Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  IN ALL THE very good records and written memoirs of people around Frederick, there is no suggestion that he ever played the Musical Offering or that he ever heard it. He gave his copy of it away. Eventually it ended up in the library of one of his younger sisters, an organist who collected Bach’s music. Many years later, Frederick told the story of their meeting to a friend, Baron von Swieten, once an Austrian diplomat in Frederick’s court, now back at home in Vienna, where he held a salon at which Mozart then reigned. In his memoirs, von Swieten wrote that, twenty-seven years after the event, Frederick told him the story of Bach’s visit and sang the Royal Theme for him. Sang the Royal Theme? How would he have remembered it for so many years? A better question: Why? He did not mention to von Swieten any published work Bach wrote that had been based on it. Why would he have forgotten that (if he had ever known it) but remembered the theme? Any answer to these questions, suggestive as they are, would only be speculation. According to the baron’s memoir Frederick said Bach had been able to improvise not only a three-part fugue, but then one in six parts and finally one in eight! Here Frederick gave something of himself away: that he did not know the work Bach gave him, and that, despite being a composer, there was a great deal he did not know about improvisation or fugue. (This would have surprised no one. Many of Frederick’s compositions were “filled in” by his teacher Quantz and others. As Brahms would say later, “Never criticize the composition of a king. You never know who may have written it.”) For Michael Marissen, the von Swieten story suggests that Frederick was interested in fugue mainly “as spectacle,” and what we know of him supports that conclusion. He seems to have looked at Bach the same way, as some kind of circus act.

  Would it have mattered had he played the Musical Offering, or if he had studied the score and understood its meaning? Surely not. Even the letter from Charles Jordan, the last plea of a dying intimate, had made no difference to him; still less would the cautionary notions of an old Lutheran cantor embedded in a church sonata. But of course Bach had not put the message there to change Frederick anyway, as some sort of Salvation Army cometo-Jesus pitch; it was simply another declaration of faith in a lifetime of such declarations. Given Frederick’s neglect of his work, it is comforting to remember that Bach would not have cared whether Frederick liked the Musical Offering or not, and to remember as well that Bach’s indifference to Frederick’s opinion was not stubborn or arrogant but rooted in his character too deeply even to be considered a matter of principle.

  Bach’s masterpiece was obviously a great deal more than a message to Frederick the Great. Most important, it is a work of incomprehensibly comprehensive intellectual and sensual beauty, ranging from the tightest of tight canons to the melancholy, dance-happy profundity of the French-Italian-contrapuntal-galant sonata to the wedding cake of counterpoint that is the six-voiced ricercar: a feast of inexpressibly delicious delights. Having said that, we come once more to the speed bump of the unspeakable. The reason so much of the Bach literature, like this book, focuses on “extra-musical” issues—the frame rather than the painting, as it were—is that what is greatest about Bach’s work is literally impossible to talk about, a characteristic that perhaps more than any other distinguishes his music from the galant. In a discussion of the nineteenth-century standard of artistic greatness in his book The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin might as well have been talking about Bach’s music versus that of his sons’ generation:

  In the case of works of art that are beautiful but not profound … I can explain to you, say, about some musical work of the eighteenth century, well constructed, melodious, agreeable, even perhaps a work of genius, why it is made in the way it is, and even why it gives pleasure. I can tell you that human beings feel a particular kind of pleasure in listening to certain kinds of harmonies. I can describe this pleasure, perhaps quite minutely.… But in the case of works which are profound, the more I say the more remains to be said.

  We can find the words Bach was speaking, the “point” he was trying to make in his works, but in doing so we can only discover something less than what he did. His way of writing had indeed stressed the figurative expression of words at first, Luther’s words and the Bible’s, and then the more thematic and a bit less literal interpretation of the cantata librettos with which he worked. He had spent his entire career, from his first day in Arnstadt, writing messages into his music, making messages of his music, and his musical “lexicon” had developed early—back to his late twenties in Weimar and the Orgelbüchlein, where Schweitzer discovered it, and actually before that, as early as the Capriccio for his brother. What sets Bach so far apart from other composers, though, are not specific skills and devices but the heights and depths he could reach from the security of the ground on which he stood.

  Bach’s work was not simply the product of his devotion, of course; maybe devotion was the least of it. He attributed his achievement to hard work, and surely it was that at least in part: He had an almost obsessively stubborn insistence on mastering the most difficult forms and ideas in the music of his time, and he worked with constant, riveted concentration. No composer has ever been more diligent. But he was also a hardheaded, hot-tempered man, just like his father’s twin with “the Wieneren girl” whom he refused to marry, and it was in part this unequal temperament that protected his character and his music from fickle tastes, from the pleasure and displeasure of an audience. He could thank his ancestors for that—his stubborn father and his Anabaptist mother alike—and he could thank the writings and example of the notoriously, triumphantly intemperate Martin Luther for inspiring in him not only a love of God but, perhaps more important to his music, a sense of certainty rooted in something deeper than approval or respect.

  In many ways Bach was not a man of his time at all. At a moment in history when the composer was a craftsman in service to town or church or court, charged with making music for every occasion, he forcefully, almost madly declared his independence. Such a stance was unheard of at the time, and presaged not the attitude of his sons’ generation but that of their sons and their sons’ sons. In a way, Bach was the first “genius,” if by that we mean the Romantic notion of an individual seized by and expressing his own singular creative power. Having the core of his musical thinking entirely in himself rather than in his audience or his peers, not to mention in Enlightenment theory, is precisely what allowed Bach to deconstruct and dominate rather than simply use or be influenced by what he studied, to make his music the sum and pinnacle of all the music of his time and so to prepare the way not just for a distinctively German musical language but for all of Western music.

  BY THE TIME he met Bach, Frederick’s best years were behind him, and his worst were ahead. Eventually his prayer for Voltaire to move to Potsdam was answered, and the result was predictably ugly, ending after a couple of years in mutual recriminations and a scathing “secret” memoir from Voltaire about scandalous goings-on in Potsdam that was widely read and tittered at. A few years later they renewed their correspondence, which continued until Voltaire’s death, but the two men, both of whom survived to old age, never saw each other again.

  Frederick left whatever vestige of youthful vigor remained in him on the battlegrounds of his Seven Years War. He had always been a gambler in war, thanks to the fatalism that came with his belief in predestination, but the gamble he took this time, starting a preemptive war against a threatening new alliance among Austria, France, and Russia, was the costliest he ever made, in a cause so often hopeless that he spoke several times of suicide. During one particularly horrific battle, after two horses were shot from under him, he cried for the bullet that would kill him. By the time his nearly miraculous victory came it was wholly cheerless: He had lost more than a hundred fifty thousand soldiers and at least half a million Prussian civilians. Berlin was in ruins, the whole country was in ruins. A triumphal reception awaited Frederick on his return to Berlin, but he found his way to the palace through side streets to avoid it. “I am returning to
a city where only the walls are still familiar,” he wrote, “where endless labor awaits me, and where soon my bones will find refuge which will never again be disturbed by war, misfortune or human meaninglessness.” He gave no victory speeches, not even to praise the soldiers who had fought and died for him, and the people of Berlin especially never forgave him for the trials he had brought upon them.

  The war seemed to have bent him over physically. He had lost several teeth, and in his shabby and faded blue uniform, smeared with snuff, he looked a sorry remnant of himself—except for those enormous blue eyes, which could still run a knife through his ministers. The day after his return from the war he gave an audience to a group of regional officials who wished to congratulate him on his victory. He brought them up short. “Be silent and let me speak. You have something to write with? Very well, write this down: The gentlemen must draw up a list of how much wheat for bread, how much seed, how many horses, oxen and cows are immediately needed in their counties. Think it over carefully and come back the day after tomorrow.” As the distinguished biographer Reinhold Koser put it, Frederick returned from the Seven Years War “gloomy, cold, hard, like a sunless winter day,” an old man of fifty-one.

  The old and good friends who had not died before died now, and though their chairs were occupied at dinner, they were not replaced. His remote and hostile family relations never improved. Even Wilhelmina, during their estrangement, wrote a memoir of her life with him almost as pitiless as Voltaire’s. There is no record that Frederick ever knew of it, however, and years after she wrote it they reconciled. “I have kissed your dear letter a thousand times,” he wrote her when she had fully convinced him of her remorse for what had appeared to be disloyalty at a time of trial for him. “My heart speaks a language that I cannot put into words. It is full of you, owes everything to you, is entirely yours.”

  He never wrote his sister more movingly than during the Seven Years War, when her health was deteriorating along with his fortunes on the battlefield. “You are the only person left who is attached to me,” he wrote. “My friends are dead; I have lost everything.” When she wrote that a longtime illness appeared to have turned fatal, he was inconsolable. “Life would be unbearable without you,” he wrote. “These are not phrases but the truth.” Two days before his most disastrous defeat, at Hochkirk, he wrote: “I am so full of you, of your dangers and my gratitude, that, awake or in my dreams … your image reigns in my heart and shapes all my thought. May heaven hear my appeals for your recovery!” She was dead before the letter arrived in Bayreuth, and as Frederick’s biographer G. P. Gooch put it, “the last touch of romance vanished from her brother’s stormy life.”

  Even in his last years he managed to add to Prussian territory, though, first managing by diplomatic guile to divide up a third of Poland among Russia, Austria, and himself, and later with a bloodless war that kept Austria from annexing Bavaria, a successful campaign for which he rewarded himself two more provinces.

  Gradually the two sides of his life that had come together all those years ago in Neuruppin—the military and the arts—came down to one. By the end of the war over Bavaria he had lost several more teeth, his fingers had so stiffened with gout that he could no longer play the flute, and at that he lost interest in music completely. In his last years he begrudged every penny that went to his once-beloved Berlin Opera, and the performances there became so widely ridiculed that Frederick, onetime champion of free speech, issued a ban on press comment about them. Eventually he had to order soldiers to fill the house during performances just to keep it warm. Suspicious and cruelly dismissive of everyone who worked for him, he gave his only affection to a pair of greyhounds and his only devotion to his duties as king, which he carried out with mechanical regularity to the very end.

  The Enlightenment went on without him. He was blind and deaf even to the new generation of German artists. He thought Goethe wrote “disgusting platitudes” that parodied the worst of the “ridiculous … bizarre” Shakespeare. Italian music was “dumb stuff,” French music “childish.” Haydn’s music was “a racket that hurts the ears” and Mozart’s was “caterwauling.” “New music,” he wrote in 1777, “has degenerated to mere noise, bludgeoning our ears rather than caressing them. Noble song is lost.…”

  Frederick did a great deal for the people of Prussia. He enforced religious toleration, established the first German code of law, reduced censorship, encouraged free speech (within limits), greatly expanded access to education, and assured his subjects of markets for their products when times were good, freedom from starvation when times were bad, and help from the state in times of natural disaster, promises that brought a steady influx of settlers from countries without such enlightened policies. Frederick was, in fact, an enlightened leader by the standards of his day, especially in his domestic policies, when he sounds most like his obsessively practical father. “The ill custom prevails among us that both in town & country the servant-girls make the best rags into tinder to like light the fire,” he wrote to one of his ministers during a cotton shortage. “We must try to break people of it, and therefore the rag collectors must be provided with touch-wood, which is just as good tinder for lighting fire, to give to the girls in exchange for rags.”

  At the same time, Frederick’s cynical and bellicose diplomacy cost untold misery, and his inability to trust anyone—though who could blame a person for lack of trust whose mother was filled with treachery and whose father seriously considered killing him?—led to a world of pain for himself, for most of the people around him, and ultimately for his country. His obsessive control of every aspect of government created a system that could not survive without him, and his autocracy was responsible for how easily Prussia adjusted to Napoleon’s rule twenty years later, one dictator being very like another. Twenty years after he died, when French troops had securely occupied Berlin, Napoleon visited Frederick’s grave with some of his officers to pay tribute to a dauntless wartime general, which finally is the greatest part of what he was. “Hats off, gentlemen,” Napoleon said. “If he were still alive, we would not be here.”

  RACKED BY GOUT, asthma, a chronic lung disease, and possibly chronic malaria, Frederick lived through many more sleepless nights than he had any wish to before he died. After he finished his history of the Seven Years War, he sent a letter to an old friend that showed just how deep and despairing his cynicism had become: “[T]o write history is to compile the follies of man and the blows of fate. Everything runs on these two lines, and so the world has gone on for eternity. We are a poor race, which is very restless during the little time it vegetates on this atom of mud called the earth. Whoever passes his days in quietness and repose until his machine decomposes, is perhaps more sensible than they who, by so many torturous circles, spiked with thorns, descend to the grave. In spite of that, I am obliged to go round like the wheel of a water mill, because one is dragged by one’s fate.” He lived for another twenty years after he wrote that.

  By the time he died, the world was fast passing by him. In 1785, the marquis de Lafayette paid the old king a visit. He was twenty-eight years old, Frederick’s age when he had taken the throne. After the meeting, Lafayette sent his impressions to General George Washington:

  [I] could not help being struck by that dress and appearance of an old, broken, dirty Corporal, covered all over with Spanish snuff, with his head almost leaning on one shoulder, and fingers quite distorted by the gout. But what surprised me much more is the fire and some times the softness of the most beautiful eyes, which can give as charming an expression to his physiognomy as he can take a rough and threatening one at the head of his troops.

  The American Revolution had been won at that point—Frederick had even signed a trade agreement with the new nation—but revolution in Europe was still aborning, threatening every monarch in Europe but Frederick, who was convinced that American-style democracy could never take hold there. One evening at dinner, when Lafayette spoke glowingly of elected government, constitu
tions, the rights of man, Frederick cut him off.

  “I once knew a young man who … decided to defend these principles in his own country. Do you know what happened to him?”

  “No, sire.”

  “He was hanged.”

  Fittingly, perhaps inevitably, Frederick’s excess of bile led to the illness that finally killed him. He had so insulted one Silesian regiment during their review that he was obliged to review them personally the next year, despite a crippling attack of gout and dyspepsia. That morning, from the time the drill began at 4 A.M. until it ended six hours later, the seventy-three-year-old king sat defiantly on his horse in a cold, pouring rain without a coat. He never recovered.

  He wanted to be buried with his greyhounds—the two with him now were the last of eleven, each of which still has a grave marker at Sanssouci—but the new king, Frederick’s nephew Henry, decided he should be laid to rest instead next to his father in the Garrison Church. In his own years of waiting at Rheinsberg, Prince Henry had taken so much abuse from his uncle that by the time he got the throne he had heard enough about Frederick the Great. Among his first acts was to build an obelisk to honor all those soldiers who had served Frederick so well, “about whom his fucking memoirs say nothing.” One of those was Henry’s father, Frederick’s brother, who had died in disgrace not long after Frederick relieved him of his command during the Seven Years War and publicly denigrated him as a coward. Few mourned Frederick. One poignant exception was his wife, who had never set foot inside Sanssouci and who was having a party at her palace the night he died, unaware that he was ill, but who, during a very lonely life, had never stopped missing him.