Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's compositional work can be characterised overall as a permanent conflict between high artistic standards and the need to make concessions to playability, audience taste, and contemporary understanding of music. However, as the eldest son of the famous Thomaskantor, he was willing only to a limited extent to subordinate his musical ideals to external constraints, as numerous contemporary anecdotes and documents attest. He preferred to accept being considered an outsider and deliberately moved his art beyond the boundary that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing described as the threshold at which the common people could "distinguish the true from the false." This uncompromising attitude not only shaped his contemporary failures but also explains the enduring fascination that his work exerts today.
