Clementi
and Cramer. In 1768 Bach succeeded Georg Philipp Telemann as
_Kapellmeister_ at Hamburg, and in consequence of his new office began to
turn his attention more towards church music. Next year he produced his
oratorio _Die Israeliten in der Wueste_, a composition remarkable not only
for its great beauty but for the resemblance of its plan to that of
Mendelssohn's _Elijah_, and between 1769 and 1788 added over twenty
settings of the Passion, a second oratorio _Der Auferstehung [v.03 p.0131]
und Himmelfahrt Jesu_ (1777), and some seventy cantatas, litanies, motets
and other liturgical pieces. At the same time his genius for instrumental
composition was further stimulated by the career of Haydn, to whom he sent
a letter of high appreciation, and the climax of his art was reached in the
six volumes of sonatas _fuer Kenner und Liebhaber_, to which he devoted the
best work of his last ten years. He died at Hamburg on the 14th of December
1788.

Through the latter half of the 18th century the reputation of K. P. E. Bach
stood very high. Mozart said of him, "He is the father, we are the
children"; the best part of Haydn's training was derived from a study of
his work; Beethoven expressed for his genius the most cordial admiration
and regard. This position he owes mainly to his clavier sonatas, which mark
an important epoch in the history of musical form. Lucid in style, delicate
and tender in expression, they are even more notable for the freedom and
variety of their structural design; they break away altogether from the
exact formal antithesis which, with the composers of the Italian school,
had hardened into a convention, and substitute the wider and more flexible
outline which the great Viennese masters showed to be capable of almost
infinite development. The content of his work, though full of invention,
lies within a somewhat narrow emotional range, but it is not less sincere
in thought than polished and felicitous in phrase. Again he was probably
the first composer of eminence who made free use of harmonic colour for its
own sake, apart from the movement of contrapuntal parts, and in this way
also he takes rank among the most important pioneers of the school of
Vienna. His name has now fallen into undue neglect, but no student of music
can afford to disregard his _Sonaten fuer Kenner und Liebhaber_, his
oratorio _Die Israeliten in der Wueste_, and the two concertos (in G major
and D major) which have been republish