Keyboards, Music Rooms, and the Bach Family at the Court of Frederick the Great

Using historical architectural plans, inventories, and images, this study locates and describes the musical spaces and the keyboard instruments upon which Johann Sebastian, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach would have performed at the Prussian court. King Frederick II’s many palaces—and those of the king’s close family members—featured from one to five music rooms, in addition to small palace theaters and orangeries. Oleskiewicz takes the reader on a virtual tour of each palace (with help of an illustrated web companion) and solves many long-standing puzzles about enigmatic features of several keyboard works, specific locations of known performances at court by the Bachs, and the numbers and types of organs, fortepianos and other keyboards at court by Marx, Shudi, Silbermann, and others.