The choral music associated with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach is, in large part, not the music he actually composed. The vast majority of music that he directed after his appointment at Hamburg in 1768 was made up of pastiches of the music of other composers (notably his father and brothers, and his immediate predecessor in Hamburg, his Godfather Telemann), sometimes combined with work of his own. 1 With the coming of the Enlightenment, it would seem that the composition of church music declined; unfortunately, fewer new compositions and less interest in things sacred also led to a severe decline in the quality of the musicians performing in churches. The burgeoning middle class was rapidly gaining the means to engage performers of the highest level. Composers of stature, such as Emanuel Bach, wrote more and more music designed for these audiences; consequently they wrote less original music for the church. The composer as performer of his own works, a sort of proto-celebrity, was also becoming much in vogue. The idea of the composer as servant to the church (or a royal patron) was beginning to lose force. The old style of writing church music was considered “unnatural”; polyphony clouded, the text and therefore rendered the meaning hard to grasp. All these factors contributed to Bach’s relatively small output of original church music.
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