Bach’s sons remained in the homeland — until the last, Johann Christian. Born in 1735, he was called, though even from beyond the grave, father Bach might have regretted that second name after his youngest had moved to Italy in 1755 and converted to Catholicism, that sect feared and hated by Orthodox Lutherans with an intensity that surely surpassed the antipathy of Shiite for Sunni, and vice-versa. Like so many Protestant musicians who worked in Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries, the parallel sensual appeal of Catholicism and opera proved difficult to resist: the mighty fortress of Lutheran austerity could not long hold out against this siege of sumptuous decadence.
On J. S. Bach’s death in 1750, Christian went to live with one of his older half- brothers, Carl Philipp Emanuel, in Berlin. Like all Bach son’s, Christian had been trained by his father in his birthplace Leipzig as an organist; the teenager continued these studies in Berlin with the help of a two-manual clavichord with pedal board he inherited in the estate.
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