Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  In such a time, all things were up for reconsideration. Some years after his own disillusion with the Revolution, Beethoven was visited by an old Thuringian harp maker, one Johann Andreas Stumpff. When Stumpff mentioned his landsman Sebastian Bach, Beethoven thought to ask, “Why is he dead?”

  THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT was conceived and spent its prenatal period in Frederick’s East Prussia, home to two exceedingly smart, well-educated, and socially oppressed young men named Johann Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant, the sons of Pietists and the men largely responsible for dynamiting what was left of the Enlightenment’s optimistic trust in reason. Herder’s contribution was to undermine the certainty that all questions are in theory answerable by reason and that truth is singular, that one truth could never contradict another. Herder did not set out to refute this fundamental notion, but his powerful assertion of the fact that different cultures have very different “truths,” all of them valid in their different contexts, inevitably had that effect. Kant likewise was in no way trying to prepare the way for a movement with his Critique of Pure Reason, but the notion that order was a quality of the mind rather than the universe, that the mind was capable of many different metaphysical conceptions of the world, dashed any hope of cosmic certainty, though it comported nicely with the evidence of Lisbon and the bloody mess in the Place de la Révolution.

  After Lisbon, the French Revolution, Herder, and Kant, no one could argue for an orderly universe or for the ultimate triumph of empiricism. If only the mind knew order, and if various intellectual constructions of order could be equally valid, every human being would now be, like it or not, the maker of his own world, every person responsible for her own Creation, and the progress toward human fulfillment that had once been the project of the church would now be the province of the creative self. Every life would be a work of art, and the ultimate task of finding a source of meaning in the world would belong to the artist.

  The young Beethoven who had thought to ask after the music of Sebastian Bach had admired his works from childhood, but he liked Carl’s music as well. This was not the Bach-intoxicated Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis, but he was on his way. Born a crucial fourteen years later than Mozart, Beethoven did not have to learn but began with the knowledge that music had to be more than a nobleman’s entertainment, more than a depicter of this or that element of the natural or even supernatural world, and eventually he devised a new job for music: exploring and expressing the newly emergent creative self, the life of the mind. There were no words for this world yet, no talk about frustration and gratification, tension and relaxation, conflict and resolution, not to mention neurosis and psychosis (though there had been quite a bit of talk about one of music’s best means of communicating such psychic dynamics in the arguments over consonance and dissonance; when Scheibe charged there was entirely too much “affected dissonance” in Bach, what he was really saying was that composers demonstrated bad taste by trying to endow music with meaning). Freud was born almost thirty years after Beethoven died, but Beethoven beat him to the unconscious, and he did so in large part by listening to Bach, who can practically be heard singing in the background of the late quartets. Bach was never really lost to composers, not at least to good ones.

  Carl too in his last years seemed to turn away from the lightweight pieces that had made him a star, drawn back in both his late choral and keyboard music toward the profundity of his father’s work. (It was too late to rescue his reputation from the Romantics, who would turn viciously on light music. E. T. A. Hoffmann described Carl’s concertos unkindly as “laughable and empty,” and Mendelssohn said of his place in the Bach line, “It was as if a dwarf had appeared among the giants.” Thus was the indignity of the father’s late life visited on the reputation of the son.) In fact the works of Carl’s last decade were among his most challenging and introspective, and at the end of his life he spoke of his father’s music with only unambiguous esteem. He even copied out the canonic fugue from the Musical Offering, presumably for a performance. At the same time, despite all his achievements, he seems never to have quite got over the mixed feelings of the second son. When Charles Burney visited him in Hamburg toward the end of his life (he had become music director of the city on the death of the incumbent, his godfather Telemann), Carl proudly brought out his original manuscript of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Carl told Burney that, just as his father had written the notebook for Friedemann, the Well-Tempered Clavier was written for him. There is no evidence beyond his statement that this is true.

  IN 1825, FOR THE fourteenth birthday of her grandson Felix, Fromet Mendelssohn gave him a copy of J. S. Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew. To get it transcribed, she had to pry loose the original temporarily from Felix’s music teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, who years before, so the story goes, discovered the manuscript at a cheese shop, where it was being used to wrap butter.*

  Bach was already making a comeback of sorts by this time. Even before Napoleon occupied them, the Germanic cities, provinces, and principalities were discovering a sense of common national history and identity, and at the same time experiencing a spiritual resurgence, a combination of forces that makes Bach’s rediscovery by a large public seem inevitable in hindsight. Still, even among cognoscenti, he was more admired than heard until the now nineteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn got his teacher to agree to let him perform the St. Matthew Passion with Zelter’s Singakademie in Berlin. By the time of the performance, on March 11,1829, exactly a hundred and two years after its first performance (though they thought it was the centenary), word had got out that it was to be an extraordinary concert, and Berlin turned out for it in force.

  What they heard was not exactly what Bach had written. As if preparing Quasimodo for his first blind date, they apparently felt it needed a bit of cosmetic work. In letters to his friend Goethe, Zelter said he had always been put off by the work’s “atrocious German chorale texts” and their “dense fumes of belief, which is what no one really wants anymore.” He also thought Bach “as a son of his age … could not escape French influence. We can, however, dissociate him from this foreign element, it comes off like thin froth.” (Goethe, whom Zelter had made a fan of Bach by this time, knew enough to wonder about that: “You might give me a serious exposition of what you call the French froth which you take it upon yourself to separate from the basic German element.”) In the words of Edward Devrient, the singer who helped Mendelssohn produce the work and who sang the role of Christ, all involved felt the need in various ways “to make the antiquated work modern, vivid, and alive by carefully selecting the most appropriate means to this end.”

  Mendelssohn did the work. Among other things, he cut the Passion by a third, from three hours to two. We only know what he took out of the work as he conducted it at St. Thomas’s Church twelve years later, when he had restored quite a bit of it, but even for that performance he had cut six arias, four recitatives, and six chorale movements. He replaced the plaintive oboes with sweeter clarinets. He replaced the organ with a piano. He modified the orchestration in various other ways, changed some cadences from major to minor, reordered passages, gave alto parts to sopranos, and put dynamic markings all over Bach’s score that had the effect of making the work a demonstration of Romantic passion as well as Christ’s, especially so since he performed the work with a huge orchestra and a chorus of four hundred! (Bach’s orchestras were not much larger than chamber music ensembles, his choirs usually not more than twenty or thirty voices.)

  Whatever he did, though, the performance had the desired effect. Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny wrote in her diary that the audience was awestruck, “filled with the most solemn devotion; one heard only an occasional involuntary ejaculation that sprang from deep emotion.” Even the grumpy Hegel, whose lectures on aesthetics Felix had attended at the university, seemed visibly moved. Fanny said the concert hall that day had the feeling of a church.

  This is the concert that brought Bach back to life, but i
n a new home. Just as the concert hall felt that day like a church, future performances would make churches feel like concert halls. Before Mendelssohn’s concert version, it had always been part of a Good Friday Vespers service, the two halves of the passion divided by a sermon. This time it was presented only as itself, as a work of art, and given the setting that must have seemed in one way odd. It is, after all, the story of the Passion, which ends before the Resurrection, with Christ in the tomb. As part of a Good Friday service no one expected it to have an emotionally satisfying end, since the Resurrection would not be celebrated until the Easter service two days later. Heard in concert, though, the St. Matthew Passion seems to end at the edge of a cliff. The anticlimactic minor chord at the end, the irresolution, the lack of a triumphant final cadence, means that the last thing one can imagine is applause. This was a new problem: How can you leave the performance of such a work without clapping. But how can you applaud a crucifixion?

  It would have taken a few bold people to begin, but after the initial oddness wore off, the applause must have grown to a roar, because this St. Matthew Passion, liberated from the context of worship, had been heard that day in a way it could never have been heard before, not as a call to devotion but as one of the most complex and gorgeous pieces of music ever written. Never mind what Mendelssohn had done to it: Deploying every style and form, along with two choirs and two orchestras, Bach had created what could now clearly be heard as the masterpiece it was, a work far more elaborate and intricately plotted than the most ambitious opera of its time, embracing music for stage, court, and church—polyphonic motets, chorales, choirs in counterpoint, arias for solo and duet, arias with chorus, the whole work ranging through all twelve chromatic keys and even beyond that, to the six-flats key of E-flat minor. It was an almost insanely ambitious mix of dances and dirges, passages of galant song and Renaissance madrigal, free-verse arias and Gospel recitatives, the bold concision of Italian melody and the ravishing filigree work of France, all brought into perfect coherence in a profound and staggeringly beautiful work of art. Having been given a sort of spiritual asylum in the modern concert hall, Bach proceeded in death to find the audience and the glory that had been denied him during his life.

  WITH ITS RENEWAL of interest in German myth and history, its recovery of a respect for mystery, and its exaltation of the Heroic Artist, the lonely, singular soul in pursuit of an inner vision heedless of poverty, scorn, or neglect, Romanticism had every reason to love the ever-faithful-visionary Bach. As Wagner put it, Bach was “himself the history of the German spirit through that horrible century during which the light of the German people was completely extinguished.”

  Look then upon this head, disguised in its absurd French full-bottomed wig, this master—a wretched cantor and organist wandering from one little Thuringian village to another, hardly known even by name, dragging out his existence in miserably paid posts, remaining so unknown that it took a whole century for his works to be retrieved from oblivion.

  As a Romantic figure, Bach was in every way perfect.

  To Frederick’s reputation, though, the Romantic movement was a great deal less kind. Romanticism was all very well for painting, literature, and music, but it had no business in politics. The empowerment of the individual to create his or her own world led easily to the enshrinement of the will, which had perverse consequences. Given political power, the Romantic hero became a demigod whose exercise of will was a positive virtue, at a time when the notion of virtue was otherwise unrooted and unclear, and the movement that had sent out its first tender shoots under Frederick’s thumb in East Prussia eventually rose to strangle him.

  Brahms once said that the two greatest events of his lifetime were the formation of the Bach-Gesellschaft, founded in 1850 to undertake an edition of Bach’s complete works, and twenty years later the declaration of the German Reich, which drew the Germanic provinces into a state. (This would be known as the Second Reich, the first having been the remnant Roman empire.) These two events were intimately connected: The coalescence of a nation and a national identity made Bach a German hero (interesting, since he would never have called himself a German; he would have said Eisenacher, Saxon, or Thuringian). It also doomed Frederick’s Prussia to oblivion. In one of the greatest series of unintended consequences in history, Bismarck’s success in making Germany a nation—which was really an attempt to save Prussia by placing it at the head of a German state—actually killed the entity that neither Frederick nor his forebears had had any wish to create. They were proprietors of hereditary lands, no more a “nation” than any other collection of real-estate parcels. The only motto Prussia ever had was what Frederick’s Sun King—aping grandfather had chosen when he invented the Order of the Black Eagle, the decidedly unstirring “To each his own.” Nevertheless, in one of several strange posthumous roles prescribed for him, Frederick too became a hero of this new German nation, reincarnated as a cross between knight and burgher, speaking folksy German and drinking beer. Only a few decades later, as part of the most perverse enactment of German Romanticism, Adolf Hitler—to the hijacked music of Wagner and in a cape stolen from Nietzsche’s Superman—made Frederick his collaborator as he willed into being the darkest night of modern history.

  The formal proclamation of the Third Reich took place at Frederick’s tomb, where Hitler laid an elaborate garland. In Mein Kampf he. called Frederick’s Prussia “the germ cell of the Reich,” and all through the war Nazi Germany invoked Frederick in every way it could. There were Nazi posters of the Teutonic trinity featuring Frederick alongside Bismarck and Hitler. At Hitler’s enormous desk in his enormous office, the little Führer sat under Frederick’s portrait. “The spirit of Frederick the Great is living in the Third Reich,” Wilhelm Wolfslast wrote, “and it will continue to live as long as the swastika waves over Germany.”

  As the Allies advanced on Berlin, Göring ordered Frederick’s remains, precious Teuton relics now (how he would have laughed at that), to be moved into the Harz mountains, where they were hidden in a mine. In the bunker at the end, Goebbels fanned the Führer’s dwindling hopes and kept him in tears reading Carlyle’s accounts of Frederick’s triumphant recovery from devastating defeats during the Seven Years War.

  To associate Frederick with Hitler is not entirely unfair. His most important legacy to Germany, after all, lay not in his enlightened domestic reforms but in Prussia’s military culture and conquests, as he followed perhaps to a fault the advice of his father and the Great Elector. He would have worn no brown shirt, he was not a barbarian, but with the forcible disarmament of Germany after World War II, Frederick’s greatest legacy was destroyed along with Nazism, no less decisively than his once-beloved Berlin Opera was leveled by Allied bombs.

  After the war Frederick’s corpse was sent into the safekeeping of the last of the Hohenzollerns, who had withdrawn to a castle in one of the family’s former principalities. There he rested for half a century, until the post-reunification summer of 1991, when Chancellor Helmut Kohl created something of a stir by attending Frederick’s reinterment where he had always wished to be buried, next to his dogs at Sanssouci. Among the many protests surrounding the ceremony (one sign along the route of the cortege read “Old Fritz’s bones today, yours after the next war”), gay demonstrators in Baroque costume handed out leaflets with unsubtle references to Frederick’s sexuality. A poll conducted during the controversy over his reburial found that most Germans could not say when Frederick the Great had lived or what he had ever done.

  BACH’S BONES HAD a ride to their final interment almost as wild as Frederick’s, beginning with a very messy dig nearly a century after his death around the area where his grave was thought to be (in the vicinity of everyone else who had been buried in Leipzig for the past two centuries, more than a thousand people in 1750 alone). The search was aided by the fact that he had been buried in a casket made of oak, an unusual extravagance, and eventually the bones of a not improbable skeleton-candidate were recovered from on
e such casket. Enthusiastically shown around, prodded, measured, and dissected, these bones and casts made from them were shipped from this laboratory to that one until finally, based on vaguely scientific speculation and a variety of more or less racist conclusions about what the skull and physique of a German genius would look like, the remains were certified as Bach’s and eventually entombed in an appropriately dignified sarcophagus in the chancel of St. Thomas’s in Leipzig, just in time for the gala bicentennial of his death in 1950.

  By then Bach was an exalted figure in music, one of the most revered figures in Western civilization, and in the bicentennial year St. Thomas’s Church was teeming with tourist-pilgrims. For months Bach’s tomb was covered with wreaths, and lines wound out the church door down the street. Most of the world’s great living composers paid their respects, in person or in print, in a sense fighting over his remains. Paul Hindemith, whose many neo-Baroque works identified him as a devoted student of Bach, gave a speech—widely distributed and argued about later—in which he lamented the fact that Bach had been elevated into oblivion. “In the two hundred years since his death,” he declared, “each rising generation has seen him differently; his creations have been analyzed and criticized, performed and deformed, used and abused; books and pamphlets, paintings and plaster busts have made him a common household article; in short he has finally been transformed into a statue.”

  In his speech, Hindemith took as his task to revivify this cultural objet that had been handled to death, but in the end he only seemed to add evidence to his point: He spoke in favor of authenticity in the performance of Bach’s music, of small-scale orchestras and choruses and the use of original instruments tuned to the historical rather than the modern standard. This reactionary protectiveness was quite new for Hindemith, who in his youth took the C-minor Fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier and made a version of it for four hands—in ragtime! “Do you suppose Bach is turning in his grave?” he wrote gleefully on the score. “He wouldn’t think of it! If Bach were alive today, perhaps he would have invented the shimmy.…” Hindemith had done a lot of apologizing in the years since then (though perhaps he had it right the first time).