Write to us at [email protected] and stay tuned for the next episode of DW Festival Concert, available online on October 17, 2022.

Edited by: Manasi Gopalakrishnan