Musical Offerings, Spring 2019

32 Dellaperute ⦁ Emanuel Bach the artists who followed them, challenged traditional rules, upholding in their place the values of individualism, imagination, emotion, and originality. 9 Empfindsamkeit in Music Emanuel Bach absorbed the philosophical ideas of Empfindsamkeit into his music to create a style known as empfindsamer Stil . One notable use of empfindsamer Stil was in the portrayal of human emotions in his character pieces, which were short keyboard works that attempted to portray in music the characteristics of actual people. He uses fragmented gestures and an introverted mood to represent human emotions and to elicit appropriate empathetic responses in the listeners. 10 By nature, these pieces are subjective, requiring the listener to interpret the music and imagine what the “person” in the music must be like. 11 Already, one can see the philosophical values of Empfindsamkeit emerging in Emanuel Bach’s music: an emphasis on individuality, human emotion, and subjectivity. One example of such a character piece is La Buchholtz . In this piece, the juxtaposed contrasting moods every two bars, the unpredictable form, and unexpected dynamic contrasts all suggest a character who is capricious, unstable, and even explosive. 12 Emanuel Bach is also known for employing empfindsamer Stil in his fantasias. A fantasia, which comes from the German word for improvisation ( fantasieren ), is an ideal vehicle for Empfindsamkeit because of its free-flowing nature: “The later fantasy, in contrast, a favourite of the age of sentiment especially for the keyboard, was a piece conceived in imitation of the spontaneous playing of a master of his instrument, flexible in form and open to the maximum degree of emotional variation and contrast.” 13 9 Lilian R. Furst, “Romanticism in Historical Perspective,” Comparative Literature Studies 5, no. 2 (1968): 119 , http://www.jstor.org/stable/40467744 . 10 Joshua Walden, “What’s in a Name? C. P. E. Bach and the Genres of the Character Piece and Musical Portrait,” from Genre in Eighteenth Century Music , ed. by Anthony R. DelDonna (Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein Publishing Inc., 2008), 119. 11 Ibid., 113. 12 Ibid., 120-123. 13 Margaret Mahony Stoljar, Poetry and Song in Late Eighteenth Century Germany: A Study in the Musical Sturm und Drang (London, UK: Croom Helm, 1985), 51.