Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 10

  a terrible expression of suppressed pain [that is] the height to which the character of the whole piece naturally leads us.… The composer has here overshot the mark.… That he allowed himself … to be carried away too far by his subjective bias must have become plain to him later, when he wrote a chorus with … many similar details (as particularly the wailing minor sixths) to the words Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, etc.

  Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen means “Weeping, Wailing, Sorrowing, Fearing,” surely better occasions for a deeply scarifying motif than a town council event, and he would have an even better use for it later.

  In the end, Bach’s ambitions were too great for Mühlhausen and especially for its church, which had not only a temperamental strain of musical conservatism but also was a stronghold of Pietism, with which Bach sympathized in just about every way but one: They disapproved of the use of “concerted” music in church, meaning elaborate music with instruments, reserving their favor only for hymns. Like Ohrdruf, Mühlhausen was riven by the strain between orthodoxy and Pietism, a city so long and passionately involved in its spiritual disputations that it had hosted the execution of the Anabaptists’ leading light, Thomas Münzer. Now a couple of centuries later, reviving the old dispute, a war broke out between the Pietist pastor at St. Blaise’s, who was also the Mühlhausen superintendent, and the pastor at another church, who like Bach was orthodox Lutheran. Despite enough Pietist sympathy to straddle the issue in good conscience, Bach of course placed himself squarely in the middle of it, siding against his own superior.

  More important to Bach than Pietist conservatism, though, was a siren’s call from the opera, which was serving up tantalizing new forms capable of bringing music for the church, especially the cantata, to a higher level of eloquence and beauty: free recitatives, which lifted virtually all structural constraints; and a robust, compelling form of aria that supported and inspired not only biblical quotations but boldly interpretive poetry as well. These innovations could never have been embraced by the clergy or parishioners of a town like Mühlhausen, and just a year after he had moved there, he wrote a (somewhat petulant) letter of resignation to the town fathers:

  Although it was my intention to advance music in the divine service toward its very end and purpose, a regulated church music in honor of God; although it was also my intention here to improve the church music, which in nearly all villages is on the increase and is often better treated than here … I have not been allowed to do my work without vexation and opposition.… So God willed to bring about an opportunity that will make it possible for me [to pursue] the creation of an organized repertory of church music.

  Thus did Bach inform the town fathers of Mühlhausen of a delicious vindication, the offer to return, as a member of the ducal Kapelle and principal organist, to the very court where he had been a “lackey.” His new salary of 150 florins, eighteen bushels of wheat, twelve bushels of barley, four cords of firewood, and thirty pails of tax-free beer represented a significant raise, and Weimar was a large court town—a third of its five thousand residents worked for the court—known to be a venue of serious new music, as forward-looking as Mühlhausen was stultifying. The court secretary and keeper of the ducal coin collection was an accomplished poet, Salomo Franck, whose cantata texts required just the sort of freedom Bach was seeking for his choral music. There was a link to the latest musical theory there as well in the person of J. G. Walther, who was just then finishing his latest book on the subject, having been aided in the project by Andreas Werckmeister himself. Bach was about to learn all he needed in order to choose the final course of his career, and that choice would decisively influence his response, in the last years of his life, to a more than musical challenge from the king of Prussia.

  * * *

  * At this point it is time we begin to call him by the name of Bach. He was no longer a child, and he was already very close to earning the right granted him by posterity to have the name to himself.

  * Christoph Wolff has made a strong case that it may have been written for Bach’s school chum Georg Erdmann or for a graduation party at Lüneburg (NBR no. 18n), but the departure for war of his closest brother remains a plausible and attractive occasion for it as well. Finally, the question is unanswerable.

  VII.

  WITNESS TO AN EXECUTION

  AS FREDERICK RODE BEHIND HIS FATHER AND THE Saxon elector Augustus the Strong in the grand procession at Mühlberg, after the fiercest beating of his life, he had cause to feel more like the butchered oxen on the banquet tables than like the crown prince of Prussia. By then he had concluded that his relationship with his father was both desperate and hopeless: He was at the malevolent whim of a gout-ridden drunk whose best friends and wife (not to mention the emperor) handled their “Fatty” like a dolt. By such a man was the crown prince beaten and humiliated in front of servants and officers, a man who split his pants at parties and replaced a Leibniz with a Gundling. He belonged with the boars of Wusterhausen. Frederick did not. On his first visit to King Augustus’s lavish court in Dresden, Frederick had become Fédéric, someone who was not just inclined but destined to curl his hair and play the flute—and not necessarily someone meant to sit straight on a horse or eat with a steel spoon. On this his second and last visit to Saxony as crown prince (he would be back some years later as a king, to the next Saxon elector’s deep regret), Fédéric decided he would not let himself be bullied anymore. He was not yet sure how, but the humiliation was going to stop.

  The fury of the king’s assaults seemed to increase with the pressure of diplomacy over the “double marriage,” the queen’s longed-for scenario in which Frederick and Wilhelmina both married into Britain’s royal family, securing not only a Prussian-English alliance but a glamorous (meaning: Hanoverian) court for herself. The attack at Mühlberg, for example, coincided with the visit of a special envoy from London whose mission was to break the long deadlock: Frederick William was ready to let Wilhelmina marry the prince of Wales but would not commit himself to Frederick’s marriage as well. The British king, obviously more interested in having a Prussian king as a son-in-law than a Prussian princess as Britain’s next queen, insisted on both marriages or neither. In the interest of foiling Frederick William, Frederick and his mother had taken up a back-channel correspondence with London, and in Potsdam they plotted behind the king’s back with the ambassadors of both England and France. Frederick went so far as to put in writing a secret promise to his grandfather, the English king, that if he (George I) would consent to Wilhelmina’s marriage to the future prince of Wales, he (Frederick) would pledge to marry no one but the English Princess Amalia while Frederick William lived. Such a commitment to a foreign power in contravention of the king amounted, of course, to treason.

  Frederick William, even when he suspected her of conniving, treated his wife with deference, out of affection and respect for her position as a Hanover, but he could not be expected to make any such allowances for his son. Even Wilhelmina, Frederick’s co-conspirator in all things and especially the double-marriage plot, which she no less than her mother dreamed of, warned him that he was placing himself in danger by acting as he did.

  Only his youth and the severity of his father’s abuse can explain Frederick’s recklessness. Beyond plotting with England, he began shaking down foreign governments to support his various forbidden hobbies, such as his library, which included two thousand thalers’ worth of musical scores alone by the time he was fifteen. At first he raised five hundred ducats from Austria, but then, his appetite aroused, he started asking for more and more until he was collecting huge sums regularly from Austria, England, and Russia. Each of the loans was secured by his promise of friendship and repayment on taking the throne, which even then he was plotting intermittently to do.

  “The Crown Prince is loading me with favors,” the French ambassador Rothenburg wrote to Paris, and later: “I pretend never to speak to the prince, but I have several sure, faithful ways of making known to him what I
desire and of receiving his messages.” In Rothenburg’s diplomatic dispatches there were dark hints that Frederick William could be declared insane or in some other way dethroned by the crown prince. “[Frederick William] is absolutely hated by every class in his kingdom,” Rothenburg wrote, citing the king’s harsh treatment of Frederick. “In order to disarm the father, it will be necessary to form a party for the crown prince, and to attach to his side a number of officers. I believe that this scheme would succeed.” King Louis himself replied to that message: “Profit by the relations you have with those who surround [Frederick and] present to him my acquiescence in his sentiments and the assurances of my interest in his welfare.”

  Frederick William was not so naive or confused that he failed to sense something was afoot, even if he could not say exactly what it was. He got his son drunk one night to try to discover the truth but got nothing from him. When he found out about the foreign “gifts” to his son, he made it a capital crime to loan money to royal minors, but the money kept coming in. He had already put a stop to Frederick’s education by pensioning off his beloved teacher Jacques Duhan and assigning Prussian officers to be his minders, but then he became convinced that one of the officers assigned to the task was only encouraging his son’s disloyalty. The British ambassador to Potsdam wrote to London: “The other day the King asked the Prince, ‘Kalkstein [his minder] makes you English, does he not?’ to which the Prince answered, ‘I respect the English, because I know their people love me’; upon which the King seized him by the collar and struck him fiercely with his cane, in fact rained showers of blows upon him; and it was only by superior strength that the poor prince escaped worse. There is a general apprehension of something tragickal taking place before long.”

  Frederick William’s inchoate frustration with his crown prince, if not the violence that attended it, inspires a certain empathy. For all that he ranted and raved, he had no words for the plainest and worst fact of his life: He had lost his son, just as Frederick had lost his father.

  After the beating reported by the British ambassador, Frederick wrote to his mother:

  I am in the utmost despair. What I had always apprehended has at length come on me. The King has entirely forgotten that I am his Son.… I am driven to extremes; I have too much honor to submit to such treatment; and I am determined to put an end to it one way or other.

  FREDERICK MADE HIS first attempt at escape while still at Mühlberg, telling the British emissary that he was planning to run away first to Alsace (where the French ambassador Rothenburg had an estate), then, after a few months in France, to England.

  He was abetted in this and later such plans by a new friend, Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte. The son and grandson of high Prussian officers, Katte was also a flautist and a painter who loved to talk. One of the king’s Tobacco College chums said Frederick and Katte acted like lovers with each other, and Wilhelmina also suspected that her brother’s relationship with Katte was of a scandalous, “unnatural” sort, an opinion that clearly informed her physical description of him in her memoirs: “His eyes were almost hid under two large black eyebrows; his countenance carried in it a certain ominous trait that seemed to mark his destiny.… He affected to be a free-thinker, and led a most dissolute life: with these vices he combined great ambition and much levity.”

  The escape attempt in Mühlberg was entirely lame. Frederick sent Katte to the post office for a map and asked the Saxon minister to arrange horses for two officers who wished to go incognito to Leipzig. The minister, who like everyone else knew about Frederick’s humiliation at the hands of his father, saw through the ruse immediately, and Frederick’s chief minder, Colonel Wilhelm Friedrich von Rochow, closely questioned Katte, who denied all. Von Rochow was not stupid, however, and now he was on notice.

  That plan foiled, Frederick next told the British emissary that he planned to escape during a tour of their western provinces with his father the next month. According to the diplomat’s notes, Frederick said, “I prefer to go to France first [because if] I should go immediately to London the king would think that my mother knew of my plan and treat her cruelly.” Appalled at the possible consequences of such a course of action, Uncle George (who had succeeded Frederick’s grandfather to become England’s King George II) sent back word that he should sit tight, and he offered Frederick another large “loan” if he would. Frederick took it, and continued with Katte to plot his escape.

  Befitting the defection of a reckless and romantic crown prince, his plans were richly dramatic, involving aliases, secret meetings, safe houses, and highly incriminating correspondence, most of it carefully preserved in a chest that Frederick left with Katte. The prince—in a smashing new red cape he bought for the occasion—was to slip away from the king during their tour, and Katte was to meet him at The Hague, where Frederick would be staying under the name of “Count Alberville.” The execution of the plot was pitiful; in fact, it never reached a point that could be called execution because Frederick’s intention to flee was so plain and his circle of conspirators so large and flimsy. The plan had been easily frustrated more than once during the trip when finally the king was informed of it by a frightened page who had been caught bringing Frederick a horse in the middle of the night.

  Frederick William was beyond angry. In his view, Frederick had plotted desertion, probably in a treasonous conspiracy involving the French and British governments, which was a harsh but not wholly unreasonable construction of the facts. At first he did not let Frederick know he knew. “I thought you would be in Paris by now,” he baited his son at the next halt. Frederick answered boldly, “If I had wished it I could certainly have been in France,” but now he knew his father knew, and he wrote to one of his pages, “the plot has taken an unfavorable turn. Arrange for our leaving.” Colonel von Rochow, however, was already on orders to see that Frederick be kept in hand, and Frederick overheard officers saying that he was to be taken to a nearby town for detention and interrogation, “dead or alive.”

  The king himself was his first interrogator.

  “Why did you attempt to desert?”

  “Because you have not treated me as your son, but as a worthless slave.”

  “Then you are nothing but a deserter, without honor.”

  “I have as much honor as you. I have only attempted what you said a hundred times you would do, if you were in my place.”

  At that the king drew his sword, and one of Frederick William’s generals had the courage and presence of mind to step between them, sensibly suggesting that if the king really wanted to get at the truth, Frederick should be questioned not this way, by his father, but by a formal board of inquiry.

  Presumably chastened by his father’s rage and the sentries who were now stationed outside his door with bayonets fixed, Frederick next day gave at least a version of the plot, but apparently he was not yet sufficiently frightened to tell the truth. “He said he wished to go incognito to Landau, Strasburg and Paris, to take service, enter Italy, distinguish himself by brilliant action and obtain in this way His Majesty’s pardon.” The king knew that The Hague had been Frederick’s rendezvous point and so had caught him in a lie. This convinced him that there had been a conspiracy, and one that might even have included his own assassination. At this point the crown prince was formally placed under arrest.

  When the true gravity of the situation began to dawn on him, Frederick wrote his father a letter.

  I take the liberty of writing to my dear father to ask him to recall my arrest, giving assurance that all that I have said or have told to my dear father is true. As to the suspicions held against me, time will show that they are groundless, and I affirm that I have not had the bad intention that they accuse me of having. I implore my dear father’s pardon, and I remain, for life, his most respectful, most submissive and very devoted son.

  The king responded by having Frederick sent to the fortress prison of Küstrin and ordering the arrest of all of his co-conspirators, including Katte. He s
ent off two letters by pouch to Potsdam, one to the queen, another to her lady-in-waiting. Only the second letter survives, a pitiable testament to his compassion for his wife: “Fritz has attempted to desert. I have been under the necessity to have him arrested. I request you to tell my wife of it in some good way, that the news may not terrify her. And pity an unhappy father.”

  Frederick was kept in isolation, without pen or ink, without his flute, without visitors or books to keep him company. Frederick William composed another of his compulsive “Instructions”: “The door [to his cell] must be well closed day and night, with two heavy locks across it; the keys must be in the keeping of General Lepell. Every morning at eight o’clock it must be opened, and two officers shall enter to see if everything is right; a stocker of the post shall bring to the arrested a glass and a basin of water to make himself clean, and … the whole must not take more than a few minutes,” and so forth.

  A second interrogation was undertaken by one General Mylius, who put to him almost two hundred questions, and finally, under protest, five from the king that were clearly meant to elicit an admission of guilt but each of which Frederick answered with a perhaps all-too-clever grace.

  Q. What does he deserve and what punishment does he expect?

  A. I submit myself to the mercy and will of the king.

  Q. What does a man deserve when he has broken his faith and plotted desertion?

  A. I do not think I have failed in honor.

  Q. Does he deserve to become a king?

  A. I cannot be my own judge.

  Q. Does he wish his life to be spared or not?

  A. I submit myself to the mercy and will of the king.

  Q. As he has rendered himself unfit to succeed to the throne by breaking his faith, will he, to preserve his life, abdicate his succession and renounce it in such manner that it will be confirmed throughout the whole Roman Empire?