Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was most renowned for his gifts of improvisation. Johan Friedrich Reichardt wrote in 1776: "I have not yet said anything to you about the excellent Phantasies of this Master; his whole soul is engaged when he improvises...it is here that he first truly shows the enormous knowledge of harmony and the immeasurable wealth of rare and unusual modulations which establish him as the greatest of original geniuses." Spontaneity of expression and changing moods give the music of Emanuel Bach a more strongly improvisatory character than that of almost any other composer. His style, so individual, surprising, and abrupt, must have originated in this subjective attitude towards emotions. After all, we can read in his autobiography (1773) "I feel that Music must, above all, touch the heart"--a sentence which could almost serve as a motto for the entire period of musical style referred to as Empfindsamkeit. The term "empfindsam" was invented by the dramatist Lessing as a German neologism for the English word "sentimental", when Lessing was helping the Hamburg publisher Bode with a translation of Laurence Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy", written in 1768. The term was used to indicate a new aesthetic which was deliberately slanted towards subjective emotions. It was a style which had already been popular in literature for some 20 years, since the publication of Klopstock's Biblical epic, "Messias" (1748). A similar striving for intensity of feeling was also to become prominent in contemporary vocal and instrumental music: the interruption of continuous textures, violent contrasts, large dynamic ranges, from the softest pianissimo to the loudest fortissimo, and finally a striving towards irrationality. Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Johann Gottfried Mthel, and Georg Benda were the foremost representatives of this style, which was most widespread in northern Germany. Trio Sonata Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's chamber music signals an important step in the process by which instrumental music freed itself from the restraints of vocal music traditions. One of the most important features of Bach's contribution to this emancipation was his highly imaginative and poetic style, which enabled his music to "speak", even without words. Musical aestheticians, during that period of the Enlightenment, referred to Ton-sprache (speech in tones) and Klang-rede (discourse in (musical) sound). The most popular chamber music genre in the time of Emanuel Bach was the trio sonata. It was genre most suited to a "Klang-rede" of this sort; indeed, two independent voices, supported by a basso continuo, could carry on a musical conversation, and the sonata adapted this technique from the genre of the concerto. In such a conversation, we can hear the two upper voices alternately speaking with or against each other, in harmony or in competition. Emanuel Bach left 29 trio sonatas (in addition to 4 more works of disputed authenticity), set for two melody instruments and figured bass, or for a single melody instrument and obbligato clavier (which in this case plays both the basso continuo and one of the concertante upper voices). No fewer than a quarter of these works, seven trios, were composed in Leipzig in 1731, under the watchful eye of his father Johann Sebastian, in the house where Bach lived during his youth. They are, moreover, the only chamber music works written by the younger Bach during this period. During the course of Bach's law studies in Frankfurt on the Oder, only one trio sonata was written (1735); the entire remainder belong to Emanuel's Berlin sojourn (1740-1768)....