Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  While Friedemann, the first and favorite, performed Bach’s works often on high feast days and rarely changed them except to correct mistakes in the score, Carl, even when he left Frederick’s court for Hamburg and was desperate for material to fill the city’s demanding schedule of music, performed his father’s works infrequently, and when he did he often replaced Bach’s arias with his own. He also routinely lifted his father’s works without attribution; every one of the twenty-one passions he wrote in his late life as musical director in Hamburg has one or more thefts in it (to be fair, he was not alone in doing that; Handel was infamous for stealing others’ work, and Friedemann, whether for profit or expediency, once erased his father’s name on a work and replaced it with his own).

  Carl was clearly of two minds about canon as well. Even as he shared them in correspondence with colleagues, he was said to have disdained them. In a parlor-game stunt that emphasizes nothing so much as their mechanical, technical quality, he created an “Invention by Which Six Measures of Double Counterpoint Can Be Written Without a Knowledge of the Rules.” The sheet on the facing page is one of four which come with instructions: First, pick six numbers at random (low numbers, to make it easy). Use the first to determine how many measures to count from the beginning to get the first note. Then count nine measures ahead to pick up the second, nine again for the third, and so on, until you have completed a full measure in 2/4 time (four eighth notes, two quarter notes, one quarter and two eighth notes, or one half note). Then do the same for the second measure—use the second random number to count forward for the first, count nine forward from there for the second, and so on; and likewise through all six measures. One table of notes will supply the upper voice, another the lower. Six measures of perfectly acceptable counterpoint result every time. A machine could do it.

  According to Dr. Charles Burney, an itinerant music historian who visited with him late in his life, Carl wrote off canons as “dry and despicable pedantry” which demonstrated only “a total want of genius in anyone who was fond of such wretched studies.” Carl’s attitude toward canons was surely more nuanced than that, but the position as Burney reports it was entirely in keeping with that of Carl’s generation, very much including his onetime patron Frederick the Great.

  AS BACH WENT his own way, the music journals continued their spirited debate. Scheibe in particular could not let go. As late as 1745, his Critischer Musikus rehashed the whole ugly argument he had started about Bach eight years before, reprinting his initial attack as well as Birnbaum’s response, his response to Birnbaum’s response, and then Birnbaum’s endless defense of his response, which Scheibe now sprayed with 164 nasty-to-savage footnotes, some of them of great length. Both Birnbaum and Scheibe had by this time become very tiresome, and we need not join them in their mud wrestle, because in the end, the battle between Bach and the next generation was not so much their embrace of the galant, nor even their dismissal of counterpoint. What most divided him from them was their motive for making music at all, of whatever sort. The new “enlightened” composer wrote for one reason and one only: to please the audience. When he was Kapellmeister in Dresden, for example, Heinichen had written that the proper ambition of a composer “consists once and for all in the art of making his music, as a matter of course, popular and pleasing to the reasonable world.” Mattheson went further: “Really we should follow not our own inclinations but those of the listener. I have often composed something that seemed to me trifling, but unexpectedly attained great favor. I made a mental note of this, and wrote more of the same, although it had little merit when judged according to its artistry.” For Bach, of course, that statement was the coarsest philistinism, a musical blasphemy.

  “[I]t hinders a preacher greatly if he wants to look around and concern himself with what people want to hear and not hear,” Abraham Calov wrote in his commentary on Luther, another one of the passages that Bach double-marked for emphasis.

  … RATHER, AS HE STANDS HIGH UPON THE

  MOUNTAIN AT AN OPEN SPOT AND LOOKS

  AROUND HIMSELF WITH A FREE MIND, SO HE

  SHALL ALSO SPEAK FREELY AND SHY AWAY FROM

  NO ONE, EVEN IF HE SEES A MULTITUDE OF

  PEOPLE AND FACES. HE NEED NOT GUARD HIS

  MOUTH NOR TAKE INTO VIEW GRACIOUS OR

  WRATHFUL LORDS OR NOBLEMEN, NOR

  CONSIDER MONEY, WEALTH, HONOR, OR POWER,

  SHAME, POVERTY, OR HARM; HE NEED NOT

  THINK ANY FURTHER THAN THAT HE SAYS WHAT

  HIS OFFICE DEMANDS.

  We cannot know if that passage was on his mind as Bach traveled to the court of Frederick the Great. Perhaps Bach had marked these lines in his Calov for some other occasion. There had been more than one time in his life when he had acted in accordance with this advice of Luther’s, sometimes with alarming force. In any event, his composition for Frederick would be no exception.

  THE TRIP TO Potsdam was to be, perhaps even primarily, a family reunion. Because of the war, Bach had not yet met Carl’s new wife or the couple’s first child, his first grandchild. Friedemann accompanied his father in part because he too had yet to meet his new nephew and sister-in-law, and in part because who would want to miss this matchup between his old Saxon-speaking, God-fearing patriarch and the godless young warrior-king of Prussia. Friedemann and his father traveled by coach from Leipzig to Potsdam, a long and bone-jarring trip. The roads were terrible, muddy in early spring and sometimes virtually indistinguishable as their coach wound through forest. If they stopped only to change horses and grease wheels at post houses along the way, the trip straight through would have taken at least two days and a night, during which sleep would have been all but impossible.

  They arrived in Potsdam in the early evening of May 7, 1747, a Sunday. Summoned to the city palace virtually as soon as he arrived, Bach was still shaken by the coach ride and in the clothes he had worn for the journey. Ushered into the king’s concert room, he must have made elaborate apologies to Frederick for his appearance and a brief bow to the many acquaintances, colleagues, and friends in the room who had assembled for the evening’s concert: Quantz, with whom he had played more than once in Dresden, his friends the Benda brothers and the Graun brothers, one of whom had been Friedemann’s teacher for a time. There could have been as many as forty musicians in the room for that night’s concert, including, of course, the king’s keyboardist, Carl.

  Among Frederick’s other objects for collection were prototypes of the modern piano, new keyboard instruments that, unlike the harpsichord, could be controlled for volume. Instead of plucking strings (harpsichord) or pressing against them with a metal tangent (clavichord), the new fortepiano (literally “loudsoft”) had covered wooden hammers connected by a complex lever to the end of each key, thanks to which the performer’s greater and lesser force could make itself felt in the music. The chief fortepiano manufacturer in Germany was the distinguished organ builder Gottfried Silbermann, who had a decade before begun asking Bach to play and give his opinion of them. Bach’s exact words are lost to history, but the first verdict was not good: He said the treble was weak and the keyboard action was too stiff, making it hard to play. Silbermann was offended but knew Bach was right and went back to work, continuing to call on Bach’s opinion from time to time. Eventually he developed instruments that Bach liked well enough to become a sales agent for them in Leipzig. Frederick had become so infatuated with the new instrument that he wanted to collect them all, and by now he had fifteen of them scattered around the Potsdam “city palace,” some of them marked for the move to his new home, “Sanssouci,” which had opened that very week.

  So of course Frederick wanted to hear Bach play them, or he wanted to say that Bach had played them, or he wanted Bach to tell him how wonderful they were, perhaps all of the above. After all the courtesies had been attended to, the king began to lead Bach from one room to another, from fortepiano to fortepiano, all of his musicians trailing after them as he asked Bach to try out each instrument
in its turn. So many fortepianos, so little time! What could Bach have played as he went through them one by one? Surely not an entire suite; that would have taken much too long. Maybe only a movement, then, or a prelude and fugue set? Perhaps there was only time for a fugue. Or would the king, midpiece, simply pull “old Bach” off the keyboard by the arm and haul him off to the next one? Surely not. At least we hope not. The fact is that we know nothing about what repertoire Bach used to play his way through the king’s collection of piano prototypes that evening until one particular moment, when Frederick sat down at one of the keyboards, played a tune of twenty-one notes, and so presented Bach the most difficult improvisational challenge of his life.

  These were not just any twenty-one notes (although any twenty-one notes would have been several longer than one might wish for the improvisation of a fugue). These were twenty-one notes that, if they were not calculated to make the task as difficult as possible, had been thrown together in an accident of anticontrapuntal genius. Was Carl the author of a calculated test for his father? We simply cannot know. Others could have done it, one of the Grauns, or possibly Quantz, though nothing about them suggests they would knowingly have taken part in a mean-spirited practical joke on an old friend and esteemed colleague. The theory that Bach was given such a contrapuntally resistant theme by benign chance, however, comes up against some withering images: Frederick’s treatment of Voltaire, for example, so eerily like his father’s treatment of the hapless Gundling or the professors of Frankfurt. It is not hard to see how such a trick could have appealed to Frederick. For one thing, Bach was a contemporary of Frederick’s father, and he represented the backward, boorish, superstitious world on which Frederick had turned his back but which still haunted him in his sleep.

  Carl too had a larger-than-life father hovering over him that evening, and in this sense he was, or may have felt he was, caught between two despots, both of whom, for different reasons, he wished both to escape and to embrace. We are far beyond known territory now. All we know is that Carl’s authorship is at least a subject for plausible speculation, which is itself an unhappy fact.

  A FUGUE IS not as strict as a canon. The subject of a fugue, like the Royal Theme, does not have to play over and against itself or be inverted or augmented or otherwise transformed in any particular way, but there are several things that are required for a piece of music to call itself a fugue: It must announce the complete subject at the outset; and the complete subject must be imitated in one or more additional voices, each voice layering on more harmonic complexity, until all the intended voices—Frederick asked for three—have entered. Thus ends the so-called exposition section of a fugue, and thus ends just about all one can say about what fugues have in common.

  That should be enough, though, to understand the insidious ingenuity of this one:

  Things get interesting after the third bar, when the signs in front of notes—first a sharp sign, then a natural, then another natural, then a flat, etc.—indicate that we are descending not in the nice, predictable whole and half steps familiar from every major scale but only in halftones, through all the notes the scale leaves out because they would make it longer, less “normal,” more ambiguous, and more complex, otherwise known as chromatic. With a subject like this one, every statement after the first would have to be matched note for note with a complex series of harmonies that could accompany this snaky, anything but simple descent, and that accompaniment would also have to fit with whatever new passages Bach devised to keep each voice going after it had finished with the subject; these “secondary” motifs would have to fit together too, here and later. Once all the voices had finished stating the subject, there would be some breathing room in which he could loosen up and follow the piece where it led him, but there should be at least references to the theme and its countersubjects even there, and eventually he had to get back and accompany the subject and its imitations all over again, differently from the way he had done it the first time, of course, and end up in the key he started out in, with a final statement of the subject as close to the end as possible.

  As difficult as it was to read that paragraph, imagine how difficult it was to do all that, and to do it ad-lib!

  As Frederick slowly played this impossible theme at the keyboard, note by chromatic note, the musicians and particularly the composers in the room must have become increasingly alert with every new half step. Bach too would have been aware that the task being set before him was growing more difficult with each note. No one was better at working out problems like this than Bach, though, and after whatever time it took him to set the theme in mind and get his thoughts aligned, he was off.

  By every account and by the evidence of the transcription Bach eventually published of that night’s improvisation, which is the first movement of his Musical Offering, the result was dazzling, a fugue that surpassed all reasonable expectations. Few people of his time could have managed even a competent improvisation on such a theme, not to mention a brilliant one, but Bach was a famously ingenious improviser. A witness told Forkel that Bach could improvise on a single theme at the organ for hours at a time, often following a certain order: first a prelude and fugue based on the theme using the full organ; then with an evolution of movements with different configurations of stops and forms—duets, trios, quartets; then with the addition of one chorale tune or another as a cantus firmus and new various combinations of stops; and always finishing with one great fugue, for which he would literally pull out all the stops.

  So perhaps it is not surprising but only wonderful that his improvisation of a three-part fugue on Frederick’s Royal Theme had all the intellectual rigor of a finished work: a strict fugue, based entirely on statements of the Royal Theme, that paired his incomparable polyphonic and harmonic density with long passages in precisely the galant style which was then ravishing the music circles of Berlin and finding its highest expression in the very court and ensemble whose musicians were listening to him that night. While doing all that, he managed to incorporate the entire Royal Theme no fewer than twelve times (in a sevenminute piece), several more than were necessary to meet the challenge, the last very close to the end.

  Given this achievement, it must have come as something of a shock when Frederick asked for more: He wanted Bach to do it all over again, this time improvising a fugue on the same theme for six voices.

  How exactly might that have gone? Bach finishes the improvisation on this long and complex theme, so that his audience of star-caliber musicians is “seized with astonishment,” in the newspaper account, prompting great applause, congratulations all around, as well as perhaps some relief among Bach’s colleagues at his having met a very daunting challenge, and just as we’re thinking about heading out for the next fortepiano, the king hangs back and says, Herr Bach, might we hear a six-part fugue, if you please? In what world or formulation could that be a polite question?

  As we know, Bach demurred (he apologized in his dedication of the completed work for his “lack of necessary preparation,” as if any were possible), and instead played a six-part fugue on a presumably shorter and less complex subject of his own. The fugue subject on which he improvised has not survived, and it may not have been an improvisation at all. There are exactly no sixvoice fugues in all The Well-Tempered Clavier, which after all he had had the opportunity to write, and there are only two fugues of even five parts. As he played this six-voiced consolation fugue he had every reason to be infuriated at having been put in the position of having to admit a defeat which had no recorded precedent in his life. He had proved too much for the great Louis Marchand and for the even greater Georg Friedrich Handel, both of whose avoidance of Bach has no more plausible motive than intimidation. The image that comes to mind of Bach as he played for Frederick that evening—after two sleepless days bouncing around in a carriage for the pleasure of this moment—is of reddened face and burning anger, of a man who is only too aware that he has been shown up by a man not only decades younger, not onl
y by far the lesser musician (understatement of understatements), not only the enemy of his Saxon elector and king, not only the not-very-appreciative employer of his son, but also by someone who plainly thinks of Bach as no more than Prussia’s latest Royal Executor of Puzzles, someone about as important to him as a farting duck.