In an age of royal patronage, father and son alike knew that a university education helped prevent a professional musician from being treated as a servant.

[1] He was by this time one of the foremost clavier players in Europe, and his compositions, which date from 1731, include about thirty sonatas and concert pieces for harpsichord and clavichord.

[1] During his time there, Berlin was a rich artistic environment, where Bach mixed with many accomplished musicians, including several notable former students of his father, and important literary figures, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, with whom the composer would become close friends.

His reputation was established by the two sets of sonatas which he published with dedications to Frederick the Great (1742) and to Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg (1744).

[1] In 1746, he was promoted to the post of chamber musician (Kammermusikus) and served the king alongside colleagues like Carl Heinrich Graun, Johann Joachim Quantz, and Franz Benda.

Bach's interest in all types of art led to influence from poets, playwrights and philosophers such as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing.

[1] But his main work was concentrated on the clavier, for which he composed, at this time, nearly two hundred sonatas and other solos, including the set Mit veränderten Reprisen (With Varied Reprises, 1760–1768).

[1] While in Berlin, Bach placed himself in the forefront of European music with a treatise, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (An Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments), immediately recognised as a definitive work on keyboard technique.

The first part of the Essay contains a chapter explaining the various embellishments in work of the period, e.g., trills, turns, mordents, etc.

The second part presents Bach's ideas on the art of figured bass and counterpoint, as well as performance suggestions and a brief section on extemporization, mainly focusing on the Fantasia.

[15] In 1768,[1] after protracted negotiations,[2] Bach was permitted to relinquish his position in order to succeed his godfather Telemann as director of music (Kapellmeister)[1] at Hamburg.

The title was honorary, but her patronage and interest in the oratorio genre may have played a role in nurturing the ambitious choral works that followed.

The following year he produced his most ambitious work,[2] the oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste (The Israelites in the Desert), a composition remarkable not only for its "great beauty" but for the resemblance of its plan to that of Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah.

[17] In Hamburg he also presented a number of works by contemporaries, including his father, Telemann, Graun, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Salieri and Johann David Holland (1746–1827).

[18] Bach's choral output reached its apex in two works: the double chorus Heilig (Holy) of 1776, a setting of the seraph song from the throne scene in Isaiah, and the oratorio Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu (The Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus) of 1774–1782, which sets a poetic Gospel harmonization by the poet Karl Wilhelm Ramler.

Widespread admiration of Auferstehung led to three 1788 performances in Vienna sponsored by the Baron Gottfried van Swieten and conducted by Mozart.

In Hamburg, Bach wrote a major set of six string symphonies for Gottfried van Swieten, Wq.

These works were not published in his lifetime (van Swieten, who had commissioned them to be written in a more "difficult" style, preferred to retain them for private use),[22] but since their rediscovery, have become increasingly popular.

However, Bach's best works in the form (by his own estimation)[23] are assuredly the four Orchester-Sinfonien mit zwölf obligaten Stimmen, Wq.

183, which, as their title suggests, were written with obbligato wind parts that are integral to the texture, rather than being added on to an older string symphony.

170–172), which are cornerstones of that instrument's repertoire, have often been considered to be transcriptions of the harpsichord versions, but recent research has suggested that they might be originally for cello.

[29] Several of Bach's other miscellaneous keyboard works have gained fame, including the character piece La Caroline and the Fantasia in F-sharp minor, Wq.

Bach's fantasias, in particular, have been considered to show him at his most characteristic: they are full of dramatic silences, harmonic surprises, and perpetually varied figuration.

Bach published three major collections of miscellaneous keyboard works during his lifetime: the Clavierstücke verschiedener Art, Wq.

217, which he performed together with the Credo from his Father's Mass in B minor, the oratorios Die Israeliten in der Wüste, Wq.

[33] Through the later half of the 18th century, the reputation of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach stood very high,[1] surpassing that of his father.

[1] "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 hardened conventions of the Italian school.

In 2014, the Croatian pianist Ana-Marija Markovina, in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute, the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig and Harvard University released a 26-CD box set of the complete works for solo piano on the German record label Hänssler Classic, performed on a modern Bösendorfer grand piano.