On this recording, the music of Bach – paired with works by Henze and Mozart in terms of the programme selection as well as from an art-historical perspective – serves as a spring-board for a series of music-historical interconnections within its own musical cosmos. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the name Bach was primarily associated with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), who had become famous through the publication of his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments in 1753. C.P.E. Bach’s music was the immediate starting point for Hans Werner Henze’s (1926–2012) conception of musical and aesthetic history as well as for his work as a composer, so for example in his interpretative transcription of one of Bach’s Fantasias. Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s (1756–1791) relationship to Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was 42 years his senior, was much more ambivalent, as there are hardly any explicit references to Bach in Mozart’s music.