Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was born in Weimar on 22 November 1710, the eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach. His father supervised his musical training closely, compiling for him the Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and guiding him through the Inventions, the Sinfonias and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier; at sixteen he went to Merseburg to study violin with Johann Gottlieb Graun. He also read law and mathematics at the universities of Leipzig and Halle. In 1733 he was appointed organist of the Sophienkirche in Dresden, moving in 1746 to the Liebfrauenkirche in Halle, where he grew increasingly unhappy and which he left in 1764 without another post secured. After years of teaching in Halle, Braunschweig and finally Berlin, he died there in poverty on 1 July 1784.

Friedemann was celebrated in his lifetime above all as an organist and improviser, and contemporaries judged him clearly superior to his rivals when he won the Dresden post. His surviving output includes church cantatas, symphonies and concertos, and a body of keyboard fugues, polonaises and fantasias, together with duets for two flutes; he absorbed more of his father’s contrapuntal manner than any of his composer brothers while giving it a restless, improvisatory edge. His pupils included Johann Gottlieb Goldberg and Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who drew on him for the first biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. He inherited a large part of his father’s manuscripts, some of which he sold or dispersed, and others of which passed through his Berlin pupil Sarah Levy to the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. Long dismissed as a wayward figure, he was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century and has been reassessed by modern scholarship, notably in the work of David Schulenberg.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Friedemann_Bach
• https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/focus/wf-bach-the-neglected-son