ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the older Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's songs, and a completely unknown facet of his late vocal works. It deals with a man in his late sixties and early seventies, respectively, who suffered from spells of gout and other ailments; with a father who in 1778 had lost his son Johann Sebastian Jr., a promising landscape painter who died prematurely in Rome at age 29. Personal connections with literary figures does not generally play a significant role within the compositional activities of the members of the Bach family. The bulk of Bach's vocal output, both sacred and secular, belongs to his Hamburg period. Bach's production of songs, despite their impressive number, generally present no major problems regarding repertory, sources, transmission, and chronology. The Sing-Academie archive that contains the bulk of Bach's estate had previously never been thoroughly researched, not even when the materials were readily available until the early 1940s.
