Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the keyboard concerto—a lifelong relationship, challenging and exhaust¬ing, altogether fruitful, brilliant, and even spectacular into the bargain. As a 19-year-old (under the eyes of his father, so to speak) he wrote in Leipzig his first keyboard concerto; at the age of 74 in Hamburg he finished, in the year of his death, his last example of the genre. In-between lies a treasury of fifty keyboard concertos, colossal and fathomless.
It is a wonder that this uncommonly rich and stylistically influential genre of the composer is only now coming to light. Of all the genres of composition, C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard concertos have guarded their secret longest as unpublished music—that is, precisely the genre of works that qualify as the most personal and most advanced of his compositional oeuvre. He himself says of this: “Because I have had to create most of my works for particular persons and for the public, I have therein always been more constrained than with the few pieces which I prepared just for myself. Among all my works, especially for keyboard, are just a few…concertos, which I composed with total freedom and for my own use.”