Bach's sonatas and concertos of the 1740s represent the first major plateau in his output, matched for their sustained originality and expressive intensity only by the solo keyboard music of his last decade and perhaps the songs of the late 1750s. His first publication, the Prussian Sonatas (W. 48), looks small and stylistically cautious within his output as a whole. Yet it was ambitious when it appeared in 1742, constituting the first set of regular three-movement keyboard sonatas issued by a German composer. Its publication was a coup for its twenty-eight-year-old composer, not least because the relative newcomer to the court was able to dedicate it to King Frederick, presumably with the latter's permission and support.

Sonatas

The thirty-six copper plates required for printing the Prussian Sonatas (including title page and dedication) were less than half the number used for Sebastian's opus 1—part 1 of the Clavierübung, whose printing was completed in 1731—but the latter had been published in installments over a period of five or six years. The most ambitious of Emanuel's earlier works, such as the Locatelli Variations or the G-Minor Sonata of 1739 (W. 65/11), may be more challenging musically. Yet even the relatively simple First Prussian Sonata belies common present-day assumptions about Berlin style, not only in the imitative texture of its first movement but also in the alternation between arioso and instrumental recitative in the second.