Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 27

  * * *

  ‘The question this book is about – which kind of world do we live in? – is one that I’ve been wrestling with all my adult life and one I have yet to resolve.’

  * * *

  Were there any great surprises in your research about him?

  Yes, I didn’t realize he was such a crab. And so painfully sensitive about his official status. I would have thought he’d be bigger than that.

  Did you find him frustrating or irritating?

  Yes, which was disturbing. I made the best of it by connecting his obsession with small things to his extreme attention to detail in counterpoint, but it didn’t make me feel much better about him. He was still a crab.

  You write that in the Romantic period, ‘The ultimate task of finding a source of meaning in the world would belong to the artist.’ Where do you find meaning in your own life?

  My kids, the family. I also think a lot. At various times in my life people have asked with some apparent irritation what I could possibly be thinking about all the time. I don’t know if I think about the questions that I raise in this book more than other people do, but I think about them a great deal, and, for me, reflecting on large questions is one source of meaning.

  Do you find Paris more conducive to thinking than the States?

  In a way, yes. I think it would have been more difficult for me to write this book had I stayed in Boulder, because the mountains constantly beckon. It’s hard to feel good about sitting inside when it’s so beautiful out there. During winter in Paris, you definitely do not feel that way.

  * * *

  ‘Through counterpoint Bach conveyed a sense of awe as he tried to approximate or emulate the beauty of a universal order.’

  * * *

  Art and the divine were ineluctably the same for Bach. Do you think, almost 300 years later, that art can still be divine – in all the senses of that word?

  Yes, absolutely. I was talking to a group at the American cathedral yesterday and one of the women asked, ‘Do you think that Bach wrote Soli Deo Gloria, the inscription on his works, as a serious statement or just for form?’And I said I think it was just form, a lot of the Baroque composers did that, but Bach was still trying to talk about God in the way he approached his music. He wasn’t always talking about Luther’s God, he wasn’t always talking about Christianity, but through counterpoint he conveyed a sense of awe as he tried to approximate or emulate the beauty of a universal order. I think it is hard to listen to his music and imagine that he thought music was anything less than a reflection of the origin and nature of the cosmos, which of course is what he had been taught it was.

  Where would a Bach novice start their education and appreciation?

  The Brandenburgs are very exciting and easy to listen to. I think that would be the best starting point for someone who doesn’t know anything about Bach’s music. The B-minor mass is also pretty spectacular, as is the St Matthew Passion. Some of the chorales are pretty rousing and wonderful. Andras Schiff’s The Well-Tempered Clavier is absolutely brilliant, and since it’s on the piano, it has more emotional traction for a modern audience than a harpsichord. But we’d better stop, because we could go on like this all afternoon.

  Do you have a favourite?

  I’ve said before that my desert island Bach would be the cello suites, but I would really hate to make that choice.

  Life at a Glance

  BORN

  Dayton, Ohio.:

  EDUCATED

  University of Michigan.

  CAREER

  Editor/writer at Saturday Review, Newsweek. Managing editor of People, Life and Time magazines. Author of Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table and The Lives of the Piano.

  LIVES

  in Paris with wife and family.

  A Writing Life

  When do you write?

  When don’t I write! I sometimes get up at four o’clock in the morning and start, though the times when I get up that early I tend not to work past six. I put in a very long day. I always start by seven or seven thirty and I work at least until the kids come home from school, which is five or five thirty, and almost always for a couple of hours after that.

  Where do you write?

  At home in my office.

  Why do you write?

  To be read.

  Pen or computer?

  Computer.

  Silence or music?

  Complete silence.

  What started you writing?

  I wrote a play in the attempt to make friends in third grade.

  When do you start to write a book?

  When you think research has taken you to the place where you know enough to start.

  And finish?

  When you’ve got everything said and you can look back at what you’ve done and say to yourself, all right then, what was all that really about?

  Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?

  No.

  Which living writer do you most admire?

  If I have to pick just one, John Updike. Happily, though, I don’t have to.

  What or who inspires you?

  My kids. My friends. My family. Bach.

  What’s your guilty reading pleasure or your favourite trashy read?

  I’m not sure I have a favourite, I don’t read many airport novels, but I have to confess I read The Da Vinci Code.

  Top Ten Books About Back

  Butt, John, ed.

  The Cambridge Companion to Bach

  Dreyfus, Laurence.

  Bach and the Patterns of Invention

  Marissen, Michael.

  The Social and Religious Designs of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos

  Melamed, Daniel, ed.

  Bach Studies 2

  Pelikan, Jaroslav.

  Bach Among the Theologians

  Schrade, Leo.

  Bach: The Conflict between the Sacred and the Secular

  Spitta, Philipp.

  Johann Sebastian Bach: His Work and Influence on the Music of Germany, 1684–1750

  Wolff, Christoph.

  Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician

  Wolff, Christoph, ed.

  The New Bach Reader

  Yearsley, David.

  Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  How I Came to Write This Book

  by James Gaines

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO a friend at a publishing house called me with a proposition. She and I had worked together, and she knew I had always wanted to write a book about Bach. Her boss was looking for a Bach book, she said, and she wondered if I would be interested in working up a proposal.

  I was thrilled. From the time I started playing the piano I felt drawn toward the music of Bach, and as I got older he became my great musical passion. In high school I thought I would be the next Glenn Gould (my piano teacher did not). When I got to music school, though, I discovered there were a lot of kids more talented and driven to perform than I was, and so I switched to liberal arts and after college went into journalism, where I spent the next thirty years of my life. I kept playing and thinking about Bach during those years, but careers and children have a way of pushing youthful passions to one side.

  When my friend called I had retired from the magazine business and was spending my time learning to fly airplanes, something I had always wanted to do, as did every kid who grew up in Dayton, Ohio, ‘home of the Wright Brothers’. Her phone call reminded me of something else I had been wanting to do for the past few decades: to find some excuse to bury myself completely in Bach for a while, to apply real concentration to an area I in which I had great enthusiasm for the work but very little knowledge of the man. I had read quite a bit about him, but I didn’t know what to make of what I had read. He seemed to spring on the stage full-grown, having had no youth or growing up at all, a great man without dimension.

  * * *

  ‘In high school I thought I would be the next Glenn Gould (my
piano teacher did not).’

  * * *

  My friend’s boss wanted a different sort of book about Bach from the one I wanted to do. It was a wonderful idea in its own right, but it was not what I had come to care about. I called my agent, whose advice was immediate and clear: ‘Do the book you want to write, and we’ll find a good place for it.’

  By that time I had become interested in Bach’s meeting with Frederick, in part because Frederick was just an irresistible character. Not only was he the perfect foil for Bach (and vice versa) but their meeting also opened the door to a story even bigger than the one I had been thinking about, the story of a moment in history which raised a question that has been resonating ever since: what is the place for belief in the logical, post-Enlightenment, post-mythical world, a world where individual growth and justice are in the human rather than the divine province, a world governed (with notable exceptions) by reason? This is a question that had bothered me ever since I was old enough to doubt.

  Frederick was more than instrumental in this part of the story. In a way he is the poster boy for his own opposition. Beaten into submission by a mad father, Frederick adopted a view of life (predictably) as chaotic, accidental and wholly without meaning, a kind of clockwork in which every person was just a witless cog. In his fifties, he wrote to a friend, wondering aloud why he had waged wars, drained marshes to encourage agriculture, promoted Prussian trade: ‘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.’ Frederick loved the inventions of a fraud named Jacques Vaucanson, who built a mechanical shepherd that could actually play the flute, and later a duck that Vaucanson said could actually fart (the duck is one of my favourite characters, but the flatulence was rigged). Frederick was a convinced, hard-core materialist, the acolyte and patron of Julian La Mettrie, author of the scandalous Man a Machine. And yet even Frederick thought – needed to think – he had a soul. He could not wean himself from the idea, much as he tried.

  I wrote this book because I have always loved Bach’s music and always wanted to know the man who made it. But I was also drawn to investigate the issue of reason vs faith, one that was posed in high relief by the confrontation of Bach and Frederick and by the music that resulted from their meeting, Bach’s Musical Offering. I don’t pretend to have arrived at a definitive answer, but I do think the book asserts a provocative refinement of the question: if there were no place in this world for belief and no such thing as transcendence, how could we react as we do to the music of Bach? Or, to put it another way, if this is all there is, how could there have been a Bach?

  * * *

  ‘I was drawn to investigate the issue of reason vs faith, one that was posed in high relief by the confrontation of Bach and Frederick’

  * * *

  READ ON

  Have You Read?

  Other books by James Gaines

  Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table

  A biography of a literary group in New York City in the 1920s, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott and others.

  The Lives of the Piano

  A book of essays on the history, repertoire, pedagogy and social meaning of the quintessential nineteenth-century instrument and a consideration of its future.

  If You Loved This, You Might Like …

  Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician

  by Christoph Wolff

  A classical and highly respected biography.

  The New Bach Reader: Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents

  Edited by David Theodor Hans, Arthur Mendel, Hans T. David and Christoph Wolff A collection of Bach’s letters, and articles about him, which offer an enlightening and entertaining insight into his character.

  The Aesthetics of Music by Roger Scruton

  A philosophical discussion of what music is and means for humanity, both in terms of significance and enjoyment.

  The Essential Bach Choir by Andrew Parrott A professional chorister investigates the history and practices of Bach’s choirs, in order to better understand how the composer constructed his many choral pieces.

  Frederick the Great by Theodor Schieder A highly regarded series of essays about the king which throws light both on his personality and his country.

  Music and Silence by Rose Tremain

  In seventeenth-century Denmark King Christian IV turns to music as the solace and solution to all the problems of his court and marriage. But his wife hates music … Told by four different narrators, the novel constructs a world that is at once gentle and violent, honest and deceitful, good and evil.

  Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

  The Booker Prize-winning novel in which two old friends, a composer and an editor, make a euthanasia pact, with disastrous results.

  The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: The Hidden World of a Paris Atelier

  by T.E. Carhart

  A love letter to the piano and to Paris, written by an expat who describes his life with both.

  Find Out More

  USEFUL WEBSITES

  www.jsbach.org

  This website, set up in 1995, offers an extensive biography, bibliography and catalogue of Bach’s works as well as a useful tourist guide and map detailing sites worth visiting. Recordings and works are catalogued in several different ways, including by instrument, year and, where relevant, recording label.

  www.baroquemusic.org/bqxjsbach.html

  Detailed information about Bach’s life and works presented against a rather too detailed bright blue background.

  www.pianosociety.com

  Listen to free MP3 downloads of Bach’s music, played by both amateurs and professionals.

  http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/bachindex.html

  Tim Smith’s website on the Bach canons is a great resource in itself but fantastically well connected to other Bach websites and materials.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  In addition to those signal influences cited in the acknowledgments and in the text, several authors’ works have been especially important to me and would be for anyone else setting out on this territory. Every student of Bach is of course deeply indebted to Christoph Wolff, whose scholarly achievement in this field (and others) is breathtaking and whose biography of Bach is definitive. The best English-language biography of Frederick, aside from Carlyle’s deeply researched but eccentric eight-volume monologue, is that of Robert Asprey. For Frederick’s youth, the work of Ernest Lavisse is unmatched, and Ernest Helm’s Music at the Court of Frederick the Great remains the most useful work on the subject. Most of the primary-source material I have used in languages other than English has been taken from the translations cited, but for some documents in German I turned to a translator, Dr. Ursula Sautter, and for those in eighteenth-century German to her mother, Dr. Elisabeth Sautter. Both of them have my gratitude especially for translating 164 long, ranting footnotes in Scheibe’s last attack on Bach, not one of which made it verbatim into this book but which at least put the finishing touches on my portrait of their author. In the interest of space I have annotated only facts and quotes that would otherwise be difficult to locate. All quotations from Bach and his contemporaries are, unless annotated, in the translation of the indispensable New Bach Reader (NBR). Unannotated statements by Frederick or his correspondents should be understood to be in his Oeuvres (which begin with letters he wrote as a boy), translated either in one of the major English-language sources cited here or by me. Anyone wishing the source for facts, details, or sources of translation not given here may contact me through the publisher at 4thestate@harpercollins.com (FourthEstate, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022) or at my e-mail address, jg@jimgaines.com.

/>   I. THEME FOR A PAS DE DEUX

  3 could not even spell Deutschland Ergang, 40.

  5 One Sunday … in his voice Forkel, NBR, 429ff.

  6 Frederick had been hinting NBR, 429.

  6 Carl’s letters home Idem.

  7 warring values For his insight into the array of conflicts between Bach and Frederick, If am indebted to Marissen, Bach Studies 2.

  7 Frederick, a bisexual See discussion in Chapter IX.

  7 “never read a German book” The quote is from a letter of October 22, 1757, to Cölestin Christian Flottwell from Johann Christoph Gottsched reporting on a conversation with Frederick; cited in Marissen, Bach Studies 2, 89.