Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
For a century, anyone in Europe who wanted to learn a keyboard instrument started from a single book: the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, the essay on the true way of playing the keyboard, published in Berlin in two parts, 1753 and 1762. Its author is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, second son of Johann Sebastian, harpsichordist to Frederick the Great, the same flute-playing king for whom Quantz wrote the twin of this treatise, a year earlier.
The Versuch did for the keyboard what no book had done: it put fingering in order by modern criteria, consecrating the systematic use of the thumb, which even in the early eighteenth century many held suspended above the keys like an uninvited guest; it catalogued the ornaments one by one, with the realisation written out in notes, and still today anyone who has to execute a trill or an appoggiatura in an eighteenth-century text goes there to check; and it devoted memorable pages to the art of improvising a fantasia, that is, to the moment when the performer stops reading and starts speaking. Inside is also the sentence that sums up an entire aesthetic, that of the so-called sensitive style: whoever plays without being moved, Emanuel writes, will move no one.
Posterity played the trick on him that we know: squeezed between the father and the grandchildren, he became the middle Bach, the one who is cited and not performed. His contemporaries saw it the other way around. For the Viennese of the late eighteenth century, Bach was him, not the father, who at the time was a local hero awaiting rediscovery. Haydn declared he owed him everything he knew; Beethoven demanded that Czerny study from the Versuch; and to Mozart tradition attributes the definitive line: he is the father, we are the boys. Anyone who wants to hear why should listen to one of his keyboard fantasias: modulations that collapse one into the next, sudden silences, a restlessness that in the mid-eighteenth century had no name and that the nineteenth would call Romanticism.
The Versuch sits in the Melos library, on the shelf of treatises, in a reproduction of the original Berlin edition. It reads with a particular pleasure: it is a technical book written by a witty melancholic, full of jabs at virtuosos who rush and at bad teachers. Two hundred and seventy years later, the jabs still hit the same targets.