This summer I spent an artist residency at the Greifenberger Institut für Musikinstrumentenkunde in Greifenberg, and out of it has come a new film: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Sonata in F minor, Wq 57/6, played on the Institute's reconstruction of a grand piano by Franz Jacob Spath (c. 1770), and read alongside a remarkable eighteenth-century commentary on the same piece.
The film brings together two parts of my life that usually sit in different rooms: playing, and research. I recorded the sonata on 16 July 2026 in the Kirche St. Anna in Schondorf am Ammersee, and I did the audio, the filming and the editing myself. The texts on screen come from my doctoral thesis.
Forkel and the sonata
Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818) was music director at the University of Göttingen and is often called the first German musicologist. He wrote some of the first histories of music in German, and in 1802 he published the first biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, drawing on what Bach's sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel among them, told him.
In his Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland auf das Jahr 1784, Forkel chose this very sonata to show his readers how to listen to instrumental music. He writes as if to a Liebhaber, a music lover who plays and feels deeply but is not yet a Kenner, a connoisseur who knows how music is put together. His guide is rhetoric, the classical art of moving an audience through speech: music, for Forkel, works like an orator, and its figures (sudden breaks, hesitations, repetitions, climaxes) carry the listener through a succession of feelings.
This is close to the heart of my thesis, A Rhetorical Approach to the Historical Performance of Keyboard Music: 1740–1830. I ask how these eighteenth-century ideas of musical rhetoric can guide performers today, and Forkel's essay is one of the clearest witnesses we have to that way of listening. The film is a kind of excerpt from that work. I wanted to take a source that usually lives in footnotes and let it speak alongside the music it describes, in English translation, so that anyone can follow it.
Feeling in three movements
Forkel hears the sonata as one emotional journey. "At first sight of the sonata," he writes, "you will at once perceive that the first Allegro contains the expression of a certain indignation; the Andante, contemplation and reflection; and the last, the Andantino grazioso, the tranquillity that arises from them."
The first movement is full of sudden outbursts and abrupt silences. Forkel's description of how feelings behave could stand as a programme note for it: they "rise with vehemence up to a certain point and then suddenly break off; or they show a certain uncertainty, a doubt, in their expression; or they repeat themselves." He even defends a harsh modulation near the middle of the movement, which he admits he would not call beautiful on its own, as "a faithful expression of what was to be, and had to be, expressed here."
Why would anyone want to hear indignation set to music? Forkel's answer is that the pleasure comes from what follows: from reflection returning to the angry person, and from the "melancholy-consoling" feeling that grows out of it. In the Andante and the Andantino, he writes, the listener finds "depictions so touching and gentle" that "hardly anything will remain of the unpleasant feeling of indignation depicted before." The last movement, with its "melancholy-tranquil and almost balsamic, consoling expression," is for him "the finest that one could imagine or wish for in this character."
What moves me in this text is how seriously it takes feeling. Forkel is not describing themes and keys; he is describing what happens to a listener, and he trusts that a careful player and a careful listener will meet in the same place. That is a good thing for a performer to be reminded of.
The Spath instrument
There is a happy connection between the text and the instrument. In his Musikalischer Almanach for 1782, the same Forkel counted Franz Jacob Spath of Regensburg among the best instrument makers in Germany, praising his keyboard instruments as "of ingenious quality" and his grand pianos as "particularly excellent" (Greifenberger Institut).
The instrument I played is the Institute's reconstruction of a grand piano ascribed to Spath, c. 1770, whose damaged original was found in Tannheim in Tyrol. It has a simple Stossmechanik, an action without escapement. In practice this means that nothing in the mechanism helps you: the hammer has to be sent to the string with real control, and it is easy to block a note or lose it altogether. It took me some time to find my way with it.
But it is very rewarding. The sound is direct, sometimes even a little rough, and to my ears that suits the rawness and the sudden changes of mood in C. P. E. Bach's music beautifully. Playing the first movement on this instrument, Forkel's "indignation" did not feel like a metaphor at all.
Watch and read
In the film, Forkel's words appear between the movements and at the moments he writes about, together with pages from the first edition of 1781 (Clavier-Sonaten … für Kenner und Liebhaber, Dritte Sammlung). There are also two short excerpts for Instagram, from the first movement and the Andantino.
My thesis, freely available in the University of Tübingen library: A Rhetorical Approach to the Historical Performance of Keyboard Music: 1740–1830
My warm thanks to the Greifenberger Institut für Musikinstrumentenkunde, whose residency made this project possible, and for the chance to spend time with such a remarkable instrument.