AHJ, Vol. 7 No. 4, Winter 1980

member of the family, regarded by contemporaries as
an even greater harpist than his father. We do not
know how Franz Petrini, eighteen years old in 1762,
was occupied during the final years of the Seven
Years' War. Although there were some opportunities
for employment in Berlin during the war, many of the
musical events normally sponsored by the King or by
other highborn members of his army had been suspended
or drastically curtailed. Conditions in Berlin
improved only slightly for musicians after the war.
Frederick the Great had succeeded, against staggering
opposition, in winning recognition for Prussia as
a major power, but he returned from the war weary,
morose, and with his ardor for music considerably
cooled. Musical life in Berlin did not regain the
brilliance it had achieved in the years immediately
preceding the war; some musicians, including C.P.E.
Bach, began to look elsewhere in the hope of finding
a more favorable situation. 29 During this troubled
period, Franz Petrini began his career. In 1765 he
entered the service of the Duke of Mecklenburg­
Schwerin; in 1769 he made a final move to Paris
where he achieved celebrity as a virtuoso, teacher,
and composer for the harp. 30 It seems likely, considering
eighteenth-century accounts of Franz Petrini's
virtuosity, that it might have been for him that
Emanuel Bach composed the Sonata for Harp.
There is no way of knowing what kind of harp
Bach had in mind for the sonata. From Marpurg's
report of the elder Petrini's facility in all 24 keys, it
might be inferred that he played a double or triple
harp, and it is possible that Petrini's children were
trained to continue playing such a harp as a family
tradition. But Bach's harp sonata can be performed
on a single action pedal harp and seems, in some
respects, to favor the design of a pedal harp. Fashions
in Frederick the Great's Berlin were often governed
by his taste for French culture - it is equally believable
that Therese and Franz Petrini learned to play the
kind of harp which was becoming modish in France
during the l 750's and l 760's. But there is nothing
about the harp sonata which clearly restricts it to a
particular instrument.
Harpists have frequently been puzzled by the great
difference in technical requirements and style between
Wq 139 and another composition for harp
attributed to C.P.E. Bach: La Bataille de Bergen, Sonate
pour le Piano-Forte ou Harpe, Wq 272, published by A.
Kreitner in Worms without a date. 31 Although this
"sonata" is listed in the appendix to the Wotquenne
catalogue as a posthumous publication, it was published
as early as 10 years before Bach's death. An
advertisement for it in the Hamburger Correspondent on
December 12, 1778 announces that this battle piece
is by "C. E. Bach," and adds "not the one from
Hamburg." The following statement by Emanuel
Bach in a letter of August 4, 1787 to Westphal is
undoubtedly another disclaimer: "The Bataille you
mention is not by me. That sort of thing is not my
style." 32 The Nachla/3 Verzeichnis does not list the
Battle of Bergen, and, what is even more significant,
neither does Westphal who does record a number of
questionable publications. 33 Clearly, the evidence
against Bach's authorship of the Battle of Bergen is as
strong as the evidence that he did compose the harp
sonata.
Our investigation of the origin of Emanuel Bach's
harp sonata has yielded information of various kinds,
and it is important to distinguish among the different
degrees of conclusiveness of evidence. Firm evidence
exists of Bach's authorship of the sonata, as well as
its year of composition and the order of its movements:
Adagio-Allegro (C)-Allegro (3/8). We can
submit with equal certainty that Bach did not write
the Battle of Bergen. From circumstantial evidence
having to do with musical affairs in Germany in
Bach's lifetime, we can propose a strong probability:
It is likely that the harp sonata was composed for
Marie Therese or Franz Petrini, or, perhaps, for both.
From rather inconclusive evidence, we can suggest
two possibilities each of which seems plausible: the
harp sonata could have been written for a chromatic
harp or for a single action pedal harp.
Having examined circumstances surrounding the
origin of Emanuel Bach's harp sonata, let us look at
the work itself. Some aspects of its style have given
rise to conjectures that this sonata may have originally
been written for another instrument. Passages
of broken chords and certain ornaments (particularly
the trilled turn) suggest keyboard technique. But the
same observation might be made about many of
Emanuel Bach's compositions - Bach, whose accomplishments
as a performer seem to have been
confined to the keyboard, obviously conceived much
of his music in terms of keyboard technique. The
harp sonata has one feature, however, which is decidedly
uncharacteristic of Bach's sonatas for keyboard:
the sequence of movements. The keyboard
sonatas, which number more than 150, have, with
one exception, the same sequence of movements -
fast-slow-fast. The harp sonata's sequence-slowfast-faster-can
be associated with another genre
among Bach's works: the sonata for melody instrument
with continuo (the sequence S-F-F, based upon
what is often called the "Tartini model" after the
most frequent sequence in Tartini' s violin sonatas,
originated in the 1720' s and disappeared as the Classical
style developed). The harp sonata has other
points of similarity with Bach's sonatas for melody
instrument and continuo: its texture and its figured
bass. The figures in the left-hand part of the harp
sonata are something of an enigma since they often
designate notes which are already in the right-hand
part. This feature has caused scholars to wonder
whether the harp sonata may once have been a sonata
for violin and continuo (the compass of the righthand
part fits the range of the violin nicely). But
Bach wrote no other solo violin sonatas with con-
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