Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 20

  He also forwarded some bad poetry of his own in Voltaire’s name that referred to Louis XV as “the most stupid of kings.” The poetry was so clumsy, though, that Voltaire was easily able to disown it.

  In his attempts to act the spy, Voltaire was once again an abject failure. Frederick knew exactly why he had suddenly decided to come to Berlin and refused to discuss politics with him, which he said would be like a man “offering a glass of medicine to his mistress.” Frederick wrote of Voltaire to Algarotti: “It is a pity that such a mean soul is mated to such a fine genius. But I shall say nothing, because I need him for my French studies.” He meant that literally. The man he had called the very incarnation of Racine would remain in his menagerie as a French teacher.

  FLEURY WAS RIGHT to suspect the king of Prussia would be up to something just now. Two years after the First Silesian War the situation in Europe was almost the reverse of the way Frederick had left it: Austria was newly ascendant, having recaptured Bavaria and Bohemia from an “emperor” who had been voted in by the German electors and supported on the battlefield by France to challenge Maria Theresa. Now France was in full retreat and the electors’ would-be supplanter had no more money and no land. Most worrisome, Frederick discovered that Maria Theresa had secretly made a coalition with England, Holland, and his neighbor Saxony. One of his spies gave him a letter from “Uncle” George II to Maria Theresa that made a clear and disturbing reference to Silesia: “Ce qui est bon à prendre est bon à rendre. [What’s good to take is good to give back.]” Saxony’s siding with Austria was trouble even closer to home.

  In the spring of 1744 Frederick attempted to regroup the German princes under the banner of their landless emperor, Charles Albert, formerly elector of Bohemia, but he had a hard time selling his plan. No one was buying his argument from German patriotism or his appeal to the assaulted dignity of their propped-up emperor. Even after promising that he would virtually carry the war himself, he could only get two of the electors to sign on with him in the “Union of Frankfurt,” which pledged itself to get Bavaria and Bohemia back for Charles Albert. Frederick’s motive for going to war, of course, had nothing to do with Charles Albert or his “empire” but lay in the absolutely correct insight that what was bad for Austria was good for Prussia and vice versa.

  This would not be like the First Silesian War. Maria Theresa’s now battle-hardened troops had been reinforced by twenty thousand Saxon and sixty thousand Hungarian soldiers and a bankroll from Frederick’s not-very-avuncular uncle George. In the fall and winter of 1743, Frederick’s forces moved deep into Bohemia, but his French allies, who were supposed to keep Austria’s forces engaged, folded. Undaunted, Frederick moved on to capture Prague, then farther south in terrible weather. In the process he overextended his forces, and this time he was not in Protestant Silesia but in loyal Catholic, Hapsburg territory, where the Prussians were despised. The forces against him had perfect intelligence, and Frederick could recruit no spies. He was chronically short of supplies, his troops were laid low by dysentery and typhus, the weather was unremittingly cold, desertion became epidemic, and finally Frederick was forced to retreat to Silesia. “No general ever committed more faults than the king in this campaign,” he said. Later he told someone, “Good fortune is often more fatal to princes than adversity. The former intoxicates them with presumption, the latter renders them circumspect and modest.”

  By the next spring he had rebuilt his forces, and this time when the Austrian and Saxon armies came to meet him, near Hohenfriedberg in Silesia, he was ready. Disarmed with false intelligence, they were unprepared for the Prussian assault, and after two pitched battles, the Austrians and Saxons made a decisive retreat.

  WITH THE AUSTRIAN RETREAT, the Saxon elector fled to Prague, and the Prussian army occupied all of Saxony, including Leipzig. The occupation was mercifully brief. Prussian troops were filled with “an unparalleled hatred of the Saxons,” Frederick had written approvingly before one especially bloody battle, and they had grown no fonder of Saxons during the rest of the war, in which they lost tens of thousands of their fellow soldiers. During the occupation, Frederick made himself at home in Dresden, which had been heavily damaged by the Prussian bombardment. In the rubble, as it were, he gave dinner parties, enjoyed himself with the royal Kapelle, and did a little discreet looting. He sent sets of Meissen porcelain to friends—tokens, he said, of “the fragility of human fortunes”—and, in addition to some cash and other odds and ends, the spoils of war would come to include a few of Dresden’s best musicians. At the elector’s birthday two months before, the Dresden Kapellmeister Johann Adolph Hasse had put on a new opera in his honor titled Arminio. Frederick requested a repeat performance for himself. The Kapelle did several concerts for him, and he impressed them with some flute sonatas of his own. Hasse actually dedicated a new flute sonata to Frederick while he was there and accompanied him on the harpsichord when he played it. Frederick gave him a diamond ring in appreciation.

  The pleasantries were cut short by a peace agreement, which was signed on Christmas Day 1745. Leipzig could not have got a better Christmas present—the occupation had been particularly harsh there—and Bach apparently conducted a new cantata for the occasion, his Gloria in Excelsis Deo (BWV 191), which he drew directly from the Gloria of the short mass he had dedicated and presented to the Saxon elector a dozen years before. Despite the fact that its lyrics were in Latin, the congregation would have needed no translation, and the words—“Glory to God in the highest … and on earth, peace among people of goodwill”—would have rung resoundingly triumphant just then, as the Prussian soldiers withdrew. This is another of the moments in the course of this story when it makes wonderful sense to stop reading, to find an LP or CD of what would later become the B-minor Mass, and try to imagine what hearing Bach’s “Gloria in excelsis Deo” and even more his “Et in terra pax” would have been like on that particular Christmas Day at St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig.

  DESPITE APPEARANCES to the contrary during his triumphant coda in Dresden, the Frederick who made his way home to Berlin had been dramatically changed by the past two years of war. He had not obeyed the old soldier’s axiom never to look at the faces of the dead. More than once he lingered in battlegrounds when the fighting was over, overseeing medical treatment for his forces and the enemy’s alike, and these were unforgettably gruesome sights. At night after the worst of the battles, with thousands dead and thousands of others screaming in pain, fires mercilessly lit the scene, to help the surgeons continue their grisly work through the night and to roast dead cavalry horses for food. After one such scene, Frederick wrote his brother: “We have beaten the enemy, but … we are the most distressed victors that you can imagine. God preserve us from such another bloody and murderous affair.” Many more were still ahead of him when he wrote that, and the war left him a bitterly despairing misanthrope. After another long and bloody battle, he wrote, “I regard [men] as a herd of stags in the park of a grand nobleman, with no other function than to breed and fill up the park.” Since for him there was no principle attached to his cause but power, how could he have felt anything but despair at the ways of such a world? There is no evidence he ever reflected on the fact that it was a world he was making.

  At home, two of his best friends had died, Keyserling and Jordan, and the war had given him no time to mourn. Jordan’s last letter to Frederick reads like a last attempt to rescue him from his nihilism, and perhaps to recover in some measure the belief Jordan had himself lost with the death of his wife.

  Sire,

  My sickness has become so much worse that I can no longer hope for a cure. I have come to realize, in this situation, the necessity of a thoughtful, enlightened religion. Without that we are the most miserable beings in the universe. I hope that Your Majesty will remember, after my death, that as I fought superstition with all my strength, I always had at heart the interest of Christianity, however removed from the notions of theologians. As one cannot know the need for valo
r except in danger, one cannot know the consolation of religion except in suffering.…

  But Frederick was beyond redemption. In a letter after news of Jordan’s death reached him on the battlefield, he wrote, “I think the only really happy men are those who love no one.” He wrote his tutor Jacques Duhan from the war that he was wrapped in “a heartrending grief more gloomy and grave than mourning clothes.” He had been back in Berlin for less than a month when he sat on Duhan’s deathbed as well.

  Frederick’s family and remaining friends felt the brunt of the change in him after the war. He began to abuse his brothers with the same contempt (though without the violence) that his father had visited on him. He became increasingly brutal with even his most senior ministers, and his court lost its life. He was even on bad terms with Wilhelmina. When she discovered that her husband had been unfaithful to her with one of her ladies-in-waiting and best friends, the daughter of a Prussian general, she decided the best way to get rid of her was to marry her off to someone far away. In the event she arranged a marriage to an officer in the Austrian army just as Frederick was about to enter the Second Silesian War against Austria. He was furious at what he perceived as her disloyalty at such a moment (as was the girl’s father), and Wilhelmina could not bring herself to tell him why she had arranged the marriage. Their letters—his condemnations, her entreaties—crossed, and years passed before he discovered the truth. Even then it was years more before he could truly forgive her.

  He still held his concerts in the evening, but increasingly he devoted himself to work. He seemed to be growing more and more like his father, who came to him in recurrent dreams, always accompanied by a phalanx of soldiers. He orders them to arrest Frederick, bind his hands, and take him into custody. His sister Wilhelmina is there, and he asks her why their father is doing this to him. “What is the charge?”

  “It’s because you don’t love your father enough,” she says.

  He always awoke from this dream in a cold sweat, he said, “as if I had been swimming in a river.”

  One night the scene changed at the end of the dream, and this time he was back at the war, on a desolate battlefield, where his father came to him again, this time without the soldiers.

  “Have I done well?” Frederick asks him, and his father says yes, he had done well.

  “I am content then,” Frederick tells him. “Your approval means more to me than that of the whole world.”

  Frederick actually worked even harder than his father. There was so much to be done, so many problems that had been neglected because of the war—not enough schools, not enough hospitals, and for the moment not enough money, thanks to the war, to do anything about them. To raise revenue, he devised and undertook reforms to increase commerce—draining marshes, luring émigres to Prussia to settle and farm the reclaimed lands, promoting Prussian exports. He worked from four in the morning until midnight some nights, reading every bit of diplomatic correspondence and writing his own replies, supervising every ministry, personally adjudicating subjects’ complaints, writing long discourses on matters from taxes to animal husbandry. People were awestruck by his dedication and his energy. He was tireless, relentless, reliable as a machine.

  XII.

  THE NIGHT OF A

  MUSICAL OFFERING

  FREDERICK HAD HIRED BACH’S SON CARL EVEN BEFORE he had become king, during the palmy years in Rheinsberg, and he kept Carl on for thirty years, despite the fact that he never quite liked him or his music. In his autobiography, Carl said he kept working for Frederick despite “one or two lucrative offers from elsewhere [because] His Majesty was gracious enough to increase my salary substantially each time this happened.” The truth was not quite so pleasant. He was hired at the unimpressive salary of three hundred thalers, but as often as he made the request, and for all the many wonderful compositions he dedicated to the king, he could not get a raise. In 1755, seventeen years after he started playing in the Prussian court Kapelle, the king’s chamberlain sent Frederick a memo about Bach’s latest petition.

  His other complaints are too numerous [to list] but his principal grievance is that he can no longer survive on 300 Thalers. In every year of service he has needed to spend a further 600 Thalers—Nichelman and Agricola were his pupils, and they get 600 Thalers, he humbly requests Your Majesty to increase his salary, or else to release him from his duties.

  Frederick contemptuously scrawled in the margin,

  Bach is lying; Agricola gets only 500 Thalers. [Bach] once played in a concert here and now he’s getting cocky. His pay will be increased, but he must wait for the next round of financial measures.

  Seventeen years is a long time to wait for a raise. That he stayed is some indication of just how glamorous and promising he thought the job to be, and why not? The king, who was only two years older than Carl, was clearly serious about music. Even when Frederick was still hiding from his father the fact that he had any musicians at all, he had already hired the great flautist Quantz as well as the famous Benda brothers, and his Kapellmeister was no less than the eminent composer Graun, on whom Carl saw Frederick lavishing all praise and glory (he and Quantz both made two thousand thalers to Carl’s three hundred). Carl was a composer of some accomplishment as well when he went to work for Frederick, at least he had been so recognized in Frankfurt, and he had reason to believe, at least at first, that it would be only a matter of time before the king similarly perceived and rewarded his gifts.

  Fifteen months after Frederick took the throne, when Carl finally began to receive a regular salary, “old Bach” came to Berlin for a visit. There was no question of his meeting Frederick on that trip since the king was at the First Silesian War. Saxony was then still allied with Prussia, having even allowed Frederick to take his troops across its territory for the initial invasion of Silesia, so Bach was breaching no protocol by making the trip, which had the dual purpose of seeing his son settled in (as he had done with Friedemann in Dresden) and of bringing a recent commission, his “Aria with Different Variations,” to its patron, Count Hermann von Keyserling.

  A man of worldly wisdom and taste with a broad knowledge of music, Keyserling (an uncle of Frederick’s beloved “Caesarion”) was Russian ambassador to the Saxon court in Dresden when he first met and became a patron of Bach (he also sent his daughter to study with Friedemann). He had been moved to Berlin when power shifted there on Frederick’s accession. The story goes that Keyserling commissioned Bach’s “Aria with Different Variations” because he was a chronic insomniac who wanted something for his keyboardist, a sometime student of Bach named Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, to play for him at night. As good as it is, the story is somewhat implausible, since Goldberg was only fourteen years old at the time, and the Goldberg Variations could hardly put anyone to sleep. The aria is peaceful enough, a wistfully melancholic French dance Bach had written for Anna Magdalena fifteen years before, but based on its simple, eight-note bass line, Bach contrived thirty variations of astonishing vigor and ingenuity, using virtually every style and device of European music. Perhaps his greatest masterpiece for keyboard, certainly among his most difficult, the Goldbergs may have been beyond even Bach’s virtuosity by this time in his life. Passionate, bold, tender, playful, lyrical, and deeply introspective by turns, every movement of the work is full of fire and light, guaranteed to make Keyserling or anyone else bolt upright in bed and stay there.

  Among the loveliest pieces in the set are canons. Every third variation is a canon—the first a canon at the unison (meaning that the second voice enters on the same note as the first), the second a canon at the second (the second voice is one whole interval higher than the first), the third a canon at the third, and so on. In place of the tenth canon, however, just before the final movement, which is a note-for-note repeat of the opening aria, he wrote a quodlibet, like the ones the Bach family used to sing at their reunions, in which two folk songs play against each other. The first of these songs, “I haven’t been with you for a long, long time, come
here,” was traditionally an evening’s last dance, and here refers to the opening aria, which is an hour’s worth of variations in the past by now and is coming back in the next movement to close off the work. The second song goes “Cabbage and beets have driven me away / Had my mother cooked meat I might longer have stayed.” Bach was not above making a plain joke about flatulence, but given the character of the previous reference, it is just possible he was making self-effacing fun of his own contrapuntal extravagance: Having forsworn the “meat” of simpler composition, he would spare his audience any further complexity (the sort of thing Frederick William might have called “wind-making”) and simply say a merciful good-bye. Whatever the literal joke may be, the winding together of these two folk tunes—over the same bass line as all the other variations, at the very end of this long, bravura display of every sort of counterpoint—is both a whimsical retort to those who denigrate canon as self-serious and itself a dazzling contrapuntal act. The aria’s return at the end, precisely as it was stated at the outset, closes the circle: We have listened to an extravagantly various set of variations on a simple series of notes that represents a stunning demonstration of the ideal of identity in variety, analogue of the indivisible presence of God in the manifold, phenomenal world, a feat that was possible only in counterpoint.

  The Goldberg Variations, which Bach published as the fourth and final volume of his Clavierübung (and for which Keyserling compensated him with a hundred louis d’or, about $4,000, in a golden goblet), was the first great work of his last decade, and there could have been no more pointed sign to where the rest of his work was headed. There would be no quarter given to the aesthetic imperatives and criticism of Scheibe, his sons, or anyone else.

  EXACTLY WHAT CARL made of his father’s music is ambiguous in the literature, perhaps because it may have been unclear to him. On the one hand he expressed great respect for his father’s genius and dedication, which he witnessed every day of his young life. On the other hand, as he admitted after his father was gone, he had needed to break away, to become himself as a composer and as a man, and that involved denning himself to some extent in opposition to his father’s aesthetic ideals. Even at his most reverential, as in the obituary he wrote soon after Bach died, his praise had rejection in it: His father’s melodies were “strange [but] always varied, rich in invention and resembling no other composer.” His “serious temperament drew him to music that was serious, elaborate and profound.” In Carl’s mouth, these were not unambiguous compliments. Like all important musicians of his generation, Carl admired the galant work of his Berlin colleagues (the best of it anyway; his father’s son, after all, he complained bitterly about the emptiest of it). His very popular Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments talked almost exclusively in terms of the galant and its dramatic child, the empfindsamer Stil (“highly sensitive style”). For Carl and his generation, the expression of feeling in music was all, and the affection that mattered was not a text or other object for depiction but the feeling state of the performer and composer. Carl was almost theatrically demonstrative when he played. “A player cannot move others unless he himself is moved,” he wrote. “This cannot come off without corresponding gestures, which would only be denied by someone who is constrained by his lack of sensitivity to sit in front of the instrument like a carved image.” When his father played even the most passionate or technically difficult passage, he barely moved.