Johann Sebastian Bach Kleine Klavierstücke um 1745

Like the well-known Klavierbüchlein (Notebook) for Wilhelm Friedemann and Anna Magdalena Bach, this collection also contains short, simple keyboard compositions from the Bach family and their immediate circle. The collection survives only in a copy made by Johann Heinrich Michel. He was one of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s most important Hamburg copyists, and in the catalog of his papers a “kleines Büchlein” is mentioned, the detailed description of which exactly matches this collection. There is much to suggest that this "little book" was a Notebook for Johann Christian Bach which Johann Sebastian Bach compiled in the 1740s, the contents of which only survive in Michel’s copy. The composers featured include Johann Sebastian Bach, his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christoph Altnickol, who studied in Leipzig from 1744 and married Bach’s daughter Juliane Friederica in 1749.

Like the compositions in the other Notebook from the Bach family, the simple compositions in the collection – which rarely venture beyond two-part writing – represent a valuable addition to the keyboard teaching repertoire.