Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach (1759-1845)
- Sestetto concertante Es-Dur (c.1800)
Performers: Boston University Ensemble
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German keyboard player and composer, son of Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732-1795). He was baptized on 27 May, with Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe standing godfather. W.F.E. Bach was musically educated by his father and Christian Friedrich Geyer, Kantor of the Stadtkirche, Bückeburg. In 1778 he went with his father to London and remained there in the care of his uncle Johann Christian Bach, making a name for himself as a pianist and keyboard teacher. He appeared at one of the Bach-Abel concerts in Hanover Square as early as 6 December 1778, playing a sonata of his own, and his first keyboard and chamber works were published by leading English firms. Some time after the death of his uncle on 1 January 1782, W.F.E. Bach returned to Germany. His route took him through Paris and the Netherlands, where he met the publisher J.J. Hummel in Amsterdam, and then to north Germany, where he gave concerts in Oldenburg and elsewhere. According to his own account, he stayed for some time with his uncle C.P.E. Bach in Hamburg before settling in 1784 in Minden, near Bückeburg. He seems to have given himself the title of Musikdirektor, since there is no evidence that such a post actually existed. His position, however, allowed him to perform dramatic works and cantatas (probably including compositions by his father). He received particular encouragement from the Kammerpräsident Franz Wilhelm Traugott von Breitenbauch (1739-96), whose daughter Antoinette (b 1766) was probably his pupil. Cantatas in celebration of the royal house of Prussia, performed in 1786 and 1788, secured for Bach a post in Berlin, where he arrived at the end of March or beginning of April 1789. There he succeeded Christian Kalkbrenner (1755-1806) as Kapellmeister to the widowed Queen Elisabeth Christine and he also taught keyboard to Queen Friederike. From 1798 at the latest he was employed as teacher ‘to the reigning Queen [Luise] and all the brothers and sisters of the King [Friedrich Wilhelm III]’, as he put it in a letter to W.C. Müller on 14 May 1830. Bach’s salary in Berlin was a modest one, and in a letter of 15 October 1809 to the privy councillor and Oberpräsident von Altenstein, now lost, he dwelt on his poverty-stricken situation. It was improved only by a pension of 300 thaler thought to have been granted by Prince Heinrich in 1811 after the death of Queen Luise. Thereupon Bach, who had previously played an active part in Berlin concerts as a keyboard virtuoso and violinist, retired from public life. In 1843 he was present at the ceremonial unveiling of the J.S. Bach monument in Leipzig. He was twice married and had four children. He was survived by his second wife and an unmarried daughter from each marriage, one of them a good soprano and the other an alto.
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