In turning to the best of his sonatas one turns to profoundly beautiful music, music that unquestionably has the power to stir the heart. The great spirit of the father has breathed upon it and given it life. The turns of his melodies and their ineffably tender cadences, and, above all, the chromatic richness of his harmonies are the voice of his father. One may be constantly startled and bewildered. There is something ghostly abroad in them. We hear and do not hear, we almost see and do not see, the all-powerful Sebastian. But it is the voice of the father in a new language, his face in shadow, in the mist before dawn. One is tempted to cry with Hamlet: ‘Well said, old mole! Canst work i’ the ground so fast?’ It is easy to understand that Haydn, worn out with his daily fight against starvation, could come back to his cracked clavichord and play away half the night with the sonatas of Emanuel Bach; that Mozart could call him father of them all. But in spirit, not in flesh. And it is, after all, the spirit of Sebastian that thus attends the succeeding births and rebirths of music. The harpsichord works by W. Friedemann Bach, the oldest and, according to some accounts, the favorite son of Johann Sebastian, have had probably far less influence upon the development of pianoforte music. But they contain many measures of great beauty. Madame Farrenc included twelve polonaises, a sonata (in E-flat major), several fugues, and four superb fantasias in the _Trésor des pianistes_. The sonata is regular in form, and a few of the polonaises are in the triplex form. Thus Friedemann Bach shows that he, too, like his brother Emanuel, allied himself to the new movement in music. His mastery of musical science, however, is evident; and that he knew the keyboard well is proved by the unusual brilliance of his fantasias. In the main it may be said that the greatest beauty of his music whispers of his father.