Bach’s Musical Offering

The Musical Offering was initiated in 1747 when Frederick the Great, King Frederick II of Prussia, himself a superb flutist, gave to Bach a complicated theme upon which Bach improvised to the astonishment of all present. Within the next few weeks Bach perfected and presented to Frederick a composition which exhibits Bach’s boundless imagination and profound depth of expression in a brilliant set of canons and fugues, and a trio sonata that is without parallel in 18th-century chamber music, all based on this royal theme.