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“The year is 1775 in Hamburg. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was already an internationally renowned composer with many contacts. And he was certainly aware of the popularity of these small-scale works, for his half-brother Johann Christian, in London, was one of the most prominent promoters of this then new culture of domestic piano playing. In response to market demand, Carl Philip Emanuel concluded an agreement with the London publisher Robert Bremner: the following year, six sonatas for harpsichord or pianoforte accompanied by a violin and a cello (Wq 89) were to be printed and published. Despite the chosen title, Bach occasionally referred to these works as “trios”, on the other hand as sonatas, sometimes even as “trios (also solos)”. Apparently he did not quite know what to call them. They could not be classified according to the usual categories. They were neither trios (in the traditional baroque sense of the trio sonata with two equal instrumental parts and continuo accompaniment), nor solo piano works, nor “solos” (works for different solo instruments and continuo). Bach’s ambivalence towards this new fashionable genre becomes clear in a letter in which he described his accompanied sonatas as something “half-baked – or middle thing of everything” in a pejorative way. Despite this, the new publication was extremely successful – Bach, whose duties included composing sacred choral music, now enjoyed a pleasant extra: ‘I am certainly luckier than right. People are infatuated with my mediocre work, and I’m a beneficiary’ In 1776 and 1777 he published two further volumes (Wq 90 and Wq 91) with Breitkopf in Leipzig, which were also very successful. Apart from C. P. E. Bach’s business sense, these works show that he was at the height of his art. They are full of original ideas and strong expressions; any shocking surprises even occasionally go beyond what Beethoven would have dared to do…” (Extract from the booklet text of the LINOS PIANO TRIOS) |
