In a late-1700s European coffee house, the greatest composer named Bach was Emanuel, not Johann Sebastian. This episode traces Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach from his 1714 birth in Weimar, with Telemann as godfather and a father who drilled him in counterpoint, through a law degree in Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder that served as a social shield in an era when musicians were treated as servants, to his post in Berlin with the Crown Prince of Prussia, the future Frederick the Great.

The episode explains the empfindsamer Stil, the sensitive style, with its sudden silences, harmonic surprises and rapid mood shifts that foreshadowed Romanticism, and the Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments that Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven treated as a bible. It follows his 30 compositions for the king’s mechanical flute clocks, his 1768 move to Hamburg to succeed Telemann, his 21 passion settings, his 1773 autobiography, and the Sing-Akademie archive of over 5,000 compositions lost in World War II, found in Kyiv in 1999 and returned to Berlin in 2001.

• Why an 18th-century court musician might wear livery and eat in the kitchens with the footmen
• How the essay standardized fingering, ornamentation such as trills, and figured bass
• Mozart’s reported remark that Emanuel was the father and the rest were his children
• The son named Johann Sebastian who became a visual artist and died in Italy in his late 20s
• How 19th-century Romantics reviving J.S. Bach recast Emanuel as a weak imitation of his father