Fuga in D-Dur

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710 – 1784), the second child and eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach, was a German composer and performer.

Despite his acknowledged genius as an organist, improviser and composer, his income and employment were unstable and he died in poverty.

Wilhelm Friedemann was born in Weimar, where his father was employed as organist and chamber musician to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar.
In July 1720, when Friedemann was nine, his mother Maria Barbara Bach died suddenly; Johann Sebastian Bach remarried in December 1721. J. S. Bach supervised Friedemann's musical education and career with great attention.

In addition to his musical training, Friedemann received formal schooling beginning in Weimar. When J.S. Bach took the post of Cantor of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Friedemann was appointed in 1733 to the position of organist of the St. Sophia's Church at Dresden.
In competing for the post he played a new version of his father's Prelude and Fugue in G Major, BWV 541. The judge described Friedemann as clearly superior to the other two candidates.

In 1746 Friedemann became organist of the Liebfrauenkirche at Halle. In 1751, Friedemann married Dorothea Elisabeth Georgi, who was 11 years his junior and who outlived him by seven years.

Friedemann was deeply unhappy in Halle almost from the beginning of his tenure. In 1749 he was involved in a conflict with the Cantor of the Liebfrauenkirche, Gottfried Mittag, who had misappropriated funds that were due to Friedemann.

In 1750 the church authorities reprimanded Friedemann for overstaying a leave of absence (he was in Leipzig settling his father's estate). In 1753 he made his first documented attempt to find another post, and thereafter made several others.

All these attempts failed. Bach had at least two pupils, Friedrich Wilhelm Rust and Johann Samuel Petri.

A sad life in the shadow of his eminent father.