Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) - more commonly known as C.P.E. Bach - was a German musician and composer of the early Classical period.

The second of eleven sons of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach, C.P.E. Bach was born in Weimar on 8th March 1714. He was one of the founders of the Classical style, composing in the rococo and classical periods.

Through the latter half of the eighteenth century, his reputation was very high. This was mainly because of his clavier sonatas, which marked an important development in the history of musical form. Lucid in style, delicate and tender in expression, they are even more notable for the freedom and variety of their structural design; they break away altogether from the exact formal antithesis which, with the composers of the italian school, had hardened into convention, and substitute the wider and more flexible outline which the great viennese masters showed to be capable of almost infinite development.