Listening for likeness, or C. P. E. Bach and the art of speculation

C. P. E. Bach was a passionate collector of portraits and many items in his collection were immediately recognizable images of famous musicians. Other pictures portrayed obscure individuals whose identity and connection to music had to be guessed at by the collector, or surmised by later commentators. As Bach's own mistakes demonstrate, correctly identifying the subject of a portrait seemed to demand a heightened sensitivity to the question of likeness: the art of speculation, at the risk of making mistakes, was crucial to 18th-century portrait connoisseurship. Some of these same sensibilities-along with their propensity for error-figure in the long-standing tradition of discerning similarities between the music of J. S. Bach and that of his portrait-collecting son. This article explores the ways in which C. P. E. Bach's handful of identification errors invites us to consider again how one might listen for likeness within the fraught context of the Bach family history. Embracing the notion of speculation as a critical tool, I reconsider moments in C. P. E. Bach's oeuvre when the composer seems to refer directly or indirectly to his father's music: rather than understand such moments as indications of influence or borrowing, this essay suggests that we might instead speculate in the mode of a portrait connoisseur such as C. P. E. Bach, to discover a composer deeply invested in concepts of artistic achievement and legacy tracing the lineaments of the family physiognomy in his own musings on his father's music.