Great dynasties of the world: The Bachs

The staying power of music's most important familyIn his obituary for his father in 1754, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote: "Johann Sebastian Bach belongs to a family whose love and aptitude for music seems like a gift accorded by Nature in common to each of its members." One suspects that Carl was attempting to establish and claim his own career here from his family's manifest destiny, but nonetheless the claim stands. There is little doubt that the Bachs are, as Christoph Wolff puts it in his B...

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