Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 18

  Bach showed Gottsched what he thought of his prescription for change—and served notice of his opinion on certain aspects of the Enlightenment in general—when Gottsched worked with him as librettist on a cantata to mark the death of Augustus’s wife, the Electress Christiane Eberhardine (the cantata Görner wanted to write). Gottsched, of course, wished his libretto to be a model of his theories in practice. Knowing Bach’s use of librettists who were pliant about letting him shove their words around and even writing to order, he adopted a formal structure that he felt would force Bach to follow his script. The beauty of his ode, he wrote, lay in “the equality of its divisions, in the euphony of its syllables and in the order of its rhymes.” Not for Bach, who bent the text entirely to his purposes, setting Gottsched’s dated, over-the-top libretto (“Your Saxony and dismayed Meissen / are struck dumb at your royal tomb; / the eye weeps, the tongue cries; / my woe can be deemed indescribable.…”) to a work of great range and beauty. There is this to be said for Gottsched: His belief was genuine and well intentioned. Beyond that, he was a very large target (literally as well as metaphorically; he only narrowly avoided being drafted into Frederick William’s regiment of giants) and so presented for the next generation a clear guide to what he himself had missed: that there is more to making great literature than observing unities or strophic regularity, that neither an artist’s nor an audience’s reactions are invariable and fixed, that sentiment, emotion, and imagination are involved both in creating and in responding to art, that one cannot paint by numbers.

  In his remarkable book Bach and the Patterns of Invention, Laurence Dreyfus raises the interesting question of whether a university education might actually have got in Bach’s way: His willful mixing and matching, destroying and rebuilding to his own specifications the forms and styles of his time was distinctly at odds with contemporary aesthetic theory. The Enlightenment’s way of knowing a thing was to identify, separate, and classify it, the encyclopedic impulse. Bach’s way of understanding something was to get his hands on it, turn it upside down and backward, and wrestle with it until he found a way to make something new. The fact that he kept himself well away from the theoretical mainstream—of Germany, not to mention Europe—may indeed have helped him follow where his own drive and genius took him, which is to say well beyond notions of music as merely a craft or a depiction of theological texts or a graceful appeal to good taste. Rather, Bach presented the model of a composer grappling creatively with himself and the world. This relation of the artist to his art would be truly adopted only a century after Bach and Gottsched, by the Romantics of the nineteenth century. Before the next few generations could figure this out, however, there were casualties among theorists in all the arts, music very much included.

  ONE OF GOTTSCHED’S students, who was at the performance of his funeral ode with Bach, was none other than Johann Adam Scheibe, whom Bach had passed over for the organist’s job at St. Thomas’s. The son of an organ builder who was a longtime friend of Bach, Scheibe had since then become a highly respected commentator on music, and he now became Bach’s most outspoken and hurtful critic. His campaign began with the March 1737 issue of his Critischer Musikus, in which he said that Bach

  would be the admiration of whole nations if he had more amenity, if he did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art.… Every ornament, every little grace … he expresses completely in notes: and this not only takes away from his pieces the beauty of harmony but completely covers the melody throughout. All the voices must work with each other and be of equal difficulty, and none of them can be recognized as the principal voice.… Turgidity has led [him] from the natural to the artificial, and from the lofty to the somber.… [O]ne admires the onerous labor and uncommon effort—which, however, are vainly employed, since they conflict with Nature.

  Scheibe spoke as a member of his musical generation in claiming the primacy of what was called the “natural” in music (accompanied melody) over “artificial” harmony (counterpoint), and had he stopped there, his critique would have taken its place with others simply as evidence of the aesthetic theory of the moment. But Scheibe did not stop there. He proceeded into an ad hominem attack, suggesting that the royal court composer was overly impressed by his new title, employing the derogatory term musikant for Bach, the word for a journeyman performer rather than a serious musician; and he referred sharply and painfully to Bach’s lack of a university education.

  How can a man be faultless as a writer of music who has not sufficiently studied natural philosophy, so as to have investigated and become familiar with the forces of nature and of reason? How can he have all the advantages which are indispensable to the cultivation of good taste who has hardly troubled himself at all with the critical study … as necessary to music as [it is] to oratory and poetry.

  Bach made no immediate reply to Scheibe, perhaps in part because just now the criticism was put into perspective by a far more serious problem at home.

  JUST AS NO MAN CAN BE CERTAIN AT WHAT

  HOUR A CHILD WILL BE BORN OR DIE; THUS

  SHOULD WE SAY: LORD GOD, THE HIGHEST

  GOVERNANCE IS WITH YOU, MY LIFE AND DEATH

  ARE IN YOUR HANDS.…

  Of the thirteen children Bach had with Anna Magdalena, only six, three sons and three daughters, lived longer than a few years. Some of the children were born dead or died shortly after birth, but their first child, a daughter, died at the age of three, as did their second son, and their second daughter died at the age of four. A third daughter died at seventeen months. Usually around the time one of his children died, a note would appear in the St. Thomas Church records indicating that Bach had taken Communion, which he did otherwise only twice or three times a year.

  So many losses can only have focused his attention more sharply on his surviving children, and particularly on his three eldest sons. Three months after their four-year-old died, Friedemann, having finished his university studies, applied for the job of organist at St. Sophia’s Church in Dresden. His father wrote a letter of recommendation for him, copied out the piece he was to play for his audition, and not only wrote his letter of application but even signed Friedemann’s name to it himself.

  After Friedemann moved to Dresden to take the job, Carl left the University of Leipzig to study in Frankfurt an der Oder, a strange and abrupt move. He had not yet finished his studies, and Frankfurt, a city once noted for its university and its patronage of the arts, had been downgraded by the elector of Brandenburg—Frederick’s father Frederick William—to a garrison town, its former virtues subjected to his patented ridicule. The year after Carl arrived, the king sent to the university an essay he had written entitled “Sensible Thoughts on Fools and Folly,” and ordered that there be a debate on the subject between professors and his court jester, which of course duly took place, no doubt to everyone’s embarrassment, including the jester’s. By that time the faculty had already declined markedly. The legal faculty in particular was said to be dreadful, so clearly Carl did not go there for his law studies. Perhaps he realized he could never be a big fish in his father’s pond—at Frankfurt he conducted the collegium musicum—or perhaps as the second-favorite son he did not want to stay home when the favorite had managed to gain his freedom. Whatever his reason, his father cannot have been entirely pleased about his son’s move to Frankfurt, and from the time Carl left home, there is no record of his coming home again until a few months before Bach died, when he returned to Leipzig to audition for his father’s job.

  The year after Bach’s second son left him, so did his third. Gottfried Bernhard had got his father’s old job in Mühlhausen, where he promptly ran up so many debts that Bach had to go to Mühlhausen, pay off all the creditors, and take his wayward son with him. He then helped Gottfried get the job in Sangerhausen that he himself had lost thirty years before, fresh out of St. Michael’s Lyceum in Lüneburg. Bach even played on the
council’s guilt and embarrassment at having to turn him down for a favorite of the duke. Now, only months into that job, it seemed that Gottfried had run up such enormous debts that he had felt forced into hiding.

  The burgomaster wrote to Bach to find out if he knew his son’s whereabouts, and Bach responded with the only letter he ever wrote that spoke of such deeply personal matters.

  With what pain and sorrow … I frame this reply, Your Honor can judge for yourself.… Upon my (alas! misguided) son I have not laid eyes since last year.… Your Honor is also not unaware that at that time I duly paid not only his board but also the Mühlhausen draft … but also left a few ducats behind to settle a few bills, in the hope that he would now embark upon a new mode of life. But now I must learn … that he once more borrowed here and there and did not change his way of living in the slightest, but on the contrary has even absented himself and not given me to date any inkling as to his whereabouts.

  What shall I say or do further? Since no admonition or even any loving care and assistance will suffice any more, I must bear my cross in patience and leave my unruly son to God’s Mercy alone.…

  Even so, he could not stop trying to protect his son.

  I would not willingly have Your Most Noble Council burdened with this request, but for my part would only pray for patience until such time as he turns up, or it can be learned otherwise whither he has gone.… I most obediently request Your Honor to have the goodness to obtain precise information as to his whereabouts.…

  For the year that followed there was no word from Gottfried and no clue to where he was. The discovery that he had enrolled at the University of Jena, intending to study law, was made only when he turned up dead there, at the age of twenty-four. The only cause of death ever given was “a hot fever.” Bach had said good-bye to many of his children, but this son, his last child with Maria Barbara, was the only grown child he ever had to bury, and the tone of his letter to the burgomaster of Sangerhausen leaves no doubt that this was a crushing loss.

  GOTTFRIED’S DEATH MARKS the beginning of Bach’s last decade of life, a decade in which, although his quantity of work was not as great as it had been before, its lucidity and sense of purpose were never greater. Perhaps like his rejection by the Church authorities, the absence of his sons was a kind of liberation. Gottfried’s death, as terrible as it was, at least spared him continued heartbreak over an always unbalanced child, and the departure of the other two meant that he did not have to live daily with the painful fact that they were in sympathy with the aesthetic theory articulated by Scheibe, even if they would not have approved the stridency or cruelty of his attack. Scheibe after all spoke very much for their generation when he criticized Bach’s music as old-fashioned. Though perhaps not so categorically as Scheibe, Friedemann and Carl also saw that the “natural” in music was an easier pleasure than the “forced labor” of counterpoint; they too understood the value of feeling over rationality, sensus over ratio, simplicity over complexity. Perhaps his sons’ departure freed Bach to pursue his own path without their unspoken doubts in mind. In any case that is what he did, with ever greater clarity, ambition, and force.

  Bach never did respond to Scheibe, at least in words. He enlisted the aid of a colleague at the university, a professor of rhetoric named Johann Abraham Birnbaum, to compose a reply, in which he collaborated closely. When Scheibe got wind of what he was doing, he pressed the attack with a satiric letter to his own journal signed only “Cornelius” but whose author was supposed to be Bach himself.

  I have never concerned myself with learned matters.… I have also read very few musical writings or books.… Since, however, I have firmly convinced myself [that] I am undoubtedly the greatest artist in music, I cannot forbear to warn you that you are in the future not to make bold to find fault with me or to condemn or make ridiculous the manifold counterpoints, canons, circular songs and all the other intricate forms of music writing that, as I have found, you have perversely called “turgid.” All these things are particularly close to my heart.… I will not let such insult stand. Though I cannot write against you myself … one of my good friends … will protect me against you, you may be sure. Don’t let things come to that, for you might very easily rue it.

  After Scheibe’s signed but no less mean-spirited response to Birnbaum’s long-winded defense, the professor inadvisably expanded his defense of Bach with an even more peevishly grandiose display at much greater length than his first one. One of Bach’s students, who had a music journal of his own, issued a somewhat more successful because shorter argument for Bach, but at moments it too seemed to be a defense that proved the prosecution’s case. “If Mr. Bach at times writes the inner parts more fully than other composers, he has taken as his model the music of twenty or twenty-five years ago. He can write otherwise, however, when he wishes to.”

  Bach did seem to respond to Scheibe directly late in 1739, the year of Gottfried’s death, when he published the third volume of his Clavierübung, this one a set of chorale preludes for organ. In the middle of it were four “duets” that seemed entirely out of place with the collection, even jarring. Bach’s student-defender saw in this volume of the Clavierübung “a powerful refutation to those who have dared to criticize the composition of the Honorable Court Composer,” and so it was perhaps intended to be. In his book Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint, David Yearsley finds Bach arguing with Scheibe and his generation most clearly in the F-major Duetto, which begins with a sweetly melodic, entirely pretty fugue (read: Counterpoint doesn’t have to mean serious or complicated). As the piece progresses, though, our melodic innocent is led into an ever deeper and more winding catacombs of precisely wrought contrapuntal development, a very unsettling passage from pastoral serenity into a scene out of Brueghel. As if bound in chains, the melody is made to follow counterpoint wherever it leads, even as what happens as a result defies rather than courts any notion of good taste. Bach slams his point home when he returns to the sun of the opening section and shows us our sweet melody in a new light: as an empty amusement. “The piece’s sprightliness now seems coy,” as Yearsley puts it, “its pleasantness more like mockingly undemanding pleasantries.” In music that is among the least pretty and most beautiful he ever composed, Bach had answered Scheibe and the aesthetic ideals of the Enlightenment in no uncertain terms, and not for the last time.

  * * *

  * Emphasis original. This passage and all those that follow were annotated, checked in the margin, or underlined by Bach in his Calov commentary.

  XI.

  WAR AND PEACE AND

  A MECHANICAL DUCK

  FREDERICK COLLECTED PEOPLE THE WAY OTHERS COLlect napkin rings or yachting pennants. As soon as he took the throne he began to recruit various eminent writers, scientists, and philosophers to his court as members of a rejuvenated Prussian Academy, for intellectual companionship and as trophies. During his first week as king he brought back the Enlightenment philosopher Christian Wolff from the exile into which his father had banished him, and in no time he had also managed to recruit the Swiss mathematician Euler and the French scientist Maupertuis, who became head of the academy. The one he really wanted as a jewel in his crown, though—or as featured attraction in his celebrity zoo—was Voltaire. Frederick would not have dared bring him to Prussia when his father was alive; he was, after all, French. But not long after Fédèric became Frederick II, after four years of the most fervent mutual admiration in the history of letters, they met.

  The circumstances were a little awkward: Frederick was in bed, wrapped in a shawl, shivering with fever; and, for all the pacific idealism of the Anti-Machiavel, there were two thousand Prussian soldiers outside who were no escort. They were in the town of Wesel to settle an old dispute over the nearby barony of Herstal, which had been inherited by Frederick’s father eight years before but ever since had rebuffed its Prussian overlords in favor of the prince-bishop of Liège. Since the bishop had the support of France and Austria, Frederick’s ministers
advised him against using force to regain Herstal, fearing the start of a wider war. Not for the last time, Frederick dismissed their advice. “The ministers are clever when they discuss politics,” he said, “but when they discuss war it is like an Iroquois talking about astronomy.” Just before Voltaire arrived Frederick had given the bishop an ultimatum and two days to think it over. Despite his own pacific ideas, Voltaire was delighted, joking that Frederick had engaged the bishop in theological debate “and brought two thousand good arguments with him.”

  Voltaire was always ambivalent about power, infatuated at one moment, disgusted the next. He once said that Virgil “had the weakness of paying Augustus an homage that no man should ever give to another man, no matter who he is”—which only proved, as Peter Gay cracked, “the Socratic maxim ‘know thyself was imperfectly realized in the Enlightenment.”

  Describing his first meeting with Frederick in a letter to a friend, Voltaire gushed:

  I saw one of the most amiable men in the world … a philosopher without austerity, full of sweetness, complaisance and obliging ways.… I needed an effort to remember that the man sitting at the foot of my bed was a sovereign with an army of 100,000 men.

  Actually the bed, at least the first bed they met in, was Frederick’s. A world-class hypochondriac, Voltaire was deeply at home in sickrooms, and no sooner were the formal introductions over than he was sitting next to the king in bed and taking his pulse. He advised Frederick to take quinine: It had worked for the king of Sweden, he said, and though Frederick was clearly nothing like that militaristic land-grabber, their bodies presumably worked the same way. Frederick said that if Voltaire’s visit was not enough to cure him, they should call for the confessor.