Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  A night of sleep and a change of clothes later, Bach was summoned once more into the service of the king. Presumably from the same mix of motives he had for taking Bach from fortepiano to fortepiano—among which motives of course was the desire to hear a great virtuoso who would not be around much longer, this time on the instrument for which he was most famous—Frederick asked Bach for a performing tour of the organs of Potsdam. All the organs of Potsdam. At the time there were at least four major instruments scattered around town, and Bach of course had no choice but to oblige him. He actually gave his last known keyboard performance that day, though which of Potsdam’s churches had that honor is unclear.

  For all that, at the end of Bach’s two very busy days in Frederick’s court, there is no indication that the king sent him off with any reward for his pains, and if he had there would be a record of it, the accounts were kept that carefully. Neither is there a suggestion of any recognition later, even two months later, when Frederick received by courier from Leipzig an elaborately printed and musically extravagant suite which had been composed on his theme and dedicated to him. There is not even a note of thanks to “old Bach,” either for his troubles on his visit or his work on the Royal Theme (not to mention a diamond ring like the one Hasse got in Dresden). This lack of response to one of Bach’s greatest works—and the king was enough of a musician to recognize it as such—is the only reason we have to speculate that Frederick may actually have understood what Bach was saying to him in it, but no doubt the explanation is a great deal simpler than that. Sanssouci was ready! There were marshes to drain! Voltaire, always good for a bit of fun, could be arriving any day! Frederick would have stopped thinking about Bach and the Royal Theme as soon as they had ceased to amuse him.

  BACH, ON THE OTHER HAND, seems to have thought of nothing else after he left Potsdam. Even during the long carriage ride home, according to Carl, he would have been thinking about what the possibilities were for this theme, how limited his options were, given all that chromaticism, what complementary themes he could deploy around it to fashion the finished work—and perhaps most important, what forms and styles exactly he would use in the finished work.

  He put himself to the task as soon as he was home in Leipzig, or as soon as he had recovered from the completely exhausting round-trip, and he could have focused on little else, because only two weeks later he emerged from his composing room with a suite of sixteen movements that was one of the great masterpieces of Western music—a work that, taken together, is at once sublimely graceful, brilliantly expressive, a bracing blast of learned counterpoint, and an intriguing set of mysteries. The first three attributes are relatively simple to explain, the last somewhat less so.

  If the three-part fugue was impressive, the variety of new ways he had discovered to elaborate Frederick’s torturous subject after giving it some thought was breathtaking, including a four-movement trio sonata that was the last and best trio sonata he ever wrote. There too was the promised six-part fugue (touché!), which may have been the last piece he ever wrote for keyboard, along with ten canons—count them, ten—on the theme, remember, that the great contrapuntist Arnold Schoenberg said would yield exactly zero canonic imitations. Schoenberg was right. Bach had to invent canons that could be placed around the Royal Theme, and this he did, royally: canons above it, canons beneath it, canons to both sides of it, canons going forward, backward, sideways, upside down, and upside down and backward at the same time. There has never been a volley of canons like it, and we will be coming back to them.

  As for the sonata, the most generous superlatives seem only to scatter dust on it. On the most superficial level the trio for flute, violin, and keyboard is loveliness itself. Look deeper and every level drops away until its beauty seems bottomless, as perhaps it is. One of the most interesting pieces in it, obviously intended for Frederick to play, is the andante movement, which is built on “sighing” figures typical of the highest galant style. At first the almost cloying melancholy of it threatens insulin shock, but not to worry: The movement is bound and chained to the Royal Theme’s chromatic descent, the rhetorical figure known to the Baroque composer as a subjectum catabatum and passus duriusculus (the sort of thing they used to suggest lowly, insignificant, and sorrowful, for those who do not remember their lesson in the musical-rhetorical figures on page 81). Voltaire said the essential mission of all things galant was “to be amusing.” But listen to it: Does this movement amuse you? We will be coming back to this too.

  As for the final fugue for six voices, it is not, played on the keyboard, the most transparently beautiful work Bach ever composed; its greatest virtues are sometimes barely audible. But for those willing to mobilize the concentration required to hear and read “eye music,” a derisive term for music in its most formally rigorous aspect, the beauty of this ricercar is blinding. Most music is better when you close your eyes. This piece requires that sort of hearing, and yet all the eyes-wide-open or eyes-wide-shut attention you give it never seems to rob it of surprise. No more impeccably concise, structurally graceful, and intensely contrapuntal work was ever written, even by the man himself.

  AS FOR THE mysteries, here are a few of the simpler ones: We do not know in what order Bach composed the Musical Offering, nor do we know in what order he wished it to be played, if he wished it to be played as a suite at all. Should both fugues come first, followed by five of the canons, then the sonata and then the other five canons, or should all ten canons go together at the end, or should the fugues bracket the sonata and the canons—or what? As Malcolm Boyd puts it in his wonderful biography of Bach, if someone who went to Bach’s house and a paid a thaler to buy the score but then “had the misfortune to slip … and to scatter the pages of his copy over the cobbles of the Thomaskirchhof,” he could forget about trying to get them back together again. There were no page numbers, most of the pieces had no performance instructions, some of the canons were enigmatically abbreviated, and there was no written clue to what instruments should play any of it except the trio sonata and two of the canons. Some of the pages that have survived are on large, fine paper stock, others on different sizes, shapes, and qualities of paper.

  Everyone who ever owned a copy seems to have taken a tumble with it, because no intact copy has ever been found, and for a long time no one could make a terribly persuasive case for the “right” order. One musicologist supported her arrangement of the parts by showing how its thirteen movements follow precisely the oratorical model set forth in Bach’s schoolboy textbook in rhetoric, the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, written in the first century A.D. Another said the work was arranged in order of increasing theological significance, which would put the canons (the Ten Commandments) together at the end. Christoph Wolff seemed finally to have put the pieces in their intended order when he discovered the only organization that made the originals’ mélange of oblong, upright, heavy- and light-stock pages make sense: The two fugues are the work’s bookends, the sonata is its centerpiece, and the canons flank it. (Wolff also concluded that Bach never meant the entire work to be played sequentially anyway, making the question of order somewhat irrelevant.)

  Now begin the deeper mysteries, which require a bit of onion peeling.

  In whatever order Bach finished it, the printed work was dated July 7, exactly two months after the evening in Potsdam—incredibly fast work for the printer as well as the composer. A few days after that an engraved copy of the work, titled Musicalisches Opfer, arrived at Sanssouci with an elaborate and somewhat odd dedication, in German, which began:

  To Your Majesty is hereby consecrated in deepest submission a Musical Offering.…

  Translators have often rendered the German verb weihen in that sentence as “dedicated,” because “consecrated” simply sounds wrong, but the meaning of weihen was then and is now clear, “to consecrate.” No two ways about it: Bach said he was consecrating an offering to Frederick. Bach knew that Frederick had no patience for organized religion, especially Christian
ity, so why would he have made his dedication sound less appropriate for a piece of music than for a ritual slaughter? Bach was nothing if not painstaking to the point of obsession with every detail of a work, including the use of words with his music.

  Consider, for example, his use on the title page of the word Opfer, the largest word on the page by far, larger than Musicalisches by a factor of ten. As Arnold Schoenberg pointed out, Opfer is a loaded word. This was not the first time a composer had named his piece a “musical offering,” but it was the first time the alternative meanings—“victim” and “sacrifice”—had been invoked with a consecration.

  Bach goes on to say in his dedication that his work “has no other purpose than this sole irreproachable one: to exalt, although only in one small aspect, the glory of a monarch whose greatness and might, just as in all the sciences of peace and war, so also especially in music, everyone must admire and venerate.”

  But consider the work itself, starting with the three-part fugue. In the very first movement, just as he bows deferentially to Frederick’s taste with galant gestures, he begins that downward modulation through the flat keys—the “distant tonal movement in the flat direction outside the ambitus” that Michael Marissen heard in his early Capriccio (page 86) when Bach wished to warn his departing brother of “various casualties that could befall him.” The Royal Theme, of course, is itself darkly minor, including not only a saltus duriusculus (“hard leap,” meaning “false”—see page 82) in the diminished seventh between the second and third bars but also the long chromatic passus duriusculus of the next nine notes. But here, just as later in the andante movement of the sonata, he does not use the galant, as he might easily have done, to mitigate the chromatic onslaught. Instead, he italicizes it by modulating so far down into the flat keys—all the way to six flats, the key of E-flat minor, below even the extremum enharmonium of B-flat minor, which was Christ on the cross—that one may be excused for wondering if he is working to let the king’s glory shine forth or digging a deep dark pit for it.

  Suggestively, he calls neither the three- nor the six-part fugue a fugue: He calls them both “ricercars,” which by 1747 was an antique term for strict counterpoint. Never before or later did he call any composition of his a “ricercar,” as many strict fugues as he wrote. One theory was that he only used the word because it was a neat Latin acronym for a phrase that could be applied to the whole work: Regis lussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta (“By order of the King the tune [the Royal Theme] and the remainder, resolved with canonic art”). Bach did love wordplay (see Opfer). The fact is, though, as Christoph Wolff pointed out, he chose the name for the fugues before he discovered that he could make ricercar an acronym, which is why the Latin phrase had to be inked in after the work was printed. As J. G. Walther derived the term in his Musical Lexicon, the word ricercare (which shares the Latin root of recherché) was an Italian verb meaning “to investigate, query, inquire, search out with diligence.” That of course is what Bach was doing here, searching out the uses of the Royal Theme, but that is what all fugues do. Could the word suggest another sort of search?

  Between the ninth canon and the tenth, both of them “puzzle” canons and so in enigmatic notation (page 117), there is a Latin epigram—Quaerendo invenietis, “Seek and ye shall find”—a quotation from the gospels of both Matthew and Luke, referring to the search for God’s mercy. Bach would hardly have used a line of Scripture here, at the end of the work, only as a redundant indication that the puzzle canons were puzzle canons, for which, quite obviously, a solution had to be found. This too seems a suggestive hint that there may be something else to be sought and found in the work.

  Bach left trails of bread crumbs everywhere. Between the fourth and fifth canons are two epigrams addressed to the king. The fourth canon is an augmentation canon in contrary motion, meaning that the second voice is an inversion of the first and in notes twice as long. The inscription reads: “As the notes increase, so may the fortunes of the king.” The fifth canon is the one that Douglas Hofstadter, in his Gödel, Escher, Bach, appropriately nicknamed the “Endlessly Rising Canon” because each time it is played it leads to a higher key, one whole note above the last. Hofstadter likens this canon to the lithographs of M. C. Escher, like Waterfall, in which a stream of water seems to make a “Strange Loop,” rising in cleverly designed steps from the pool below a mill wheel back to the top of the falls that turns the wheel, where it splashes to the bottom only to return to the top, and so forth. The fifth canon is the musical equivalent of such an optical illusion: Play it six times, and it will be back where it started, only an octave higher, and yet without seeming to have left its original key. This canon is inscribed, “As the notes ascend, so may the glory of the king.”

  As the musicologist Eric Chafe was first to point out, both inscriptions sort oddly with their respective works—in the fourth because this canon about the king’s fortune is so relentlessly melancholy, in the fifth because despite the fact that the canon is supposed to reflect the king’s ascendant glory, the magic of it is that it does not seem to rise at all. Chafe’s conclusion is that Bach is commenting on the distinction between the apparent glory of the king and the fact of his humble human estate, bound to a world of flaw and sin just like the rest of us.

  All sorts of the loveliest ripe fruit seem to drop and shrivel in the fallen world of the Musical Offering. Some of the elegantly melancholy passages of the trio sonata for Frederick are just this side of cheap in their galant sensitivity, guaranteed to make audiences swoon (though some of the sonata’s passages would have left Frederick breathless too). But they are set in the form of sonatas da chiesa, four-movement “church sonatas,” which always featured counterpoint. Their structure was to begin with a slow movement followed by a fast fugue, then another slow movement and another fast fugue. Frederick never played sonatas da chiesa since, as we know, he disliked any music that “smells of the church.” He preferred the three-movement chamber sonata, which was most often made up of dances. In Frederick’s vast music library, there was not a single sonata da chiesa.

  Bach knew all about Frederick’s aesthetic preferences. After all, his son was there to warn him of them, even if his friends in the Kapelle did not. His Musical Offering defied virtually every one of them. He would have known that a polite dedication would be in French, Frederick’s language, rather than German, which Frederick not only did not speak but held in contempt. He would have known that, far from appreciating Bach’s learned style of composition, Frederick specifically prohibited his court composer from writing in it. Of the four hundred or so flute-sonata movements that Frederick himself is supposed to have written, only one could be considered even in fugal style.

  Canons in particular had an uncomfortable role in Frederick’s thinking and repertoire, and Bach, as we have seen, presented him with ten of them. That took some doing since, as Schoenberg pointed out, he could not make a single canon of the Royal Theme itself: “All the miracles that the Musical Offering presents are achieved by countersubjects, counter-melodies and other external additions.” For all that, he managed to give Frederick all sorts of canons with the Royal Theme tucked inside them one way or the other: a crab canon and puzzle canons, a canon at the unison for two violins, a canon in contrary motion (backward), a canon in contrary motion and augmentation (backward with one voice in double-length notes), the upwardly modulating canon, a four-voice canon—all of these are “perpetual” canons—as well as a canonic fugue.

  Just one more thing and this onion will be peeled to the core: That he went to the trouble to make ten canons means, as we know (page 115), that he wished to invoke the Law. Sometimes he meant specifically the Ten Commandments, but always the number ten was associated with the Law of the Old Testament, particularly in connection with canon, one of whose original meanings was “law.”

  Putting these onion peelings, bread crumbs, and dried fruit together brings us to the musical-rhetorical stuffing that Bach cooked into his Mus
ical Offering. All of the oddities contained in the work—the harrowing descent in galant passages, the melancholy fate of the king’s fortune, the song to glory that goes nowhere, the German dedication, the Scriptural invocation to “seek and find” God’s mercy rather than the harsh, eternal judgment of God’s own canon law, the setting of a church sonata—all of these were of a piece, and this is what they say: Beware the appearance of good fortune, Frederick, stand in awe of a fate more fearful than any this world has to give, seek the glory that is beyond the glory of this fallen world, and know that there is a law higher than any king’s which is never changing and by which you and every one of us will be judged. Of course that is what he said. He had been saying it all his life.

  If this seems a foolhardy message to have sent an absolute monarch and his son’s employer, it was entirely in keeping with past practice. Bach would no more have held back, trimmed, or censored his musical and theological beliefs for Frederick than he would have shrunk from telling the young Saxon prince, grandson of his king Augustus and the son of his elector, to choose Virtue over Vice. He did not hesitate to side against his own superior in Mühlhausen, or to tell the town fathers there that God Is My King, or to defy repeatedly and roundly both the consistory of Arnstadt and the council of Leipzig. If he could press his patron-elector about a student prefect, what would he draw back from addressing with a monarch he did not like? He had nothing to be afraid of, or, more precisely, what he feared was far more powerful than any monarch. As a composer, for a congregation or a king, he stood always on that terrible earthly battlefield, fifer to the corps of angels in Uncle Christoph’s oratorio as they fought off the monster with Saint Michael, and perhaps never more so than at this time in his life, when he knew very well that death was stalking him. See Roland Bainton’s Luther, back on page 19. “The most intrepid revolutionary is the one who has a fear greater than anything his opponents can inflict upon him.”