Again he did not win the position - this time because he does not seem to have pursued his application energetically. In 1753, Emanuel Bach applied for a position as organist at the Johanniskirche in Zittau. But the nineteen-year-old Emanuel who applied later the same year for the post of organist at the Wenzelkirche in Naumburg was not successful, perhaps because he was not sufficiently experienced.
In 1733, his oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, aged 22, won a position as organist at the Sophienkirche in Dresden. It is difficult to imagine that a son of Johann Sebastian Bach was not an excellently trained organist - Sebastian Bach owed what little recognition the eighteenth century granted him to his virtuosity as an organist, to his compositions for organ, and to his expertise as an appraiser of organs. But we do not know how well he played the organ. We read glowing eighteenth-century descriptions of him as a harpsichordist, clavichordist, and fortepianist. Emanuel's eighteenth-century reputation as a composer had rested in large part on his works for keyboard instruments the faint remembrance in which the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held his name continued to depend upon these works, and it is Bach's keyboard music that has led the revival of his music within the past 40 years.Įmanuel Bach was also famous as a performer on stringed keyboard instruments.
Shortly after Emanuel Bach's death, the popularity of the two composers was reversed : Sebastian's works underwent a richly deserved revival his son's name sank undeservedly into obscurity. Throughout the last half of the eighteenth century, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), the second musician son of Johann Sebastian Bach, received far more recognition as a composer than did his father.
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