Even in late-eighteenth-century Berlin, where the music of Johann Sebastian Bach enjoyed a healthy afterlife through the advocacy of his sons and former pupils, the extensive cultivation of Bach-family works by the Itzig circle was remarkable. The “veritable Sebastian and Emanuel Bach cult” centered in the house of the royal banker Daniel Itzig from the 1770s was maintained above all by his daughter Sara Levy well into the nineteenth century. A prominent keyboardist and salonnière, Levy studied with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, corresponded with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and evidently commissioned works from both. Her enthusiasm for music of the Bach family, alongside mid-century works by Berlin composers employed by King Frederick the Great and Princess Anna Amalia, has been considered evidence of a “conservative-enlightened musical taste” that gradually ossified over several decades.

Levy's manuscript copies of music by Sebastian Bach include a representative sampling of keyboard and chamber works from across the composer's career—from the early Toccata in D Major, BWV 912, and the English and French Suites, to more mature works such as the organ trios, selections from the Well-Tempered Clavier, sonatas for violin or flute and obbligato keyboard, and keyboard concertos that she played in house concerts in her salon or performed publicly over several decades. It should come as no surprise that this list includes compositions that Emanuel Bach considered to have aged particularly well. In 1774 he wrote to Johann Nikolaus Forkel that his father's violin and obbligato keyboard sonatas “still sound excellent and give me much joy, although they date back more than fifty years. They contain some Adagii that could not be written in a more singable manner today.” And as the presumed author of a comparison between his father and Handel published in 1788, Emanuel noted that the organ trios are “written in such a galant style that they still sound very good, and never grow old, but on the contrary will outlive all revolutions of fashion in music.” Nevertheless, Sebastian's music—especially the keyboard suites—could hardly have been seen as progressive during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. And so Levy's interest in it speaks mainly to the antiquarian side of her musical taste. In this she was hardly atypical among her peers, for Berlin salon culture was pluralistic in its consumption of literature and music from both past and present.