Picturing the Moment in Sound: C. P. E. Bach and the Musical Portrait

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the contemporary critical discourse on portraiture and character study offers important insights into Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's own exercises in musical portraiture. Bach's interest in composer portraits has much to tell people about the currency of portraiture in the late eighteenth century, refracting the complex interrelationships among musical and visual portraits as they navigate through feeling and time. Many of the characters, especially the last in the list, have faded with time, some quite quickly after Bach's death, others lingering on and gaining unprecedented importance in his later biography. Music, according to Junker, not only arouses and intensifies emotion, but it can depict it, both as a gradual progression towards the height of passion or in a single concentrated moment. Christian Gottfried Krause's concept of musical character pieces as small scenes enacted in time—as slices of life—aligned the musical genre closely with the newest French paintings to be seen in Berlin in the 1750s.

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