Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 24

  Only an orderly and his last pair of greyhounds were with him at the end, and in most of his country the news of his death was met with indifference. In his biography of 1904, William Reddaway ends his introduction with the conclusion reached by all students of Frederick’s life:

  Through all his life—in his councils, in his despair, in his triumph, and in his death—Frederick, almost beyond parallel in the record of human history, was alone.

  BACH LIVED ONLY three years after his meeting with Frederick, but during those three years he devoted himself over and over again to proving the range and eloquence of counterpoint. The Musical Offering is entirely in keeping with the content and intention of all his late works. The Art of the Fugue, the Goldberg Variations, and his Variations on Vom Himmel hoch were all monothematic, like the Musical Offering all variations on a theme, and all of them bent to the same purpose: to demonstrate more bountifully than anyone had ever done before, whatever the critical reception might be for such a project, the most sublime reaches of learned counterpoint. In these works of his last years, all of them in passionate defiance of the aesthetic theory and taste of his time, were mirror canons, crab canons, augmentation and diminution canons, canons at every interval, double, triple, and quadruple fugues, and canonic fugues. In his own copy of the Goldberg Variations Bach wrote fourteen more canons, all of them perpetual, all of them based on the theme’s simple eight-note bass line.

  The last great achievement of his life, which he finished over the course of his last two years, was the B-minor Mass—everyone in the family knew it only as “the great mass”—and for this work, which he knew would be his final masterpiece, he pulled material from every corner of his life’s work. He had been doing this for the last decade, reaching back to his beginnings—back to his work with his cousin in Weimar, back to his word painting for Luther, back to the beginnings of Western music itself—as if he were trying to make one complete and perfect work of everything he had ever written and from the whole of music history. The Kyrie and Gloria of the B-minor Mass were from the mass he had dedicated to his elector in 1733. The Sanctus was based on a Sanctus he had written for the Christmas of 1724, the Hosanna on a piece dated 1732, the Agnus dei on a cantata movement of 1725. For the Crucifixus of the mass he reached back to the mournful descending figure he had used in Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, the figure that had roots in his cantata for the town council of Mühlhausen (page 95) and even earlier, in his time with Buxtehude. This appeared next to the very last choral composition of his life, the most modern section of the mass, the Et incarnatus est, a boldly experimental and entirely successful evolution of contrapuntal part writing. Perhaps the most glorious movement of the mass, maybe the ultimate declaration of his life in music, reaches back beyond even his own life to the Renaissance style of Palestrina. The only choral work he ever wrote in stile antico is the mighty Credo in Unum Deum, a fugue whose subject is the priest’s intonation in the Roman Catholic mass, a single phrase of Gregorian chant developed into one of the most spectacular polyphonic statements of all time, a work almost physically robust, glowing with passion for its subject—“I believe.”

  In reaching back to the Renaissance at the end of his life and in the explosion of rigorous counterpoint that characterized his last decade, he was pursuing more plainly than ever before his ultimate goal for music: a demonstration of “identity in variety” that would embody “insight into the depths of the wisdom of the world.” Those are the words Bach put into the mouth of his advocate Johann Adam Birnbaum to describe his mission to Scheibe’s and his sons’ generation. Put into the language of Baroque music theory with which Bach would have been more comfortable, he was attempting to come as close as anyone had come before to the celestial music of a divinely ordered universe, the very music of Creation. He was still working on his masterpiece of counterpoint, The Art of the Fugue, having just woven the figure B-A-C-H into its nineteenth fugue,* when he embarked on the “health care” that would ultimately kill him.

  HIS EYES HAD been progressively weakening for more than a year by the time, in the spring of 1750, he turned for help to a “famed oculist,” a self-promoting quack named Dr. John Taylor, who traveled with ten servants in two coaches painted all over with eyes. Handel survived an operation by Taylor to improve his vision and lived for seven more years in almost total blindness. Bach was less lucky. After a first operation he briefly regained his sight, but the procedure had to be repeated. After that he was left completely blind, and the postoperative treatment seemed to drain him of all his remaining resources. One afternoon ten days before he died, he could suddenly see again, but the reprieve lasted only for a few minutes before he had a stroke, and after that he did not leave his bed.

  One day in late July, as Carl told the story (though like his brothers he was not there during his father’s final days, so he could only have got the story secondhand), Bach called one of his students to his deathbed and asked him to play, on the pedal harpsichord in his room, an organ chorale he had written decades earlier in Weimar for the Orgelbüchlein. He had later elaborated his original twelve-bar setting of “When we are in the greatest distress” (BWV 641, Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein) into a full-scale work (BWV 668a) that took its place in the collection of organ chorales written during his last decade in Leipzig, the “Great Eighteen,” which in effect was an homage to his teachers Buxtehude and Böhm, late masters of the form. Listening now to his prelude on this chorale tune, one of those handed down by Luther himself, Bach heard an older text to which it had once provided the setting, an intimate, personal plea entirely appropriate to this moment in his life, when he knew that he was dying.

  Before Thy throne, my God, I stand,

  Myself, my all, are in Thy hand;

  Turn to me Thine approving face,

  Nor from me now withhold Thy grace.…

  Grant that my end may worthy be,

  And that I wake Thy face to see,

  Thyself for evermore to know!

  Amen, amen, God grant it so!

  Now, sightless, he set about composing a quietly eloquent variation in counterpoint for this text, Vor deinen Thron. The result was one of the most beautiful chorales he ever wrote (BWV 668). Set to the medieval integer valor—the tempo that of the human heart, each bar the length of one deep breath in and out—it is also in every other way a work of human scale and sympathy. Bach manages the remarkable feat of making each of the melody’s four sections into its own fugue, each time using the inverse of the subject as his countersubject, and as the work proceeds the counterpoint becomes ever more complex, “moving ever farther from the body into the domain of the spirit,” as David Yearsley puts it. “It is in this way a representation of the act of dying.” And yet even as it unfolds as a tour de force of the most intellectually demanding contrapuntal art, there is no aesthetic sacrifice to this technical achievement, no hint of “eye music.” From beginning to end, “Vor deinen Thron” is a song of hope and courage, with all of the elaborate ornamentation of the earlier version stripped away. Whether the story is true as Carl told it is unclear—as great a contrapuntist as Bach was, the idea that he dictated this work from his deathbed in his last week somewhat stretches credulity—but the music itself almost justifies Albert Schweitzer’s account of its creation:

  In the dark chamber … the tumult of the world no longer penetrated through the curtained windows. The harmonies of the spheres were already echoing round the dying master. So there is no sorrow in the music; the tranquil quavers move along on the other side of all human passion; over the whole scene gleams the word, “Transfiguration.”

  In Leipzig at this time was a young theologian who hated Vaucanson’s mechanical flute-playing shepherd and all that it represented almost as much as he loved Bach. After Bach died, he wrote angrily, “No one has ever invented an image that thinks, or wills, or composes, or even does anything similar,” and he cited this chorale prelude as the best possible answer to Enlightenment skeptics like La
Mettrie: “All that the advocates of Materialism could bring forward must collapse before this one example.”

  Bach died on July 28, 1750, some minutes after eight in the evening. A note about it was placed in the Leipzig burial register: “A man, 67 years, Herr Johann Sebastian Bach, Kapellmeister and Cantor to the school of St. Thomas’s; died at the school and was buried, with a hearse, July 30, 1750.”

  THE AUTHORITIES OF St. Thomas’s and Leipzig made no secret of their relief. At the first word of an illness, a year before he died, they had auditioned and all but proclaimed a successor, so that Bach’s last months had to be spent in part in the attempt to upset that choice in favor of Friedemann or Carl. The very day after his death, even before he was buried, the council met and once again expressed its favor for this previously auditioned non-Bach, who had friends in the Dresden court. He was clearly the musical inferior of both Bach sons, but he was willing to be “what the school needs,” as one of the councillors disdainfully put it, “a cantor, not a Kapellmeister.”

  Bach’s lifelong friend Georg Philipp Telemann, godfather of Carl, wrote a valedictory poem for Bach by way of epitaph. It was not much of a poem, but it began lavishly enough.

  … Departed Bach! Long ago thy splendid organ playing

  Alone brought you the noble title “Great,”

  And what your pen had writ, the highest art displaying,

  Did some with joy and some with envy contemplate.

  At the end, though, the poem took a strange turn.

  Prepare your future crown of glory brightly glowing.

  Your children’s hands adorn it with jewels bright,

  But what shall cause your worth to be judged aright

  Berlin to us now in a worthy son is showing.

  This was surely an odd occasion for a paean to Carl, especially since, despite Frederick’s coolness toward him, he was fast becoming the It Boy of the Berlin music scene, ranking exponent (along with the ever trendy Telemann himself) of that sort of music his father had stood so forthrightly against. (“Prussian blue,” he reportedly cracked. “It fades.”) Bach was outspokenly proud, not at all resentful of his sons’ successes, and godfatherly pride excuses Telemann’s thoughtlessness to some extent. But the fact remains that Telemann had declared, in his last words to an old friend, that Carl was a greater musician than his father had been and that this son, not his own music, would be Bach’s greatest legacy.

  Unfortunately, Telemann’s poem was in keeping with other aspects of Leipzig’s farewell to Bach. His grave outside the city walls was unmarked, no mention was made of him in Reverend Ernesti’s annual address that year, and his successor at St. Thomas’s Church, who of course was expected to compose and perform his own music, rarely performed works by Bach. Friedemann and Carl took most of the music manuscripts from their father’s estate before it could be probated, leaving Anna Magdalena less than what was rightfully hers, and for unknown reasons they declined to help her financially when, all too soon, she was left without means. She died an almswoman ten years after her husband. Friedemann sold most of the scores he took from his father’s estate to support a less than responsible life. Carl preserved most of what he had got from the estate but not all of it. Just after Bach died he cobbled together what was finished of The Art of the Fugue and slapped the “deathbed chorale” on the end to make up for the last unfinished movement, but when it failed to find an audience he sold the plates for scrap.

  Bach never got to hear his Mass in B minor, and for practical purposes it was forgotten for decades, as in a sense he was. More than a century would pass before the B-minor Mass or the Passion According to St. Matthew would be heard again. No silence in music could be quite as deafening as this.

  * * *

  * The letter H is b in German. The letter B is b-flat.

  XIII.

  AFTERLIVES: AN EPILOGUE

  FOR A LONG TIME IT SEEMED THAT TELEMANN’S POEM had been right about Carl. Though undervalued by Frederick, he was a flamboyant virtuoso and prolific composer with an eye fixed on business. During his time off from court duties, he managed to become not only the most successful keyboard teacher in Germany but also among the best-known composers in Europe, standard-bearer of the empfindsamer Stil. Eventually his fame and fortune grew so great that he overshadowed his father completely in the public mind.

  Of course he did. His popularity and his father’s disfavor were both ordained by the Enlightenment’s cramped mission for music. Still, Carl had enough of his father in him to save him from writing music that was merely popular. Until Haydn rediscovered “old Bach” in his last years, he said Carl was the only composer who had ever taught him anything, and Carl’s keyboard works especially were much admired by Mozart.

  Mozart of course was the ultimate composer for the Enlightenment. A good way to break up any dinner party is to claim Bach’s superiority to Mozart, but there it is: Spend any serious amount of time listening to Bach, and most of Mozart’s work, however wantonly gorgeous, will seem to be … missing something. One measure of his genius is that he could write masterpieces even in a time of such limited expectations for music, but lightweight music was beginning to lose its appeal even in his youth, and he drew himself away from it in part by studying Bach, whose influence can be heard especially in such late works as the Requiem.

  The Magic Flute, another work clearly influenced by Bach, also contains one of the best and most beautiful declarations of rationalist self-confidence, when Tamino arrives at the Temple of Wisdom, flanked by the Temple of Reason and the Temple of Nature, and Sarastro sings:

  The rays of the sun

  Drive away the night;

  Destroyed is the hypocrites’

  Surreptitious power.

  Hail to the initiates!

  You have penetrated the night.

  For Mozart, as for Frederick the Great and for C. P. E. Bach, the happy day had finally dawned when superstitious myth was shown for what it was. As Newton had long since demonstrated, the universe displayed a perfect order, the Great Design, of which humanity and human society were very much a part. The task of empiricism was simply to discover that order. The mind and universe being of the same orderly structure, and our brains now freed of religious nonsense, the answers to all questions and cures to all ills could now be discovered through the clear, unfettered exercise of reason.

  An age unfamiliar with such certitude can only be confounded by the terrible shock that afflicted Enlightenment intellectuals in 1755, when an immense earthquake and tidal wave struck Lisbon, Portugal, killing many thousands of people. It was no worse than several other earthquakes in recorded history, including one in the Apennines only fifty years before, and the world was hardly unfamiliar with other natural disasters. But they had not occurred during a wave of optimism like the one perhaps best expressed by Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man of 1733:

  All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

  All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;

  All Discord, Harmony not understood;

  All partial Evil, universal Good;

  And, spite of Price, in erring Reason’s spite,

  One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

  Or, as Leibniz had put it, this was “the best of all possible worlds.”

  Voltaire had always been a little suspicious about that, but after the Lisbon earthquake he was finished with it. “What! Would the entire universe have been worse without this hellish abyss, without swallowing up Lisbon?” he wrote in his Poème sur le déesastre de Lisbonne. “Are you sure that the eternal cause that makes all, knows all, created all, could not plunge us into this wretched world without placing flaming volcanoes beneath our feet? Would you limit thus the supreme power? Would you forbid it to show mercy?” By the time he wrote his caricature of Leibniz as Dr. Pangloss in Candide, his outrage with optimism had turned to savage ridicule. Having been robbed, cheated, kidnapped, and beaten, the hapless Candide observes as he watches a noose being lowered about
the neck of his beloved Pangloss: “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?”

  But this was not funny. If reason could not be trusted and faith was discredited, how could the world be understood? How could we understand ourselves? All over Europe, in pamphlets and books about Lisbon that expressed a desperate, rising pessimism, the question arose, as if for the first time: What if the order of nature is not perfect after all, what if it is chaotic and indifferent, likely as not to kill us all? Suddenly the reliability of reason—part of nature, after all, since it was a product of the human mind—was itself in doubt. Increasingly in the years and decades that followed, those who continued to claim their trust in reason did so more in hope than confidence, almost as an article of faith (of all things). Everyone else faced a dead end. At the close of Candide, Voltaire suggested that, lacking any better option than skepticism, we should “cultivate our garden,” work for the betterment of individuals and society. But that was not much of an answer, and a better one did not come along.

  What did, at least in Germany, was a period and movement aptly named Sturm und Drang, or “Storm and Stress,” whose signal expression was the first novel of a young writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had just been jilted by his sweetheart. He turned his agony into The Sorrows of Young Werther, an autobiographical novel about a young man who also had lost his head in love but who, instead of writing a novel, blew his brains out. Goethe averts God’s eyes from this sight by ending his novel with Werther’s secular burial, a rite in which “no clergyman attended him.” An immediate best-seller in this world bruised by a sense of its own pitilessness, the novel inspired a generation of Werther wannabes and a widely reported (if perhaps exaggerated) rash of real-life suicides. When the novel was reissued some years later, Goethe felt moved to write a preface declaring that he had not meant to recommend suicide as a solution to unrequited love. In any case, Goethe’s first novel clearly gave notice that to be “pleasing” or “amusing” was no longer much of an ambition for an artist, and his hero proved decisively that rationalism had completely lost its grip. The subsequent disaster of the French Revolution—untold bedlam and terror set loose in the pursuit of the loftiest Enlightenment ideals—put a very fine point on that.