Search of the Month: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
On 8th March 1714, three hundred years ago, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was born in Weimar. During his lifetime Carl Philipp was more popular than his father, Johann Sebastian Bach, who enjoys greater worldwide fame today. With his compositions, sacred music and not least his major contributions to the teaching of music he was an important figure in the years between the Baroque period and the First Viennese School.
The anniversary year provides an occasion for a range of events celebrating the work and legacy of the artist. The Bach cities in particular – Weimar, Berlin, Potsdam, Frankfurt (Oder), Leipzig and Hamburg – are commemorating the key stations in the biography of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
Against this backdrop of interest a search in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) may also prove rewarding. Although the digital cultural-heritage database is still under construction, the online resource already contains a considerable amount of information on Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Alongside digital facsimiles of contemporary portraits of Bach and sheet music in the archives of the Saxon State and University Library Dresden and other items held at the Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky the DDB also provides access to numerous text documents. Thanks to the painstaking digitisation of artefacts by institutions such as the State Library in Berlin, the Library Service Centre Baden-Württemberg and the Göttingen State and University Library – users are able to call up scans of material that includes old editions of Bach’s pioneering textbook entitled “Essay on the True Method of Playing the Piano”. A search for documents also reveals historical librettos in digitised form and secondary literature on Bach’s liturgical music, for example.
The items mentioned above represent only a fraction of the ever-growing bank of research material contained in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Moreover, the world of knowledge at the fingertips of researchers will be expanded with every new addition to the list of participating scientific and cultural institutions.