C. P. E. Bach's Organ Sonatas: A Musical Offering for Princess Amalia?

Abstract

This article presents a history of the prelude and six sonatas, Wq 70/1-7, that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach reputedly wrote for Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia. As a musical patron of mid-eighteenth-century Berlin, the princess was second only to her brother, Frederick the Great. Her library of musicalia (the Amalien-Bibliothek), celebrated in her lifetime, is still of paramount importance to scholars. The present study offers solutions to two mysteries surrounding the works of Wq 70: the absence of all but one from the Amalien-Bibliothek and the conflict of late eighteenth-century accounts of Bach's solo organ works with the canon established in the catalogues of Alfred Wotquenne and Eugene Helm. It considers the role that the princess's conservative musical taste probably played in the acquisition of scores for her collection. It investigates the reception of the works of Wq 70, not only by Bach's royal patroness, but by publishers and a large clientele of keyboardists of his time, and considers the circulation of these compositions in versions for stringed keyboard instruments-far more fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century than the organ.