Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  One such place was the absolutist court of Louis XIV, whose resistance to Italian passion we have confronted before (page 57). To say individualism was not tolerated at Versailles is to understate the matter considerably. Once all the Italian composers and musicians in his court were fired, no Italian opera was heard at the court of France for sixty-seven years. Lully’s luxuriant propaganda and ceremonial ornamentation took its place. From this eventually came the galant style that figured in the schism between Bach and his sons’ generation, which finally was an argument about what music was to be—serious work by serious people about serious things or light amusement for connoisseurs. We know where Bach stood in this debate, but if we did not we would have only to listen to the first movement of the fifth Brandenburg concerto (so named for their dedicatee, the Hohenzollern Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg, youngest son of the Great Elector, who knew Bach from before his years at Cöthen).

  The work opens as a concerto for flute and violin. It would have been a masterpiece if that is how it ended as well, but three-quarters of the way through this movement Bach does something that had no precedent in the history of music: He gives the cadenza not to the flute or violin but to the harpsichord, an instrument that had never had a solo in front of an orchestra. It had always functioned in the thankless role of accompanist (and a not terribly audible one at that), a peppy but harmless orchestral gofer. What’s more, he seems to be announcing that he is doing something revolutionary with a kind of malicious glee, as the musicologist Susan McClary wrote in a remarkable essay entitled “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year.” The piece is not so much interrupted as “hijacked”.…

  Bach composes the parts of the ensemble, flute, and violin to make it appear that their piece has been violently derailed. They drop out inconclusively, one after another, exactly in the way an orchestra would if one of its members started making up a new piece in the middle of a performance. Their parts no longer make sense. They fall silent in the face of this affront from the ensemble’s lackey, and all expectations for orderly reconciliation and harmonic closure are suspended.… On the surface, closure is attained; but the subversive elements of the piece seem far too powerful to be contained in so conventional a manner. Certainly social order and individual freedom are possible, but apparently only as long as the individuals in question—like the sweet-tempered flute and violin—abide by the rules and permit themselves to be appropriated. What happens when a genuine deviant (and one from the ensemble’s service staff yet!) takes over?

  To put this in terms of the debate about music’s ultimate source and meaning: Was Bach expressing his frustration with the aristocratic hierarchy, writing from his place and time? Or was he intuiting the way to new modes of expression, opening up musical vocabulary, simply as a result of his genius? One good answer is yes and yes. Bach was a man of his time, and so, as Luther did, he respected the hierarchy for what it was—certainly to be observed in most things, even when it hurt—but he also saw it for what, on the theological plane, it more truly was, just another flawed necessity of a fallen world, a side effect of human weakness. He would of course obey, but he would not be bowed. In music, where hierarchy was simply a matter of conventional expectation, Bach delighted in defiance. The current taste was a matter of indifference to him if not contempt, whether the taste was that of a commoner or a king.

  In any case, he managed to turn over a lot of furniture with all his hierarchical inversions and stylistic improprieties. Every piano concerto in the history of Western music has its antecedent in the fifth Brandenburg concerto, when the lowliest member of the orchestra was turned loose to become Liszt.

  BACH’S RELATIONSHIP with Prince Leopold seems to have gone at least somewhat beyond patronage. Three years after he had left Cöthen, Bach marked the birth of Leopold’s first son by sending the infant an early copy of his six keyboard partitas, complete with a dedicatory poem by himself, who was no poet.

  [This] is the first fruit of my strings in music sounding;

  Thou the first son round whom thy Princess’s arms have curled.

  It shall for thee and for thy honor be resounding,

  Since thou art, like this page, a firstling in this world.…

  So may I, Prince of all our hopes, e’er entertain thee,

  Though thy delights be multiplied a thousand fold,

  But let, I pray, the feeling evermore sustain me

  Of being, Serene Prince, Thy humblest servant

  BACH*

  With a sympathetic and generous patron behind him, Bach had one of the most comfortable professional situations of his life in Cöthen. He had no regular responsibilities in the churches, since the official religion was Calvinist (which tolerated only the least adventurous music); and the Lutheran church, where Bach and Maria Barbara rented pews, had an organist and cantor of its own. Since there were no singers on the prince’s regular payroll when he arrived (they were apparently hired ad hoc for the occasional secular cantatas Bach composed for New Year’s Day and Leopold’s birthday), he could and did turn his attention to instrumental work. The partitas—a mix of styles and genres the like of which had never been seen before—as well as Bach’s magnificent works for solo cello and violin date from the years in Cöthen, and it was there too that he completed the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the French and English suites, the two- and three-part inventions, and of course the six Brandenburg concertos.

  Leopold and Bach had more than music in common. They had both lost their fathers when very young, and they both lost children. Leopold’s first wife died after they had been married for less than two years, and the son by his second wife to whom Bach dedicated his poem died in infancy. Sebastian and Maria Barbara had lost twins at birth, the baby they named for Leopold died before his first birthday, and perhaps the greatest tragedy of Bach’s life occurred while he worked in the court at Cöthen.

  Frail since boyhood, Leopold took the waters at a Bohemian spa each summer on the advice of his doctors. On at least two occasions he took his Kapellmeister and members of his Kapelle to Karlsbad with him. No doubt he did so in order to enhance his prestige among the other wealthy and noble patrons of the spa, which had become “the earliest regular summer festival of the performing arts,” and Bach must have made important connections for himself there as well.

  When he came home from their second trip to Karlsbad, Bach learned that Maria Barbara, who had been perfectly healthy when he left a few weeks before, was dead. The cause of her death is unknown to us and perhaps was unknown then as well. Aside from the fact of her burial, the deaths register of Cöthen records only that the full choir of the Latin school sang at her funeral.

  BY CHANGING HOW the world is perceived, every great movement of ideas changes everything. To understand Bach’s reaction to his wife’s death, therefore—to make sense of his music at all—requires turning back the calendar to a point in time before there had ever been the faintest glimmer of an Enlightenment; because among the Enlightenment’s least explicit legacies to us is a common understanding that there is a gulf, a space that defines a substantial difference, between spiritual and secular life. For Bach there was no such place, no realm of neutrality or middle ground for action that was not a commitment to one side or the other in the great battle between God and Satan. This did not preclude his being very much a man of this world. In his “Peasant Cantata” of 1742, a bass aria exclaims, “How good a bit of smooching tastes!,” to a melody that clearly invokes a popular folk song of the time:

  With you and me in the feather bed,

  With you and me in the hay,

  No feather would poke us,

  No flea would bite us,

  Bach the religious man was simply Bach the man, who like Luther was a lover of strong drink and the conjugal bed. Bach had an untroubled sense of the central Lutheran paradox that to be human is to be simul justus et peccator, sinful and righteous at the same time, and just as his physical life in no sense taint
ed his spiritual one, his religion was no less vigorous for its roots in the world. As he wrote in one of his very few prose works for students, the purpose of music “can be nothing else but the glory of God and the restoration of the heart [by which was meant the reform of the whole person]. Where this is not the case there is no real music but only a demonic noise.” Martin Luther wrote very much the same thing in the preface to the first evangelical hymnal of 1524.

  As with Luther, God and Satan were vividly alive for Bach, and his own life was their battleground. It is difficult to listen to his music—by turns gruesome and angelic, tormented and enraptured, mournful and exuberant—without hearing the warfare raging inside him, just as it had raged in Martin Luther; and in that respect his sacred and secular music were the same. Bach did not separate them even in his filing system, and both alike bore the epigram S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria, “All Glory to God”). At the moment of the direst atonement in a cantata Bach not infrequently breaks into a dance, since in his worldview (Luther’s worldview) the knowledge of weakness was precisely the way to grace and the ultimate joy.

  There are some who say he did that now, in the gravely beautiful Chaconne from the solo violin sonata in D minor, a work at first of almost unbearable sadness, music from a cold and distant darkness which, as it slowly comes closer, begins to sing a quiet song that speaks of a hope that is filled with pain. The belief in joy is there, but the joy itself is not. It does not stay for long in a major key, but the end is not quite dark; finally a single note dies away into silence. There are serious people who say this was his tombeau or epitaph for Maria Barbara (though it must be said the claim is controversial). It was written very close to the time of her death, on paper he had bought at a mill near Karlsbad, and his copy of the whole set of suites for solo violin is dated the year of her death, 1720. Musicologists who believe Bach used gematria, or the number alphabet (A = 1, B = 2, etc.) to encode his music with hidden messages say that there is numerological evidence in all six of the violin suites that identify them with the liturgical seasons of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, that they contain in code the words of the Latin creed and Magnificat, and that Maria Barbara’s name is hidden in a cryptograph at the opening of the work. What is clearer is that Bach has quoted several chorales in the work, which he frames with parts of the melody from the Easter hymn “Christ lag in Todesbanden.”

  Christ lay in death s bondage;

  For all our sin was given;

  He is once more arisen

  And hath us brought true life now;

  For this shall we joyful be,

  To God giving praise and gratitude,

  And singing Hallelujah

  Hallelujah!

  SIX MONTHS AFTER Maria Barbara’s death Bach’s oldest brother Christoph died in Ohrdruf. Christoph had of course been the closest he had to a father since the death of his parents when he was nine years old. A year after Christoph, Bach’s youngest brother Jakob, who had gone with him to Ohrdruf when their parents died and whom he had later piped off to glory with his Capriccio, died as well. Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann was ten years old now, the three others were younger, and Bach knew he had a decision to make. The children would soon outgrow the school in Cöthen, which was only mediocre, and Leopold was being pressed so hard for funds to settle family disputes and to underwrite the Prussian military of King Frederick William, which was responsible for the defense of Cöthen, that he had been forced to reduce his support of music. Perhaps the death of Maria Barbara, compounded by that of his brothers, reminded him of the mission that began forming itself when he and Jakob had moved in with Christoph as boys, with their freshly inflicted pain. Whether for that mission or for the comfort he knew it could bring him, or perhaps for both, Bach decided to take the same path now that he had taken as a nine-year-old orphan. Once again, this time once and for all, he gave himself to the church.

  * * *

  * This poem obviously doesn’t gain anything in translation but the author is assured it doesn’t lose anything either.

  IX.

  A CHANGELING

  AMONG THE SWANS

  THE CLERGYMAN WHO HAD WALKED KATTE INTO THE prison courtyard to his beheading, Pastor Friedrich von Müller, had instructions from the king to go immediately afterward to Frederick’s cell—when the event was “right fresh,” as Frederick William put it in his letter—in an attempt to sharpen his sense of guilt and remorse. Having just witnessed his friend’s gruesome death, delirious with grief and running a high fever, Frederick took the pastor’s appearance at his cell to mean that he was about to be led to his own execution, and he could not be convinced otherwise. He was sure the medicine Müller brought for his fever was poison, and the pastor was finally forced to swallow some before Frederick would take it. Müller’s instructions were to “wring” and “break” Frederick’s heart, but it was plain to him that that was already done.

  Frederick was too weak to talk or listen much that day, and Müller had only limited success the day after. He brought a letter Katte had given him for Frederick two nights before, on the eve of his execution, and both men cried as they read what he had written: Frederick was absolved of any guilt in his fate, he still loved Frederick, and he hoped that somehow Frederick could make amends with his father.

  After that, Müller began the king’s prescribed lessons in repentance and salvation that he would repeat, over and over, for the next two weeks, during all of which time Frederick remained under the implicit threat of execution. Müller reported the prince’s predictably receptive reactions to spiritual guidance in detailed letters to the king, whose replies were predictably skeptical. “I know his wicked heart.…”

  Finally, Frederick William’s blood lust having been appeased by Katte’s death or possibly just discouraged by pleas for the crown prince’s life, the king sent word to Küstrin that his son would not be killed but would be kept in prison indefinitely under the strictest guard and regimen. The spy Grumbkow delivered this message in person, in order also to deliver the message that it was his paymaster the emperor (aided by his own not inconsiderable persuasive powers) whose appeal had saved the crown prince’s life. Frederick was so relieved to hear of the reprieve—and so disoriented by what he had just gone through, which apparently made him temporarily forget the spy’s many treacheries—that he tearfully made Grumbkow the gift of Katte’s last letter to him.

  Metaphorically, psychologically, and perhaps even strategically, this very strange gift seems to have been a gesture of surrender: Far from clinging to his friend’s memory, he wanted to deliver himself of Katte and join with the forces that killed him. In no time, his keepers said that Frederick seemed to be “happy as a lark.” He told someone that Katte’s fatal flaw was ineptitude.

  It was far from the last time that Frederick would do and say things that seemed completely inimical to his affections and ideals. In the crucible of this ordeal, the graceful dissembling he had always employed to further his interests hardened into a reflexive survival instinct for deceit, and his character was fractured. After that, he never felt more secure than he did when he was successfully deceiving others about his own thoughts and intentions. In international diplomacy, he once said, “the great art is to conceal one’s designs.” The split in his character made for a very lonely man and for a very great practitioner of power politics.

  THE REGIMEN PRESCRIBED for him at Küstrin was loosened a little after his reprieve, but only a little; he was out of his cell, not yet out of the woods. In a new “Instruction,” the king sentenced him to work in the Chamber of War and Domains responsible for governing Küstrin—a sentence to months of boring government meetings, the study of dry administrative details and provincial economics. He was to learn about taxes and rents and various methods of addressing the ultimate imperative, ein Plus machen. Much of what he learned he would later put to good use, but he could not have what he most desperately wanted, his freedom and his privacy. He was never to be left alone, but was to be
accompanied at all times by one or more of his keepers. His chief minder was the director of the Chamber, Christoph Werner Hille, who was also to instruct him in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia. “Frederick knows perfectly Aristotle’s poetry,” Hille complained early on, “but he is ignorant as to whether his ancestors gained Magdeburg at cards or some other way.”

  Frederick proved a quick study, though, and as the old deference and perquisites due a crown prince slowly but surely settled on him once more, he began to regain a little of his swagger. He was still confined to quarters, but his keepers began to loosen the chains a bit, recognizing the increasing probability that they would soon be his subjects. In coming weeks he got his flute back, and he began to write poetry feverishly if not well. (Since his mother tongue was German but he was educated in French, he was never comfortable writing in any language, and it showed. Asked for his opinion of the work, Hille told Frederick diplomatically that it was not bad for a prince.) He even felt secure enough to renew, in a letter to his father, their old argument about predestination, a tenet he quickly renounced, however, when his father made that a condition of his increasing liberties.

  Frederick began around this time to think like the ambitious monarch he would soon be, and to imagine for himself a place on the world stage. Two months after Hille gave him a lesson on the indefensibility of Prussia’s many and disconnected borders, Frederick wrote a letter in which he concluded that to knit his country together he would be required to increase its territory by force. He would do so from “political necessity” but also “to cut a striking figure among the great men of the world and play one of the great roles, neither giving nor maintaining the peace by any other reason than love of justice, and not by fear, or, if the honor of the House [of Hohenzollern] demanded war, being able to pursue it with vigor.” In the same letter he said he saw himself advancing “from country to country, from conquest to conquest, like Alexander proposing new worlds to conquer.” In this sense, Frederick the Great was born in captivity.