page_title: The Musical Offering
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: The Musical Offering / History
caption_attribution_description: Middle: Frederick the Great; far right: Johann Joachim Quantz, the king's flute teacher; to his left with a violin and wearing dark clothing: Franz Benda; leftmost in the foreground: Gustav Adolf von Gotter; behind him: Jakob Friedrich von Bielfeld; behind him, looking at the ceiling: Pierre Louis Maupertuis; in the background, sitting on a pink sofa: Wilhelmine of Bayreuth; on her right: Amalie of Prussia with a maid of honor; behind them, Carl Heinrich Graun; the elderly lady behind the music stand: Sophie Caroline; behind her: Egmont of Chasot; at the harpsichord: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
context_page_description: The Musical Offering, BWV 1079, is a collection of keyboard canons and fugues and other pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, all based on a single musical theme given to him by Frederick the Great, to whom they are dedicated. The Ricercar a 6, a six-voice fugue which is regarded as the high point of the entire work, was put forward by the musicologist Charles Rosen as the most significant piano composition in history. This ricercar is also occasionally called the Prussian Fugue, a name used by Bach himself. The composition features in the opening section of Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
context_section_description: The collection has its roots in a meeting between Bach and Frederick II on May 7, 1747. The meeting, taking place at the King's residence in Potsdam, came about because Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel was employed there as court musician. Frederick wanted to show the elder Bach a novelty, the fortepiano, which had been invented some years earlier.  The King owned several of the experimental instruments being developed by Gottfried Silbermann.  During his anticipated visit to Frederick's palace in Potsdam, Bach, who was well known for his skill at improvising, received from Frederick a long and complex musical theme on which to improvise a three-voice fugue. He did so, but Frederick then challenged him to improvise a six-voice fugue on the same theme. Bach answered that he would need to work the score and send it to the King afterwards.  He then returned to Leipzig to write out the Thema Regium ("theme of the king"):
  Two months after the meeting, Bach published a set of pieces based on this theme which we now know as The Musical Offering. Bach inscribed the piece "Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta" (the theme given by the king, with additions, resolved in the canonic style), the first letters of which spell out the word ricercar, a well-known genre of the time.
caption: The Flute Concert of Sanssouci by Adolph Menzel, 1852, depicts Frederick playing the flute in his music room, with C. P. E. Bach accompanying him on a harpsichord-shaped piano by Gottfried Silbermann.
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