The ninth child and second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach and his second wife Anna Magdalena, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach was born in 1732 in Leipzig, where his father had served for the previous ten years as Thomaskantor. His first lessons were with his father, and when he completed his academic studies at the Latin School in Leipzig he is said to have gone on to the university, to study law. In 1750, however, perhaps in view of his father’s state of health, he seized the chance of a position as chamber harpsichordist in the musical establishment of Count Wilhelm zu Schaumburg-Lippe at Bückeburg, with a salary of 200 Taler, possibly helped by the influence of his half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel, harpsichordist to the King of Prussia, who had met and dedicated works to the Count. On the departure from Bückeburg in 1756 of the Italian musicians Angelo Colonna and Giambattista Serini, concert-master and Kapellmeister, respectively, Johann Christoph Friedrich took over their duties, with a subsequent doubling of his salary. In 1755 he married Lucia Elisabeth Münchhausen, the daughter of the court organist, Ludolf Münchhausen, employed at court as a singer, briefly taking refuge with his patron Count Wilhelm in the winter of 1757–58 at the latter’s country estate at Niensteden during the French occupation of Bückeburg in the course of the Seven Years War.

— Keith Anderson