Bach may hardly be said to have originated the modern ‘pianistic’ style--the free, brilliant manner of writing particularly adapted to the requirements of the instrument. Couperin and the astonishing Domenico Scarlatti were before him. Naturally the instrument which he used was not nearly so resonant or sonorous as the piano of our day; an instrument the strings of which were plucked by quills attached to the key lever, not hit by hammers as the strings of our piano, was, of course, devoid of all sustaining power. This fact accounts for the infinite number of ornaments, trills, mordents, grace notes, bewildering in their variety, with which Bach’s sonatas are replete. Despite the technical reason for their existence we cannot forego the obvious analogy between them and the rococo style prevalent in the architecture and decorations of the period. Emanuel Bach’s music was as fashionable as that style, and his popularity outlasted it. Strange as it may seem, ‘Bach,’ in the eighteenth century and beyond, always meant ‘Emanuel’! Quite a different sort of man was Emanuel’s elder brother, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, the favorite son of his father and thought to be the most gifted, too. But the definition of genius as ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains’ would not fit his gifts. Wilhelm preferred a good time to concentrated labor, hence his name is not writ large in history. Yet his work, mostly preserved only in manuscript--concertos, suites, sonatas and fantasias--shows more real individuality, more _Innigkeit_ and, at times, real passion than does his brother’s. And, moreover, something that could never happen to his brother’s works happened to one of his. It was ascribed to his father and was so published in the Bach Society’s edition of Sebastian’s works. In the examples of his work, resurrected by the indefatigable Dr. Riemann, we are often surprised by harmonic vagaries and rhythmic ingenuities that recall strongly the older Bach; the impassioned fancy of that polyphonic giant finds often a faint echo in the rhapsodic wanderings of his eldest son. Friedemann Bach’s life was, like his work, rambling, irregular. Born in 1710, he was organist in Dresden from 1733 to 1747; then at Halle, in the church that was Handel’s drilling ground under old Zachau. His extravagances cost him this post and perhaps many another, for he roved restlessly over Germany for the rest of his life until, a broken-down genius of seventy-four, he ended his career in Berlin in 1784.