The first and in many ways the worst of the sons of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784) was a disgrace to the family name. After a lifetime of frittering away his immense compositional gifts on works that can be described as conservatively Baroque, sensitive in a modern fashion, and—to put it bluntly—unfinished, Wilhelm Friedemann ended his career by selling off his father's music and selling his own music forged with his father's name. And yet when he was good, Wilhelm Friedemann was very, very good—a composer of formidable contrapuntal skills combined with deep expressivity—and he was rarely better than he was in his 12 Polonaises for keyboard (a 13th Polonaise in C major was also composed at about the same time, but was clearly conceived as a separate work). Composed around 1765 (the dating of Bach's works is nearly impossible to know owing to the carelessness of his life), the 12 Polonaises were written in Hallé, while Bach was throwing away the last, best chance he had to obtain a solid, permanent place in Darmstadt. They are exquisitely sensitive works that are wonderfully well formed and harmonically and melodically expressive. Based on the Polish dance form that Chopin later made his own, Bach's Polonaises are among the very best works he wrote, and were highly esteemed by the first generation of Romantic composers. The first 12 were written in parallel major and minor keys ascending from C—C major, C minor, D major, D minor, E flat major, E flat minor, F major, F minor, G major, G minor—thus pointing to an organization beyond the haphazard organization of most of his other music. Although some of Bach's smaller character pieces for keyboard are equally fine, the 12 Polonaises are certainly his best set of works for keyboard and arguably his best works in any genre.

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