Creativity Quote by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Good performance, for C.P.E. Bach, is less about impressing an audience than about switching on their perception. The key verb is "make": the performer isn’t a decorative add-on to the score, but the agent who renders its meaning audible. In an age when musical display could drift into polite virtuosity, Bach draws a line between mere execution and interpretation. Technique matters only insofar as it can force the ear to recognize "true content and affect" - two loaded terms in an 18th-century world newly obsessed with sensibility, rhetoric, and emotional legibility.

The phrase "true content" carries a quiet challenge to performers who treat music as interchangeable material for flourish. Bach, writing in the orbit of the empfindsamer Stil, assumes a composition has an inner argument: tensions, releases, surprises, and implied speech-like gestures. The performer’s job is to clarify that argument, not obscure it. "Affect" isn’t vague feeling; it’s a coded emotional posture, closer to a dramatic intention than a mood. You don’t just play loud or soft; you shape timing, articulation, and color so the listener can hear why the music is pleading, teasing, grieving, or defiant.

There’s also a moral edge. By making the ear "conscious", Bach implies that listening can be taught, even improved. The performer becomes a translator of human expression, responsible for accuracy and persuasion. In that sense, his standard is demanding and modern: performance is communication, and the audience is the proof.