Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 11

  A. I do not cling much to life, but His Royal Majesty will not use such rigorous means against me.

  They were rigorous enough. As soon as the king returned to Berlin, he fired Frederick’s servants, sold his carriages and horses, found and disposed of his secret library (as well as the librarian, who was exiled, as was Frederick’s old tutor Jacques Duhan). On the discovery that Frederick had played harpsichord-and-flute duets with the daughter of a cantor in Potsdam, the king ordered that she be placed under arrest, whipped in front of her father’s house and all around the city, then sent to work in the hemp factory at Spandau prison, for life. (A midwife and surgeon certified that she was still a virgin or it might have been worse.) Stirred up by the spies, who were at this point afraid of the vengeance Frederick might wreak on them were he ever to become king, Frederick William became convinced of ever more monstrous and far-ranging conspiracies suggested by his son’s attempts at escape—involving, for example, poison and France. His fury toward Frederick became steadily more ferocious, sufficiently so to keep at least one diplomat awake at night, thinking about the foam at the king’s mouth as he spoke of his son. “If the King of Prussia persists in these sentiments,” the Dutch ambassador wrote, “we will see the most dreadful, bloody scenes that have ever happened since the creation of the world.”

  It was not at all certain that Frederick would emerge from this crisis with his life, much less the throne. The king was deaf to the pleas of his wife and Wilhelmina and resented those of various heads of state, including the Russian czar, the emperor, and the kings of Sweden and England, who felt it necessary to plead for Frederick’s life. Frederick William might actually have had Frederick killed had it not been so difficult to bring off without hurting himself as well. Beyond that, there was precious little hard evidence of a conspiracy; Queen Sophia had destroyed all the correspondence with England, and the French ambassador Rothenburg had covered his tracks as well. For his part, Frederick would not admit to desertion, only to attempting to escape his father’s brutality. To the king, this seemed the ultimate trickery. “This little knave,” he muttered at one point, “has invincible cleverness and hard-headedness in defending himself.”

  He decided therefore to call a court-martial, charging a panel of his officers—three major generals, three colonels, three lieutenant colonels, three majors and three captains—to pass on the fate of Frederick and his co-conspirators. They heard evidence for two days, and on the third rendered their verdicts. For a lieutenant who had been Frederick’s intermediary with Katte, imprisonment for two to six months. For another who had ordered a carriage for Frederick, two to six years. As for Katte, who had clearly aided Frederick’s ambition to escape and had admitted that he would have gone with the prince had the attempt succeeded, the panel was divided: Some favored his execution, some favored the death penalty conditioned on its being commuted by the king, and others voted for life imprisonment. Finally the head of the panel exercised his prerogative to break the impasse and voted for life in prison. These verdicts were sent to the king, along with the panel’s unanimous finding that, as the king’s subjects, they were not empowered to pass sentence upon a member of the royal family.

  Frederick William was incensed. He accepted their reluctance to judge the crown prince, and he found their verdicts against the other two lieutenants just, but he could not abide their mercy toward Katte. “They must judge according to the law.… The court-martial will have to convene again and … judge otherwise.” They convened again, but the head of the panel, an old and upright general, refused to reverse the finding: “To change it would be against my conscience, and is not in my power.”

  General Hans Heinrich Graf von Katte, the lieutenant’s grandfather, addressed a moving petition to the king, appealing to the distinguished service of the Katte family, the foolishness of youth, the magnificence of mercy, and “the prayers and tears of a very old man.” The response was swift and beyond firm. “This man much deserved being torn with red-hot tongs,” Frederick William wrote. “However, in consideration of the General Field Marshal and Lieutenant-General Katte, I have mitigated the penalty.… He must have his head cut off. I am your most affectionate king.”

  Frederick had no idea of the court-martial’s verdicts or the king’s order for Katte’s execution, though both were accomplished facts, when he wrote his sister Wilhelmina a letter signed “Le Prisonnier”: “They are going to make me out a heretic, after the court-martial is finished [but] the anathemas pronounced against me will disturb me very little, provided that I know my gentle sister inscribes herself my champion.… From the bottom of my heart, I wish … that we could recover those happy days when your Principe [her lute] and my Principessa [his flute] kissed each other.…” In fact, however, after what Frederick was about to endure, nothing would be the same for him, including even his relationship with Wilhelmina, the only woman he ever loved.

  MANY YEARS LATER, when Frederick told the story to his aide, Henri de Catt, he said he did not learn about Katte’s fate until five o’clock in the morning on the day of the execution, when a captain and a colonel came to his cell in tears.

  “Oh my prince my poor dear prince!” blurted out the officer amid his sobs, “my good prince!” I was sure they were going to cut off my head.

  “Just tell me, am I about to die? I am quite ready for these barbarians to finish me off, and quickly.”

  “No, my dear prince, you are not going to die, but allow these grenadiers to lead you to the window and hold you there.”

  He was confused by the odd request, and even more so when he saw Katte in the courtyard, surrounded by officers. “What is he doing here?” he said. Then the scene took shape before him: the scaffold, the pile of sand, the two pastors flanking Katte, whose shirt was loose at the neck. When Frederick fully realized his best friend was about to be executed, he began to plead frantically with his guards to do something to stop it: He offered to renounce the throne, to accept life imprisonment, to give his own life, to do whatever the king required, anything to spare Katte’s life, but the guards were impassive; obviously it was too late for any reprieve. Katte had been brought to Küstrin for his execution precisely so that Frederick could be forced to watch it. In his fashion, Frederick William had prescribed in minutest detail how the execution scene would play out, from how long the headless corpse should remain where it fell (seven hours) to the sort of men who should carry it away (“burghers of a respectable standing”).

  According to the king’s script, Katte was walked in procession to the place of his beheading, a place chosen for its central point in the narrow compass of Frederick’s cell window. The prince struggled with his guard, who could not now have pried him away from the window in any case. “My dear Katte!” he screamed. “Forgive me!”

  Katte sent Frederick a kiss with his hand and, with a gallant bow, said there was nothing to forgive. He seemed to witnesses incalculably calm, carrying his hat under his arm, listening to the formal sentence of death, saying good-bye to his bodyguard and the others assembled around him, taking off his coat, opening his shirt, and kneeling on the sand that had been put there to accept his blood. He refused a blindfold, and a last prayerful cry—“Lord Jesus Christ!”—was interrupted by the fall of the executioner’s two-handed sword. Frederick did not see the fatal stroke because just before it came he fainted.

  He returned to consciousness in a delirium. He spent the day weeping and in shock, much of the time at the tiny window of his cell, staring at the body below, on which someone (defying the king’s instructions) had thrown a black cloth, now caked with Katte’s blood. Unable to eat or sleep, Frederick spent the night, in a high fever, talking to himself. “The king thinks he has taken Katte away from me,” someone heard him say, “but I see him all the time.”

  VIII.

  SONG OF THE ENDLESSLY

  ORBITING SPHERES

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED IN WEIMAR, SEBASTIAN BACH was twenty-three, and his wife Maria Barbara was twenty-four a
nd pregnant with their first child. Since her husband had now left two jobs in a little more than a year, it may have occurred to her if not to him that it was time to settle down for a while.

  Not much is known about Maria Barbara Bach, but it is suggestive that she was a Bach even before their marriage; through her he secured a new hold on the family that had abandoned him as a boy. She was Sebastian’s second cousin, daughter of the Erfurt musician Johann Michael Bach, who was the brother of Uncle Christoph and a composer whose work Sebastian always admired. Maria Barbara was herself musical and clearly helped her husband with some of his professional chores; a good deal of the music in his library was copied in her hand. Otherwise we know only that she provided a home of which he never gave recorded complaint and a number of children that suggests they were on very good terms. In Weimar that December of 1708, fifteen months after their marriage, Maria Barbara gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Catherina Dorothea, and they had five more children during the next seven years. Maria Barbara was lucky to have help with the housekeeping and childrearing from her elder sister, who had lived with them since their marriage, because in no time the small house on the market square in Weimar that they shared with the master of pages (who was also a dance instructor and falsetto singer at court) teemed not only with children but also with the students Bach had begun picking up in Mühlhausen, to be joined in time by two of his nephews.

  Bach was obviously the sort of person who thrives on chaos because his output of work during their nine years in Weimar was enormous, including the lion’s share of his organ works, a great deal of instrumental music (he could now call on full-time court musicians), and, assuming the same percentage of his works was lost from the Weimar period as from the others, a hundred or so multimovement cantatas (finally, he had professional singers). He was almost frantically productive in these years, hungrily assimilating all the latest music of every nation and just as avidly subsuming it in works that were completely his own. By the time he left Weimar, in his absorption of such extremes of form and style as strict canon and the concertos of Vivaldi, he had learned everything he needed to turn music on its head.

  LUCKY FOR HIM, Bach had a compatriot in his studies now in a distant cousin, Johann Gottfried Walther, who had been in Weimar for a year when Bach arrived. The two men, nearly the same age (Walther was older by six months), were hardly equals, but Walther was no slouch. He knew far more about the history of music theory than Bach did, having just finished his first book on the subject, and as a composer he was described years later by no less than Johann Mattheson, referring specifically to some of the chorale settings that he wrote while he and Bach were working together, as a second Pachelbel, “if not in art the first.” At the same time, Walther had lost out to Bach when he made a run at the job in Mühlhausen, and this job as town organist in Weimar had been his consolation. Now Bach was coming to Weimar as chamber musician and principal organist at court, in effect bettering him again. However Walther may have felt about that, the two men clearly benefited from working together in what seems to have been a rivalry of friends.

  For example: Bach was given to boasting that he could play any music at sight, no matter how technically difficult or how densely scored. Whether because he was tired of hearing about it or just for a little slightly malicious fun, Walther invited him to breakfast one day for a trick challenge. Knowing Bach’s habit of going to the keyboard and playing through whatever music was there as soon as he arrived, Walther put an inordinately difficult keyboard piece among the others on his music desk. Sure enough, Bach went straight to the keyboard, and while Walther started making breakfast Bach began to read and play what was there. Carl told the story in a letter to his father’s biographer Forkel.

  In a few minutes Bach got to the piece which was destined for his conversion and began to play it. But he had not proceeded far when he came to a passage at which he stopped. He looked at it, began again, and stopped at the same passage.

  “No,” he called out to his friend, who was laughing to himself in the next room. “One cannot play everything at first sight. It is not possible.”

  Not “I cannot do it,” understand, but “it is not possible.” One thing Bach did not lack was a proper estimation of his powers.

  The most common genre for Walther’s and Bach’s dueling compositions was the chorale prelude for organ; both of them, after all, had been hired as organists, and in Bach’s case that meant primarily playing chorale preludes at Sunday and weekday services in the palace. It was in these organ works from Weimar, which Bach later collected into his Orgelbüchlein, that his biographer and fellow organist Albert Schweitzer noticed for the first time certain figures embedded in the score that had no apparent relation to the music but seemed to have been taken from spoken language—“an independently conceived motive,” as Schweitzer put it, “not derived from any of the lines of the melody, but from the text of the chorale, and embodying the poetic idea that Bach regarded as characteristic of the music and expressible in musical terms.” What he was seeing in the scores more than hearing in the music was Bach’s deployment of the musical-rhetorical figures to carry the “affection” of the chorale message, and though Schweitzer has been accused since then of discovering somewhat more than what was there, his discovery was a great achievement. As in other works, the rhetorical figures in the Orgelbüchlein can be difficult to hear as such without reference to the text and score. For example, rippling scales in the prelude to “From Heaven Came the Host of Angels” are not meant to be merely ornamental: They give sound to the flight of angels. An odd dissonance in the course of “Jesu, My Joy” is an evocation of the disquiet in the heart of a sinner. In the prelude to “With Peace and Joy I Now Depart,” rising bass figures depict the soul’s ascent to heaven. Schweitzer had discovered in the organ chorales written during the years in Weimar nothing less than what he called “the lexicon of Bach’s musical speech.”

  ONE OF BACH’S favorite forms—in the Orgelbüchlein and later elsewhere as well—was canon, which he often used to connote law, the meaning of the word’s Greek root, and sometimes specifically the Ten Commandments. The most compressed, rigorous, and esoteric form of counterpoint, canon is to fugue as haiku is to blank verse, and although Bach must have come across them in his studies, there is no evidence of a practical interest in them until Weimar. Walther had long since undertaken to learn everything about speculative music theory, from Pythagoras and Plato to his own time, including the most arcane forms of counterpoint; he was also then making a comprehensive list of the musical-rhetorical figures, classified by their related affections. His study of theory represented a devout and lifelong project that would result years later in his Musical Lexicon, the first music dictionary, but even now Walther’s library of musical esoterica was large, and Bach’s curiosity was as rapacious as it would ever be. If he had not already immersed himself in the theoretical thinking of Werckmeister, Kircher, Boethius, and their ancient Greek ancestors, he surely did so now.

  In the book Walther finished before Bach arrived, he defined music as “a heavenly-philosophical and specifically mathematical science.” This quasi-scientific and quasi-cosmic view of the composer’s art was of course mainstream, certified as such by none other than Leibniz, who started in on most great metaphysical problems with his motto, “Let us calculate.” For Leibniz and in the Baroque worldview, harmony was both an ideal and a fact. Leibniz believed that everything in the universe was composed of “monads,” the smallest, indivisible units of matter, whose forms and flow in the physical world were regulated by God in accordance with the “pre-established harmony” with which He created and imbued the universe. While Bach was in Weimar, Leibniz received a letter from his foremost disciple, Christian Wolff, requesting his definition of perfection. He answered this way: “Perfection is the harmony of things … the state of agreement or identity in variety; you can even say that it is the degree of contemplatibility. Indeed, order, regularity and harmony come to
the same thing.… Hence, it also follows quite nicely that God, that is, the supreme mind, is endowed with perfection, indeed to the greatest degree; otherwise he would not care about the harmonies.”

  Leibniz did not concern himself with the practical business of composing music, but his dancing monads presented a wonderfully evocative metaphor for canon, especially perpetual canon, in which a single phrase, played against itself at different points in time and space, becomes an infinitely unfolding harmony similar to (and thought by some to be the same as) the continuous playing out of Creation, the ultimate “identity in variety.”

  Leibniz memorably defined music as “the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating,” but when he did so he was clearly not thinking about canons, whose composition is conscious to the point of brain frying. Take, for example, the piece of music for which Bach was probably most famous in his lifetime, known (for its dedicatee) as the Houdemann canon (BWV 1074). It became famous because it was a widely published “puzzle” canon, so called for its enigmatic notation.

  The nine notes between the vertical bars present the subject of the canon, and the subject specifies the work’s entire content. Unlike fugues, whose subjects can be elaborated with secondary melodies and other harmonic devices, the only figures allowed in a strict canon are statements or variations of the subject itself. It may be transformed in different ways—played backward, upside down, in different keys—but otherwise a strict canon must be composed of its subject and only its subject. Likewise, in a “canon a 4” such as this one, every “solution,” or “realization,” of the canon subject must involve four voices—no more, no less. What must be “solved” is at what intervals the voices should come in—three notes higher, or five, or eight, or none—and when or how soon the subjects must follow one another, by one beat, two or three or twelve. In the simple canon “Frère Jacques,” for example, the theme always comes in on the same note, eight beats later, but in more complex canons the subjects follow one another much more closely than that and begin on a different note each time. The markings to the left and right of the subject in puzzle canons like the one above give clues to what solutions there might be.