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C. P. E. BACH ‘IN TORMENTIS’: GOUT PAIN AND BODY LANGUAGE IN THE FANTASIA IN A MAJOR, h278 (1782)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2016

Abstract

In his Magazin der Musik, Carl Friedrich Cramer reported that C. P. E. Bach's Fantasia in A major, h278 (1782), was composed during the agonies of gout. Tapping into a reported epidemic of this patrician malady among men of letters, Cramer's anecdote invoked rich associations of sequestered suffering, withdrawal from public life, the pleasures of the table, genius, sexual (im)potency and humour. Reflecting contemporary nerve-based theories of sensation, Cramer aligned different types of physical and mental pain with specific musical gestures. In so doing, he did more than indulge his hermeneutic imagination: he suggested a connection between Bach's solo keyboard music and the experience of embodiment. The seemingly abstract gestures of improvisation were linked dialectically to the corporeal. Behind the specifics of Cramer's reading is a conviction that this kind of music ‘knows’ about the body, as well as the mind, and that it moves between gestures suggestive of thinking, speaking, feeling and corporeal sensation. Analysis of the fantasia, and Bach's letters, supports Cramer's reading.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2016 

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References

1 Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘Introduction’, in Music, Sensation, and Sensuality, ed. Austern, , (New York: Routledge, 2002), 6 Google Scholar.

2 Carl Friedrich Cramer, (review of) ‘Claviersonaten und freye Phantasien, nebst einigen Rondos fürs Fortepiano, für Kenner und Liebhaber, componirt von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Vierte Sammlung. Leipzig, im Verlage des Autors. 1783’, Magazin der Musik 11–12 (November–December 1783), cited from Barbara Wiermann, ed., Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Dokumente zu Leben und Wirken aus der zeitgenössischen Hamburgischen Presse (1767–1790) (Hildesheim: Olms, 2000), 295. Subsequent references will take the form ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber 4’. Unless otherwise acknowledged, translations are my own.

3 Ottenberg, Hans-Günter, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, trans. Whitmore, Philip J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171 Google Scholar (‘these thoughts in some ways anticipate the irrationality of early Romantic musical attitudes . . . [but] this approach is in fact much better suited in general terms to the character and resources of instrumental music and improvisation than the older doctrine of the affections had been’); Richards, Annette, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61 Google Scholar (‘it is an extraordinary manifesto for the status of the fantasia, and “abstract” instrumental music more generally’).

4 Herder, Johann Gottfried, ed.,] Von Deutscher Art und Kunst: Einige fliegende Blätter (Hamburg: Bode, 1773)Google Scholar, available in a modern edition by Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968). For different aspects of the influence of this epochal pamphlet on German musical criticism see Matthew Head, ‘Mozart's Gothic: Feelings for History in the Rondo in A minor, K. 511’, Keyboard Perspectives IV: The Yearbook of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies 2011, ed. Annette Richards (Ithaca: Westfield Center, 2012), 69–114.

5 Cramer, ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber 4’, 294–295.

6 Cramer, ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber 4’, 295.

7 ‘Gleich das anfängliche, fast nur von Bachschen Fingern zu überwindene Solfeggio . . . die durchaus sprechende Wendung der Melodie’. Cramer, ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber 4’, 296.

8 Neumann, Hans-Joachim, ‘“In tormentis pinxit”: Eine medizin-historische Betrachtung über den Soldatenkönig’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins 92/2 (1996), 3847 Google Scholar. Neumann reproduces a few paintings which he attributes to the King, though he does not indicate if they are so signed, nor does he give their source.

9 Cramer, ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber 4’, 297.

10 Mozart spoke of the broadly salutary and specifically palliative effects of music around the same time as Bach composed his Fantasia in A major. See Keefe, Simon P., ‘Mozart “Stuck in Music” in Paris: Towards a New Biographical Paradigm’, Mozart Studies 2, ed. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2829 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 In a letter dated 10 September 1782, Bach offered condolences to his friend and publisher Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf, who had lost his wife on 16 May, and noted his own near-fatal bout of flu: ‘I pity you from the heart as a widower; I did not know of it. I also escaped death this summer. The dreadful influenza wanted to strangle me by the throat, but God helped’. Clark, Stephen L., ed. and trans., The Letters of C. P. E. Bach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 186 Google Scholar. Incidentally, Breitkopf may also have suffered from gout. Amid the effusive greetings that begin a letter to Breitkopf dated 2 January 1772, Bach exclaimed ‘may Heaven especially protect you in the future from the hideous gout!’: Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 25.

12 See Head, Matthew, Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

13 This paragraph summarizes material in Porter, Roy and Rousseau, G. S., Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

14 The theme of the artistic representation of the male body in pain achieved currency through the debate between Winckelmann and Lessing about the reason for the relative restraint of Laocoön's facial expression – for the former, it embodied a manly Grecian ideal, for Lessing the requirements of beauty. They agreed, however, that (with reference to the probably first-century statue excavated in Rome in 1506) Laocoön's barely parted lips were preferable to the alternative: an ugly, gaping hole in the face. See Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755), trans. Carter, David, in Johann Joachim Winckelmann on Art, Architecture, and Archaeology (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 3156 Google Scholar, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon: Oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766), trans. Edward Allen McCormick as Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). For a wide-ranging study see Richter, Simon, Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz and Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For a succinct introduction see Miller, Derrick R., ‘Sanctioning Pleasure: Sodomy and Lessing's Critical Project’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 47/1 (2013), 39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Cramer, ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber 4’, 293.

16 See Zohn, Steven, Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann's Instrumental Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5657 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; my thanks to the author for alerting me to this reference. Whether Bach and Cramer knew Telemann's ‘Le Podagre’ is uncertain, though Bach did request and receive music by his Hamburg predecessor via Georg Michael Telemann (the older Telemann's grandson), with a flurry of letters between 1767 and 1771. See Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, items 11, 15–21, 24–25 and 28.

17 Zohn, Music for a Mixed Taste, 110.

18 The notion of gout as an inheritance was challenged by William Cadogan, who emphasized diet and lifestyle, but gout culture was reluctant to embrace the newer ethic of personal responsibility for health. See Cadogan, William, Abhandlung von der Gicht und allen langwierigen Krankheiten als Folgen von einerley Ursachen betrachtet: nebst einem Vorschlag zu ihrer Heilung, trans. from the tenth English edition by Christian Gottlieb, Hertel (Frankfurt: Hertel, 1772)Google Scholar.

19 Beethoven followed suit with his (fantasia-like) Op. 132 Quartet in A minor (1825), the slow movement being entitled ‘Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart’. Again, instrumental music occasions devout first-person references to illness. Implicitly, the completed ‘opus’ is a musical offering that testifies to recovery and constitutes a righteous thanksgiving.

20 Gerstenberg, writing to Bach from Copenhagen in 1773, reported ‘a gathering’ in which ‘certain concertos by the old Tischer’ were ‘played and judged’. These pieces, the poet related, were ‘set on biblical passages’ and drafted, according to the composer's title page, ‘during a painfull illness’. The description is sufficient to identify the composition as the final concerto, for unaccompanied solo keyboard, from the Musikalische Zwillinge (1754) – a set of thirteen concertos by Johann Nikolaus Tischer published in 1754. The last is entitled ‘Letztes und leichtes Clavier Concerto zum Beschluss der Musicalischen Zwillinge, welches noch währender Maladie verfertiget und der Musik liebenden Jugend zum Exercitio und andencken herausgegeben’ (Last and Easy Keyboard Concerto to Conclude the Musical Twins, Written during Ill Health, and Published for the Practice of Music-Loving Youth and as a Souvenir).

21 Clark explains that Bach's peculiar remark – ‘it might appear that I want to order myself a coffin’ – played on Tischer versus Tischler (a cabinet maker): Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 41, note 4.

22 On 6 September 1778 Bach wrote to J. G. I. Breitkopf that ‘[Heilig] is to be my swan song of this type, and thereby serves the purpose that I may not be forgotten too soon after my death’. On 30 November 1778 Bach confided that ‘I am gathering everything together now’. See Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 125 and 130.

23 On Fux see Bernsdorf, Eduard, ed., Neues Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst, four volumes, volume 2 (Dresden: R. Schaefer, 1857), 74 Google Scholar (‘Fux, der an der Gicht litt, konnte sein Werk nicht selbst dirigiren und an seiner Statt leitete Caldara das Ganze’ (Fux, who was suffering from gout, could no longer direct his own work, and in his place Caldara led the whole thing)); on Wagenseil see Daniel Schubart, Christian Friedrich, Vermischte Schriften, ed. Schubart, Ludwig, two volumes (Zurich: Gessner, 1812)Google Scholar, volume 1, 250 (‘Die Gicht hat seine Hände halb gelähmt, und doch spielt er noch mit vieler Anmuth’ (Gout has half crippled his hands, and yet he still plays very charmingly)); on Hasse see Mennicke, Carl, Hasse und die Brüder Graun als Symphoniker (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1906)Google Scholar, 429, and Niggli, Arnold, Faustina Bordoni-Hasse (Waldersee: P. Count, 1880)Google Scholar, 317 (‘[er] war in späteren Jahren viel von Gicht geplagt, die auch seine Finger so steif machte, dass er nur noch mühsam Klavier zu spielen vermochte’ (in later years he was much plagued by gout, which also made his fingers so stiff that he could only play the keyboard with difficulty)); on Franz Benda see Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces. Or, The Journal of a Tour, two volumes (London: T. Becket, 1773)Google Scholar, volume 2, 128 (‘the gout has long enfeebled his fingers’); on Joseph Reicha see Gerber, Ernst Ludwig, ‘Reicha, Joseph’, Neues historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler, four volumes (Leipzig: Kühnel, 18121818)Google Scholar, volume 2, 813 (‘die Gicht schon in seinem 35. Jahre des Gebrauchs seiner Glieder beraubet hatte’ (gout had by his thirty-fifth year robbed him of the use of his limbs)). Additional signs of an epidemic are found in the obituary of Jan Ladislav Dussek, where his death is attributed to the spread of gout to the head(!) – see the anonymous article in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 14 (April 1812), 259.

24 Letter from C. P. E. Bach to Hans Jacob Faber and the Hamburg Senate, Berlin, 13 November 1767, in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Briefe und Dokumente. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Ernst Suchalla, two volumes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), volume 1, 118 (document 51).

25 Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 12.

26 See Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, xxxiii. Clark is not alone in inferring a ‘feigned illness’. In a jubilee article in the Hamburger Abendblatt, ‘Der Hamburger Bach, ein Originalgenie seiner Zeit’, Joachim Mischke has Bach fibbing about his gout in order to gain freedom from the service of Frederick II: <www.abendblatt.de/thema_552/article125540451/Der-Hamburger-Bach-ein-Originalgenie-seiner-Zeit.html> (27 July 2014). On the gout suffered by Frederick II see among many references in his letters that of 17 March 1782: ‘Ich habe an der rechten Hand und am rechten Füß einen heftigen Anfall von der Gicht gehabt’ (I have had a strong attack of gout in my right hand and right foot). Cited from Hinterlassene Werke Friedrichs II. Königs von Preußen, fifteen volumes (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1788), volume 11, 284.

27 Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 75. The circumstances of this reported time in Töplitz are not known. The charms of this spa town were described a decade before Bach's visit by the Dresden physician Johann Wilhelm Sparmann in his Kurtze doch gründliche Beschreibung aller in und vor der Stadt Töplitz befindlichen warmen Bäder (Dresden, 1733). Warm baths helped relieve gout, Sparmann advised: see pages 110 and 124.

28 Burney, , Present State of Music in Germany, volume 2, 274, and second edition (London: T. Becket, 1775), volume 2, 275 Google Scholar.

29 Which is not to say that Anna Amalia could or cared to manage obbligato pedal parts. A manuscript collection of organ sonatas by C. P. E. Bach bears an annotation in the hand of Johann Nikolaus Forkel that probably reflects information supplied by the composer: ‘These four organ solos were composed for a princess who could not play the pedals, nor anything difficult.’ See Organ Works, ed. Annette Richards and David Yearsley, in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works, series 1, volume 9 (Los Altos: Packard Humanities Institute, 2008), 94, with reference to D-B, Mus. Ms. Bach P 764.

30 Fox, Pamela, ‘Towards a Comprehensive C. P. E. Bach Chronology: Schrift-Chronologie and the Issue of Bach's “Late-Hand”’, in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Musik für Europa. Bericht über das Internationale Symposium vom 8. März bis 12. März 1994 in Frankfurt (Oder), ed. Ottenberg, Hans-Günter (Frankfurt (Oder): Konzerthalle Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, 1998), 306323 Google Scholar.

31 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 2, 269–270; Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend, two volumes (1774 and 1776; reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1997), volume 2, 16, and Cramer, ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber 4’, 294. These accounts of Bach's performance were highlighted for English-speaking readers in Ottenberg, C. P. E. Bach, trans. Whitmore, 167–171.

32 Bach's involvement in Hamburg concert life is documented in C. P. E. Bach: Dokumente zu Leben und Wirken, ed. Wiermann, section 4 (‘Öffentliche Konzerte’), 433–474.

33 See Peter Wollny, Preface to Concertos, in C. P. E. Bach: The Complete Works, series 3, volumes 4–10: Bach wrote out cadenzas for many of his concertos. These are occasionally found in the original parts, but most are compiled in a manuscript copied later and transmitted in the collection of J. J. H. Westphal (B-Bc, 5871 MSM = Wq 120). Some of the written-out cadenzas may document Bach's own performances of his concertos, but others were clearly intended as suggestions for less advanced players or as models and study material for students’. <http://cpebach.org/prefaces/concertos-preface.html> (9 July 2015).

34 Letter from C. P. E. Bach to Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Hamburg, 10 February 1775, in Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Suchalla, volume 1, 485 (document 203).

35 Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 75. Bach's claim that six sonatas were composed in 1743 during an attack of the gout is not borne out by modern manuscript studies; the identity of the pieces thus remains contentious. See Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 75, note 1.

36 In his brief autobiography – commissioned by the musician and publisher Johann Joachim Christoph Bode as a corrective to, and for inclusion within, his translation of Burney's German tour – Bach observed that ‘among all my works, particularly for keyboard instruments, there are only a few trios, solos and concertos composed in complete freedom and for my own use’ (‘unter allen meinen Arbeiten, besonders fürs Clavier, sind blos einige Trios, Solos und Concerte, welche ich mit aller Freiheit und zu meinem eignen Gebrauch gemacht habe’). Carl Burney's der Musik Doctors Tagebuch seiner Musikalischen Reisen. Dritter Band. . . . Aus dem Englischen übersetzt (Hamburg: Bode, 1773), 209.

37 A connection specifically between gout and fantasias was already being made in the early seventeenth century, in William Lawes's eighth fantasia-suite for viol consort, the second movement being subtitled ‘la goutte’. The association of gout with imaginative, composer-centred instrumental music for gentlemen continued into the eighteenth century with the Dutch-born Johann Schenck (1660–c1712). His Op. 10 collection for solo viol and continuo appeared around 1710 under the heading of ‘Les Fantaisies Bisarres de la Goutte’ (Strange Fantasies Born of the Gout). See Johannes Schenck, Les Fantaisies Bisarres De La Goutte Contenant XII Sonades pour une Viole de Gambe Seule avec la Basse Continue, ou avec une autre Viole de Gambe ou Theorbe . . . Dixieme Ouvrage (Amsterdam: Estienne Roger & Le Cène, c1710), D-B Mus. O. 11553, RISM 00000990057900.

38 Letter from C. P. E. Bach to Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, Hamburg, 15 May 1772, in Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Suchalla, volume 1, 266–267 (document 112).

39 Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 28.

40 The notion of pain as lacking ‘referential content’ and ‘resisting objectification in language’ is affirmed in Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, 5. Understandably, such an appeal to the absolute has not gone unchallenged by social constructionists, for whom pain does not exist as a universal – or even as an experience – outside of its context, conceptualization and articulation: see Moscoso, Javier, Pain: A Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Nerve theory is beyond the scope of this article, forming part of a project I am developing on the medical contexts of C. P. E. Bach's music. For an overview of nerves in the German Enlightenment see Minter, Catherine J., ‘Literary “Empfindsamkeit” and Nervous Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, The Modern Language Review 96/4 (2001), 10161028 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 On Albrecht von Haller and his far-reaching influence see Steinke, Hubert, Irritating Experiments: Haller's Concept and the European Controversy on Irritability and Sensibility, 1750–90 (New York: Rodopi, 2005)Google ScholarPubMed.

43 Cramer, ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber 4’, 291 and 296.

44 The title has long incited commentary, not all of which captures the historical specificity of Bach's term ‘Empfindungen’. For a recent analysis focusing on sincerity and performance see Kramer, Richard, ‘Diderot's Paradoxe and C. P. E. Bach's Empfindungen’ , in C. P. E. Bach Studies, ed. Richards, Annette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 624 Google Scholar.

45 I identify this section as involving a minuet topic for several reasons. The composer's marking ‘andante’, the upbeat (which is consistently used in the first eight bars) and the initially regular phrasing (4 + 4) are hallmarks of titled and untitled minuets. The character of this section also corresponds to contemporary descriptions of the minuet that highlighted, in Eric McKee's summary, ‘artful simplicity’. See his ‘Ballroom Dances of the Late Eighteenth Century’, in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 169. In 1807 Heinrich Christoph Koch observed that while minuets were rarely danced any more, minuet-like melodies were often used in symphonies and sonatas. See the article ‘Menuet’ in his Kurzgefaßtes Handwörterbuch der Musik für praktische Tonkünstler und für Dilettanten (Leipzig, 1807; reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1981), 225 (‘Anjetzt ist der Tanz selbst wenig gebräuchlich, desto öfterer aber bedient man sich der Melodie desselben in den Sinfonien und Sonatenarten’). Bach's untitled minuet invokes, but also subverts, that subtle mixture of ‘gracefulness’ and ‘dignity’ that Koch attributed to the dance (‘Leichtigkeit, Munterkeit und Grazie verbunden mit Gravität, Ernst und Anstand, machen den Charakter dieses Tanzes aus’), Kurzgefaßtes Handwörterbuch der Musik, 224–225. Though evoking the dancing body, minuets were also contexts for exploring the rules of art, be that in exercises for fledgling composers or in Haydn's ingenious experiments with minuet-and-trio pairing throughout his works. In moving between body and musical abstraction, minuets wrote small the dialectic explored in this article.

46 The notion of a tour of keys proceeding from tonic, to dominant, to a point of furthest remove, and completed by a return to the tonic – analogous perhaps to the itinerary of the Grand Tour – is discussed in Ratner, Leonard, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980)Google Scholar.

47 The German language also describes this rhythm as limping. Heinrich Christoph Koch defined ‘alla zoppa’ as ‘auf hinkende Art’ in his Kurzgefaßtes Handwörterbuch der Musik, 23, referring the reader to a music example (Figure 26) that is almost identical to the passage in h278, not just in rhythm, but in melodic profile.

48 Letter of 28 December 1782, in Clark, ed. and trans., Letters of C. P. E. Bach, item 223, 189.

49 Hogarth, William, The Analysis of Beauty, a new edition (London: W. Strahan, 1772), 147 Google Scholar.

50 Johann Gottfried Herder, Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (1778), in Johann Gottfried Herder: Werke, ed. Wolfgang Pross, four volumes (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1984–2002), volume 2 (1987), 498–499.

51 Gottfried Herder, Johann, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream, ed. and trans. Gaiger, Jason (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Original italics. Quotations from Herder earlier in the paragraph are from the same page.

52 Much recent scholarship has chipped away at the grand narrative of ‘the emancipation of instrumental music’, according to which the musical aesthetics of the late eighteenth century gradually abandoned the constraining framework of representation in favour of a German-idealist fantasy of the purely musical and spiritual. Haydn scholarship has led the way in this regard: see, for example, Will, Richard, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Sisman, Elaine, ‘Haydn's Solar Poetics: The Tageszeiten Symphonies and Enlightenment Knowledge’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66/1 (2013), 5102 Google Scholar. These studies can be taken to imply that Haydn's instrumental music was often situated at the boundary between the mimetic and the absolute, at least in its reception. Scholars of Romanticism such as Holly Watkins are also complicating received wisdom about the rise of the musical absolute. Sensation – a term that grounded music's origins and effects in human experience and which resisted the binary opposition of mind and body – was central to German idealism, as Watkins explores in Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapters 1 and 2.

53 See Richards, Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque, chapter 2 (‘C. P. E. Bach and the Landscapes of Genius’), 34–72, and ‘An Enduring Monument: C. P. E. Bach and the Musical Sublime’, in C. P. E. Bach Studies, ed. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 149–172.

54 Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition (London: A. Millar, 1759), 53 Google Scholar. The relevance in principle of the ideas of Young to C. P. E. Bach is suggested by Ottenberg, C. P. E. Bach, trans. Whitmore, 139.

55 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, volume 2, 269–270.

56 Joel Collier (pseudonym John Bicknell), Musical Travels Through England (London: G. Kearsley, 1774), 41. Original italics. Bicknell's parody of Burney's encounter with C. P. E. Bach has gone unnoticed, but the pamphlet as a whole is brilliantly contextualized by Agnew, Vanessa, Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 144165 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 In the 1990s, Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. von Mücke, in the Introduction to their edited volume Body & Text in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), were already suggesting that for some it might seem that ‘the body's moment . . . is past: that the body has been done’. See ‘Introduction: Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century’, 1.

58 McClary, Susan, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

59 On some recent accounts of embodiment and theatrical music see Head, Matthew, ‘The Growing Pains of Eighteenth-Century Studies’, Cambridge Opera Journal 27/2 (2015), 175186 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 181–183, with reference to Charlton, David, Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, and Le Guin, Elisabeth, The Tonadilla in Performance: Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

60 Le Guin, Elisabeth, Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Bach's third-person locution, in which autobiography is figured as self-representation, not unmediated disclosure, is also encountered in Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Les Confessions de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, two parts (Geneva: Cazan, 1782 and 1789)Google Scholar: ‘I shall depict myself without pretence and modesty. I shall show myself to you such as I see myself and such as I am.’ Quoted from Peter Abbs, ‘The Full Revelation of the Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Birth of Deep Autobiography’, Philosophy Now (October–November 2015) <https://philosophynow.org/issues/68/The_Full_Revelation_of_the_Self_Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_and_the_Birth_of_Deep_Autobiography> (8 October 2015). Abbs's reference to an ‘absorbed pre-conceptual drifting merging with the most elementary sensations’ in Rousseau's autobiographical writings is highly suggestive of ‘C. P. E. Bachs Empfindungen’.