In a late-1700s European coffee house, the greatest composer named Bach was Emanuel, not Johann Sebastian. This episode traces Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach from his 1714 birth in Weimar, with Telemann as godfather and a father who drilled him in counterpoint, through a law degree in Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder that served as a social shield in an era when musicians were treated as servants, to his post in Berlin with the Crown Prince of Prussia, the future Frederick the Great.

The episode explains the empfindsamer Stil, the sensitive style, with its sudden silences, harmonic surprises and rapid mood shifts that foreshadowed Romanticism, and the Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments that Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven treated as a bible. It follows his 30 compositions for the king's mechanical flute clocks, his 1768 move to H ...