Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  Not all of his friends were gay, but several were. One was the Count Francesco (Swan of Padua) Algarotti, author of the recent Newton for Ladies. Frederick fell in love with him, according to his biographer Nancy Mitford. If so, he was in good company, with lords and ladies alike. There was another “Swan” in Frederick’s court, this one his “Swan of Mitau,” who was Count Dietrich von Keyserling, also known as “Caesarion,” an “extremely debauched” linguist and poet, in Wilhelmina’s opinion, “who thought himself a wit and was nothing more than a walking encyclopedia.” (Keyserling, who was fourteen years older than Frederick, had been one of the officers assigned to him as a teenager, with strict instructions from his father never to leave him alone, even in his sleep, with the result that Keyserling had often shared the crown prince’s boyhood bedroom.)

  One of Frederick’s strongest influences and most prolific correspondents was the Saxon diplomat Ulrich Friedrich von Suhm, nicknamed “Diaphanes.” Besides bearing news of having successfully secured large “loans” for Frederick from the Russian court where he served as envoy, the letters from Diaphanes bore a gift that Frederick considered beyond price: translations of the works of Leibniz’s disciple Christian Wolff, one of Germany’s few early champions of the Enlightenment. Accused of atheism by the Pietist faculty at the University of Halle, Wolff had been banished from his chair in philosophy by Frederick’s father, a characteristically rash and wrongheaded act that even Frederick William came to regret, but one which can be seen as a symbolic birth of the Enlightenment in Germany, or that strange sibling of the Enlightenment that came to be known by the German word for “clarification,” the Aufklärung.

  THE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS difficult enough to define. Even the term itself was not in use at the time, and it would be decades before Immanuel Kant would think to pose the question in his famous essay “What Is Enlightenment?” But never mind: Even early in the century they knew it when they saw it. It was the wish and the freedom to question everything, to submit everything to the rigor of reason and experiment, to take nothing on faith, and to resist the long-standing practice of using abstract principles to generate other abstract principles. In the mid-eighteenth century they knew also what they were against; the cry was to écraser l’infamel!, and while the infamy to be smashed was mainly Christianity, it was more broadly the great muddle of philosophical and theological speculation. There were no immutable, divine laws, only those which arose from human experience. Truth was observable and calculable, and what was not could not be true. In Peter Gay’s magisterial study of the Enlightenment, he cites a dream of the great encyclopedist Denis Diderot:

  The dreamer sees himself transported to an enormous building suspended in space, inhabited by feeble, aged and deformed men. Then a small healthy child enters, grows into a colossus, and destroys the building. That building (as Diderot interprets the dream) is the land of hypotheses, the cripples are the makers of systems, the colossus is Experiment.

  These were heady times. Given enough time and the courage to follow empirical fact where it led, all was knowable and would be known; all diseases would be cured; all secrets of the universe would be disclosed.

  What the Aufklärung had that the Enlightenment did not was a Lutheran upbringing. German thinkers did not have the liberty claimed elsewhere of writing off Christianity as a weedy blight of superstition choking off the flower of right reason. In Germany, the spirit of Martin Luther insisted that faith and reason be reconciled. This was, of course, quite the job. The most elaborate attempt before Wolff’s prodigious gloss was made by Leibniz, who (to put his elegant reasoning very bluntly indeed) deduced from the fact that God made the world that it must be the best world possible, whatever its appearance. His ideas were systematized, popularized, and in the process somewhat flattened by Wolff, who was at least clear about his ambition: The title of the book Suhm was translating for Frederick was On God, the World, the Human Soul and All Things in General. Wolff delved deep into sophistry to explain miracles in rationalist terms: Moses parted the waters because he had a deep understanding of liquid dynamics, and it was Jesus’ transcendent knowledge of chemistry that enabled him to turn water into wine.

  Just as Frederick never had a language in which he was entirely at home, he was lost in religion as well, having given up on Christianity but without a footing in any other faith or philosophy. What he found so admirable in Wolff was the squaring of absolute confidence in human reason with a nondoctrinal notion of soul. This gave Frederick, who read his work extremely carefully—religiously, you might say—a measure of comfort.

  ONE CAN ONLY imagine Voltaire’s reaction when, one summer day in 1736, the post brought a letter from Rheinsberg with the seal of Prussia’s crown prince. Although they had never met, Frederick wrote, he felt he knew Voltaire sufficiently through his works to know he would appreciate the enclosed French translations of the works of Christian Wolff, whom he recommended to Voltaire as “the greatest philosopher of our time.” This phrase might have carried a bit of a sting, since Voltaire no doubt thought that title might have been his, but Frederick had plenty of compliments left over. “Your works,” he wrote, “are treasures of the mind.… You alone are able to combine the wisdom of a philosopher, the talents of an historian and the brilliant imagination of a poet in the same person.” It goes on like that. He signed it, in the French manner, Fréedéric PR (prince royal) of Prussia.

  At this point in his career, at the age of forty-two, Voltaire had already had numerous theatrical triumphs with now very dated neoclassical works for the theater. Candide, whose Le roi Bulgare would owe so much to Frederick, was decades away, but Voltaire was already both famous and infamous, having been imprisoned and exiled for what were taken as (and were) slights on religion and the court of Versailles. He had been forgiven and was allowed to return to Paris in 1729, but after his rigorously freethinking Lettres philosophiques was published in 1734, he felt the need to flee to his country house in Cirey. There he stayed. Chronically under threat of arrest, he nevertheless wrote in his Discours sur l’homme, for example:

  This world is a great dance in which fools, disguised under the laughable names of Eminence and Highness, think to inflate their being and elevate their baseness. All mortals are equal … All are born from the same mud; they drag out their childhood in the same weakness; and the rich and the poor, and the weak and the strong, all go on equally from sorrow to death.

  As a result, Frederick’s letter found him in the midst of troubles: He was being spied on, betrayed by friends, persecuted in various ways for his writings, and always in danger of being exiled or sent to prison again.

  The gesture of affection and prospect of protection by a crown prince, even at so provincial a court as Potsdam, was no doubt responsible at least in part for Voltaire’s drippingly obsequious reply, which hailed “a prince who thinks like a man, a royal philosopher who will make men happy…[Your] divine character … will be adored by your people and cherished by the entire world.” The scholar Adrienne Hytier found that in the letters that followed, Voltaire managed to call Frederick “a Caesar, an Augustus, a Marcus Aurelius, a Trajan, an Anthony, a Titus, a Julian, a Virgil, a Pliny, a Horace, a Mécène, a Cicero, a Catullus, a Homer, a Rochefoucault, a Bruyère, a Boileau, a Solomon, a Prometheus, an Apollo, a Patroclus, a Socrates, an Alcibiades, an Alexander, a Henry IV and a Francis I.” Of course the Voltaire—Frederick correspondence went on for more than forty years, filling three volumes of Frederick’s Oeuvres, but the great majority of such references were in the early days, when their correspondence sounded more like love letters than a meeting of minds.

  Not long after their correspondence began, Frederick told Voltaire he was reading Machiavelli’s The Prince. He was horrified, he said, by its assertion that every ruler’s most important occupation was war. Machiavelli’s power politics, Frederick argued, was “opposed to virtue and the true interests of princes,” and he was at work on a book-length refutation of it. The idea that he wished to
promote was that the ruler was in fact the servant of the state and not the other way around, that war was justifiable only in certain circumstances, such as self-defense, and that the true interest of the ruler lay in the best interests of his subjects. “I venture to undertake the defense of humanity against this monster [Machiavelli],” he wrote, “to oppose reason and justice to [his] sophistry and crime. I have always regarded The Prince as one of the most dangerous books in the world.”

  Voltaire took the bait, not knowing—or preferring to ignore the suspicion—that Frederick already saw himself at war for Prussian territory to which ambition was his only claim. The book that would come to be titled Anti-Machiavel was, as Frederick’s biographer Friedrich Meinicke observed, “a secret dialogue with himself and with the passionate impulses inside him.” Actually it was not even secret. He had already confessed himself to Grumbkow, and the new French envoy to the court in Berlin told Paris almost as soon as he arrived that it seemed to him Frederick’s “true desire is for fame, indeed for martial fame; he is burning to follow in the footsteps of the Great Elector.” A year before, the former imperial ordnance master Count von Seckendorff had warned Vienna that Frederick liked the military “even more than his father [did].… His principle is to begin with a thunderbolt.”

  As Voltaire and others would soon learn, Frederick was not much bothered even by the ideas he embraced most passionately. To be charitable, perhaps he was gifted with what Keats called the poet’s “negative capability,” the capacity to entertain contradictory feelings and ideas without attempting to resolve them. Less charitably, he would be called two-faced. Perhaps both are true. On the one hand he wrote Wilhelmina he could not wait for “the fat one” to die, and on the other he told his wife, “I do not want my father to die, and I believe that I shall be more grieved by his death than many others who pretend to idolize him during his life; natural feeling is an instinct too powerful in me and I am not sufficiently strong to smother it.” This was the last we would hear of Frederick’s “natural feeling” for his father. Two played this double game, of course. Frederick’s father still throttled his son at one moment and embraced him at another. On his deathbed, Frederick William said he would laugh at Frederick from his grave at the terrible king Frederick would be; and he thanked God for such a wonderful son and heir.

  A DAY OR two before Frederick William drew his last breath, in the spring of 1740, he called to his bedside the “Old Dessauer,” his best and favorite general, his most devoted drinking companion of the Tobacco College, one of the few there whose loyalty was never in question, his friend in the best and blackest times. The king had his horses brought into the courtyard outside his window and asked the general to choose one. “Not good enough,” he said to Dessauer’s choice, and pointed out another he said was better. Knowing he would not see his friend and king again, the old warrior retired in tears.

  Of course Frederick William prescribed every detail of his postmortem, dictating another of his long “Instructions.” “As soon as I am dead my body is to be washed, dressed in a clean shirt and placed upon a wooden table.… The lid of the coffin is to be fastened with screws.…” and so on, page after tiresome page, through the procedure for the autopsy (“no organ [is] to be taken out”) to how the body would be displayed to the arrangement of the horses drawing the caisson.

  That done, he was ready to die. He called for his pastors and their absolution. At least at first they did not tell him what he wanted to hear. Frederick William pointed out that he never coveted what did not belong to him, that he was faithful to his wife, that he honored the Bible and always went to church. A pastor inquired: What about that man you hanged in Königsberg without so much as a trial? And what about the forgiveness of enemies? You have to forgive everyone else if you are to be forgiven yourself. The king told an orderly to write to one of his enemies when he was dead. The pastor said that would not do, but the king would not budge. In particular he refused to forgive his hateful cousin George II for a string of slights that went back to their childhood days. Eventually one of the pastors must have got to him, though, because among his final words were, “Death, I fear thee not!”

  Frederick was awash throughout the deathwatch, clawing at his father’s sheets, pledging his love and devotion: There would never be a greater king, he would do his best to be the equal of him, etc. He was not in the room when his father died. When the news came to him, he collapsed in tears once again, but he was not so overcome that he forgot to order the gates of Berlin to be closed so word of the king’s death would not get out before he could be assured of his grip on power.

  A while later the old Dessauer came to console Frederick on their mutual loss. Almost as an afterthought, he said he assumed Frederick would wish him to continue in command of the army, and suddenly the new king’s eyes were dry.

  “I know of [no authority] but that of the king,” said the newly minted, twenty-eight-year-old monarch. The general withdrew with what Carlyle called “a painful miscellany of feelings, astonishment … among them.”

  Another old veteran came to give Frederick his condolences, this one the general who had run Frederick’s court-martial, who had stood between him and the king at the worst of the crisis and had refused the king’s demand that Katte be sentenced to death. Frederick scolded him for leaving his post without permission.

  That night at the palace in Rheinsberg, the sound of horsemen arriving at two o’clock in the morning was followed by exciting news of Frederick’s accession. There were shouts in the halls: “Get up, get up, the king is dead! Frederick is king!” Someone in the card room was so excited that he upset the table, scattering bets all over the floor. As someone bent down to scoop them up, another said, “What, grovel for groschen now, when it is going to rain ducats?”

  Frederick’s friends came to call what followed “the day of the dupes.” There were to be jobs for only two of them, no wonderful new positions at court, no replication of the Rheinsberg idyll. They were out, though they could come to dinner when summoned. As Frederick bluntly put it to Keyserling, his close friend since boyhood: “My dear Caesarion, you’re a dear fellow, you are well-read, you have a pleasing wit and a nice singing voice, but your advice is that of an imbecile.” They were shocked by his brutal treatment of them. He sounded almost like his father.

  X.

  THE ARTIST IN A PAINT -

  BY - NUMBERS WORLD

  FREDERICKS HALCYON YEARS-IN-WAITING AT RHEINSBERG were the worst years of Bach’s life. By now more than a decade had passed since he had left Cöthen to become cantor at the school of St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, and the honeymoon was long over. At this point, despite his surpassing work and genius, his superiors were scorning and undermining him on a regular basis. A few weeks after the premiere of his St. Matthew Passion he was actually docked in pay, proof of their shortsightedness, surely, but also of his ferocious stubbornness, which lost nothing with age. He had discouraging family problems as well. Bach’s two oldest sons had long since left home, well launched on careers of their own—no small thanks to himself—but Bernhard, the third, was running up huge bills and bad loans again at his organist’s post in Sangerhausen, the same problem that had forced him to leave Mühlhausen (and Bach had had to pull strings to get him both jobs). Finally in his annus horribilis of 1737, the journal Critischer Musikus published an attack on him by a certain Johann Adolph Scheibe, one of his former students and the son of a longtime colleague, who called him a composer of turgid, outdated, academic music and—this really hurt—an undereducated social climber.

  These troubles hit him at a tender psychological moment. Two years before the Scheibe attack, he had turned fifty, the age at which his father, his mother, and his older brother Christoph had died. As others have been known to do when reminded of mortality much less forcefully than this, he started that year to work on a genealogy, reclaiming the family he had lost by digging up all known traces of the Bach line of musicians. He compiled a collection of
their music as well, as if to make sure there would be a record of his own distinction, if only as part of a distinguished clan. At this point in his life, he had reason to doubt he would be remembered at all, except perhaps as an exemplary anachronism.

  If he was hurt by such ignominy, he could not have been entirely surprised by it. It was of a piece with his whole life.

  WHEN MARIA BARBARA died in 1721, Bach was thirty-six and at the top of his form, well known for his virtuosity as a performer and as a composer of great mastery. Still, when he reached out for a good church job, that did not seem to be enough. For a senior position that came open in Hamburg, he gave a concert on the great organ at St. Catherine’s, where a long, bravura improvisation on the chorale “An Wasserflüssen Babylon” prompted from the near-centenarian Johann Adam Reinken a very rare compliment indeed: “I thought that this art was dead, but I see that it lives on in you.” Virtually the entire musical establishment of Hamburg turned out to hear Bach play and to conduct one of his cantatas, apparently including Johann Mattheson, now director of music at the Hamburg cathedral, who always praised Bach as a keyboard virtuoso but took from the cantata only a case study in bad declamation. In his Critica Musica, he quoted the libretto word for word in order to make fun of it: