Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach was born in Leipzig on 21 June 1732, the fifth son of Johann Sebastian Bach, and was taught music by his father and by his distant cousin Johann Elias Bach while attending the St. Thomas School. In 1750 William, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, appointed him harpsichordist at Bückeburg, where he became concertmaster in 1759 and stayed for the rest of his life — hence the name he is usually known by, the Bückeburg Bach. There he worked with Johann Gottfried Herder, who supplied texts for six vocal works, the music of four of which survives. He married the singer Lucia Elisabeth Münchhausen in 1755; their son Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst, whom he taught as his own father had taught him, became music director to Frederick William II of Prussia. Father and son travelled to England in April 1778 to visit Johann Christian Bach, and he died at Bückeburg on 26 January 1795.

He was a keyboard virtuoso and an industrious composer across keyboard sonatas, some twenty symphonies, oratorios, liturgical choral music, motets, operas and songs, adapting to Count Wilhelm’s taste for Italian music while keeping traits of his father’s and his brother C. P. E.’s writing. His cataloguers, Hansdieter Wohlfahrth and Ulrich Leisinger, place him with C. P. E. Bach, Johann Christian, the Graun brothers and Telemann as a transitional figure, with some works in a high Baroque manner, others galant, and others combining the two with early Classical traits. A significant part of his output was destroyed when the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin, where his scores had been deposited since 1917, was bombed in the Second World War.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christoph_Friedrich_Bach
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q57225