Yep, I’ve had a little break from blogging recently, mostly doing a lot of writing and working and other fun creative things. But let’s get back to business, shall we?
Everyone who has studied even a smidgen of music has heard about the Bach clan. Johann Sebastian and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel (known as C.P.E. to increase his street cred). There’s also the Strauss’s, another prolific musical family. One lesser known family of musical note (ha ha, note, get it?) are the Fasch’s.
Johann Friedrich was born in 1688 in Buttelstedt Germany. He studied in Leipzig (where the great Johann Sebastian was working, too, and, incidentally, the hometown of my dad) and wrote a prolific amount of concertos, cantatas and symphonies. The music he wrote was never printed in his lifetime, and he’s largely forgotten today, though at the time he was highly regarded by his contemporaries. Johann Sebastian Bach actually made copies of some of his manuscripts to preserve and study them.
His most popular youtube offering is his trumpet concerto, below, which seems to show up on any anthology of trumpet music produced. There was a great album from 2013, Overtures in G Minor, D Minor and G Major, with Paul Dombrecht on oboe, that was all Fasch. Incidentally, this group is becoming a favorite of mine for all their early music recordings.
https://play.spotify.com/album/3zXQXQSItExg1zVVydwfW4
He also appears with one of my other favorites, Telemann, in a lot of Baroque anthologies.
Like the Bach’s he gave birth to a musical son, Carl Friedrich Christian who was born when his dad was almost 50, and founded the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, which still exists today as a musical society (which Mendelssohn apparently wanted to become the director of in later years).
So the next time you’re at a dinner party and some classical music snob is going on about the talent of the Bach family, you can come right back at them with the talent of the usually-overlooked Fasch’s.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.