Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  Spitta reported of Sebastian’s grandfather, perhaps diplomatically, that he found “no record to show that [he] stood forth as a pattern of moral worth,” but said he was pretty sure about his brother, since the preacher at his funeral praised his piety. “There may be conditions under which it seems to be no particular merit to be called a pious man,” Spitta observed,

  but there are times, too, when piety is the … sole guarantee for a sound core of human nature. The German nation was living through such a period.… The mass of people vegetated in dull indifference or gave themselves up to a life of coarse and immoral enjoyment; the few superior souls who had not lost all courage to live, when a fearful fate had crushed all the real joys of life around them, fixed their gaze above and beyond the common desolation, on what they hoped in as eternal and imperishable.

  THREE YEARS BEFORE the end of the war, in the winter of 1645, Sebastian’s father Johann Ambrosius and his twin brother Johann Christoph were born in Erfurt, the largest city in Thuringia. According to a note made by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in the family genealogy, Ambrosius and his brother were “perhaps the only [twins] of their kind ever known. They loved each other extremely [and] looked so much alike that even their wives could not tell them apart.… They were an object of wonder on the part of great gentlemen and everyone who saw them. Their speech, their way of thinking—everything was the same.” This is good to know, because while little is known directly about the character of Ambrosius, his twin left a trail.

  When the boys were eight or nine, the family moved from Erfurt eleven miles south to Arnstadt, where their father joined the town band and began to concentrate in earnest on the musical training of his sons. He died when they were in their teens, however, and their education was undertaken by his brother, who by then had been the Arnstadt organist for a dozen years. After their apprenticeship and years as an assistant were over, the twins moved back to Erfurt, where they had secured jobs in the town band (thanks to their cousin, its new director).

  Ambrosius soon married, and married well, into the family of Valentin Lämmerhirt, an affluent furrier and an influential citizen. The Lämmerhirts were a devout Anabaptist family, which was saying something. The Anabaptists were zealous even by the standards of their onetime leader Zwingli, who espoused a Christianity more ascetic than Luther’s but finally denounced the Anabaptists for extremism. The Anabaptists were best known for denouncing infant baptism (at a time when theology had become so narrow and poisonous that baptizing an adult who had been christened in childhood was a capital offense), but their differences with mainstream Protestantism were comprehensive. They renounced all physical adornments, they refused to swear oaths or bear arms, and each member was expected at a moment’s notice to give up home and family to take up the life of a missionary. The Lämmerhirts did not live by every tenet of this faith, but merely to remain identified with it in orthodox Lutheran Erfurt was a sign of great commitment. In the bizarrely charged atmosphere of dueling Protestant sects that pitted Lutheran against Lutheran, not to mention Lutheran against Calvinist, both Lutherans and Calvinists had sentenced Anabaptists to the stake. Sebastian Bach’s mother came from strong-minded people who were dead serious about religion.

  A bit less serious about religion perhaps (most of the Bachs before Sebastian were secular musicians for the courts and towns rather than the churches), the Bachs were no less strong-minded. After Ambrosius’s marriage, his twin Christoph moved back to Arnstadt, where we find him in the records of the town consistory fighting off a young woman named Anna Cunigunda Wieneren, who came before them, with her mother, to accuse Christoph of breaking his promise to marry her. The consistory was the ecclesiastical body responsible for hearing such disputes, among other supervisory duties, and given the clerk’s matter-of-fact record of the hearing, it was not the first of its kind.

  Both parties appeared before the Consistory, and Anna Cunigunda confessed that she had promised to marry Bach, and he her.… They had done no less than give each other rings in pledge of marriage, which they still had … and it was now on Bach’s conscience whether he thought he could withdraw from her under these circumstances without injuring her.…

  Christoph Bach confessed, indeed, that he had offered marriage to Anna Cunigunda, but they had merely considered the matter provisionally, and he had not in any way considered himself bound.… He had given her a ring … but not in pledge of marriage.… Besides, Anna Cunigunda has asked for her ring back again.…

  After Bach had withdrawn from her and his affection had died out, she had desired to have her ring back, on these conditions: she put it to his conscience that if she were not good enough for him, and if he only meant to make a fool of her, he should return her the ring and answer for it in his conscience before God.… He, in answer, had sent her word that he had no fear of punishment from God on that account.

  The dispute went on for more than a year, when finally the consistory ruled that Bach should marry the girl. That was predictable, given current practice. What was not predictable was that Christoph Bach promptly took the matter over the heads of officials in Arnstadt by appealing to the authorities in Weimar. At this point, according to the records, he “hated the Wieneren so that he could not bear the sight of her.” After more weeks and months of appeals, the officials of Weimar overruled Arnstadt and lifted his obligation to marry.

  By the time it was over, the affair had lasted more than two years, Christoph Bach had made enemies of his hometown consistory, which comprised its most influential citizens, and he had indeed made a fool of Anna Cunigunda Wieneren, who had become the talk of Arnstadt. But he had done what it took to get his way, and when we try later to interpret some of the more intemperate behavior of his nephew Sebastian, including his own even more severe problems with the consistory of Arnstadt, this antecedent will be worth remembering.

  IN THE FALL OF 1671, Ambrosius and Maria Elisabeth Bach moved their belongings out of their rooming house, “The Silver Pocket,” and hauled them twenty miles west to Eisenach, where he had rented an apartment in the home of the duke’s head forester. His position placed him among the town’s most visible and affluent figures. In a few years he became a citizen, bought a home on the market square, and joined the town council, an honorific body that met rarely and served mainly as the local duke’s rubber stamp but was at least a democratic bunch, including not only a doctor and the town organist, his cousin Christoph, but also a butcher, several keepers of the town clocks and watchtowers, a gravedigger, and three shepherds. The Bach household was large from the very beginning in Eisenach, including his three apprentices and a journeyman as well as his widowed mother-in-law and his nineteen-year-old sister, who was profoundly impaired both physically and psychologically. (When she died a few years later, the preacher at her graveside called her “a simple creature, not knowing her right hand from her left … like a child.”) Given the size of his household, Ambrosius must have been grateful for his generous starting salary and housing supplement of fifty florins, and with the promise he could double that with fees for weddings and funerals and for playing in the court Kapelle. By way of comparison, with that much money, roughly four times the town barber’s salary, he could have bought several harpsichords every year, or a dozen good lutes. Of course, he had more pressing uses for the money. Ambrosius and Maria Elisabeth brought their first baby Bach with them to Eisenach, and during the next fourteen years there they christened seven more, little imagining that the last of them, their one and only Sebastian, would someday make St. George’s baptismal font a music lovers’ site of pilgrimage.

  III.

  THE HOHENZOLLERN

  REAL ESTATE COMPANY

  THE CHRISTENING TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER OF the infant who would become Frederick the Great lacked nothing in pomp. The infant Frederick of Brandenburg-Hohenzollern, Prince de Prusse et d’Orange, Count of Hohenzollern, Lord of Ravenstein, and so on, was dressed in a baptismal gown made of silver cloth studded with diamonds, and he w
as carried to the fount of the Chapel Royal at Potsdam by two margraves and a margravine. No fewer than six countesses carried the train. The godmothers were all dowagers of this and duchesses of that, and among the five godfathers were Czar Peter the Great, and the elector of Hanover, soon to be King George I of England. We know there was music at this christening but only because the baby’s father was not yet king. When he took the throne a year later, one of his first acts was to fire the musicians.

  The royal Kapelle of Prussia’s king at the time, baby Frederick’s grandfather, Frederick I, included some of the best musicians of their day, so although the program does not survive we can be sure the music was entirely equal to the grandeur of the occasion. All the bells of the city rang out to announce the baptism of the crown prince, and we know from Thomas Carlyle (who produced his eight-volume History of Frederick the Great after thirteen years that he grimly described to Ralph Waldo Emerson as “the valley of the shadow of Frederick”) that the christening “spared no cannon-volleyings [and] kettle-drummings.” Happily, they appear to have kept the cannons at a distance. According to Carlyle, one previous heir to the Prussian throne had been killed by the shock of a triumphal volley fired too close to his crib. Another had died shortly after his christening because the infant crown had been forced onto his head. Possibly more reliable, certainly more conventional accounts lay the cause of death of both previous crown princes to trouble with teething. In any case, the baby’s grandfather, Frederick I, had cause to be delighted when at six months the infant crown prince Frederick had six teeth and was still alive.

  A year later, Frederick I died, the victim of a mad third wife, who somehow eluded her custodians one morning wearing only a white shift and petticoat. She made straight for the bedchamber of the king, who mistook her for the apparition that was said always to herald death in the Hohenzollern family—"the White Lady”—and the shock killed him. Every account holds this story to be true.

  THE HOHENZOLLERNS were a funny bunch, but Brandenburg was lucky to get them, which says something about its earlier history. A hill fortress town, it was taken by siege in the twelfth century by a prince of the Ascanian family, whose name, like many in the Brandenburg line, was pointed: Albert the Bear. The emperor had given Albert the task of protecting Germany’s North Mark from the heathen hordes to the east, and in time Albert found himself with the means to expand his territories, which eventually came to be a scattered patchwork collectively known as the Mark of Brandenburg.

  After the Ascanian family died out, Brandenburg changed hands several times, and for a couple of centuries things went from bad to worse. First it went to the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, whose contest with the Hapsburgs for primacy in the empire inspired in them exactly no interest in an unimportant sandy wasteland to the north except as a source of taxes and whatever else they could grab from a distance. Their complete negligence of Brandenburg would have been a gift, but in the event, having soaked it for what they could and being unwilling even to visit the territory, the Wittelsbach elector sold it to Luxembourg, whose monarch simply gave it to a man named Frederick. This Frederick had fought beside him against the Turks, had become his good friend, and Frederick’s family had already acquired a few lands scattered around Germany over the past two centuries by marriage, by purchase, and by force. These were the Hohenzollerns, and the man named Frederick now became Frederick I of Brandenburg.

  Understandably surly after the treatment it had received from its various overlords, Brandenburg’s snubbed, pickpocketed nobles gave this Frederick a very hard time. His successor beat them down, though, with a strategy whose subtlety can be deduced from his nickname, “Iron Tooth.”

  The names of Iron Tooth’s successors seem less descriptive than ironic. In any case, Albert Achilles really had no notable weak point. In fact, it was Achilles who finally figured out the obvious virtues of primogeniture: that if you did not spread your inheritance among all of your descendants but gave it all to the first son, your lands and your power would be consolidated rather than fractionated. This sounds rather obvious, but the former policy made for a thousand tiny dukedoms and principalities and centuries of complicated, self-defeating German politics. The Hohenzollern policy of primogeniture would become one of their most important advantages.

  Unfortunately, Achilles’ successor, John Cicero, was no Cicero either, being what historian Sidney Fay called “innocent of any interest in the new Renaissance movement that was beginning to transform the intellectual life of South Germany.”

  THIS BRINGS us, roughly, to the reign of Frederick the Wise and the Hohenzollern cardinal Albert of Mainz, whose enthusiastic salesman Johann Tetzel did so much to color. Martin Luther’s already jaundiced view of indulgences. We enter as well into some of the same historical territory passed through by the ancestors of Sebastian Bach, but to Albert and his descendant Hohenzollerns, the history of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly during the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, looked very different from the way it looked to the senior Bachs, rather like the difference in perspective between warden and prisoner.

  The Hohenzollern Cardinal of Mainz was a ravenously ambitious and entirely secular figure who had bought two important bishoprics at the ridiculous age of twenty-three. At twenty-five he set out to buy the archbishopric of Mainz, which would make him primate of all Germany. Fine, said the pope’s man, that will be twelve thousand ducats for the Twelve Apostles. Albert said he thought maybe seven thousand ducats for the Seven Deadly Sins would be more appropriate. Thanks to the Ten Commandments, Albert got his red hat, but having already laid out cash for his other two bishoprics, he had to borrow the money.

  To help him pay off the loan and to help with expenses for St. Peter’s in Rome (like Michelangelo’s fee), for which he would take half the receipts, the pope gave Albert a ten-year license to sell indulgences of unprecedented potency. These indulgences could actually work on future sins, so that, having paid the right price for a particular sin, you were preemptively absolved and presumably could feel at ease sinning likewise for the rest of your life. The pope authorized Albert to promise, seriously, that even violating the Mother of God Herself could be forgiven by these indulgences. It was the prospective-absolution feature of these indulgences, a patent encouragement to sin, that made Luther especially furious.

  Albert clearly had chosen the right man for the job. When Tetzel came into a city he arrived in procession, holding a huge red cross, fronted by flags and drums and a herald proclaiming, “The Grace of God and of the Holy Father is at the gates!” Making straight for the cathedral, he would plant his cross by the high altar and set his strongbox up beside it. Taking the pulpit, he gave his pitch: “At the very instant that the money rattles at the bottom of the chest, the soul escapes from purgatory and flies liberated to heaven.… I declare to you, though you have but a single coat, you ought to strip it off and sell it.” Then he would stand by the strongbox, examining each supplicant in turn to determine the amount due. Kings and princes were good for twenty-five ducats, barons ten, etc. The various sins had prices too. Witchcraft was forgiven for two ducats, polygamy for six, murder for eight, and the sin of all sins, stealing money from the church, cost nine. (It is hard to believe that this one could be forgiven indefinitely, however expensive the indulgence.)

  Just as Albert and Tetzel had got started with their new indulgences, on the eve of All Saints’ Day 1517, when Frederick the Wise would have put out his relics and indulgence fever would be at a pitch, Luther pinned to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg his “95 Theses,” which took off directly from the promises in Tetzel’s latest spiel. For example:

  27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].

  28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone.…

  46. Christ
ians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons.…

  75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God—this is madness!…

  Drawing to a close, he posed a series of statements from which he diplomatically distanced himself by characterizing them as “shrewd questions from the laity”:

  84. “… What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul’s own need, free it for pure love’s sake?”

  86. Again:—“Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”

  The rest, as they say, is history, one of whose most wonderful ironies is that we have a Hohenzollern to thank, if only indirectly, for the Protestant Reformation.

  A FEW YEARS LATER another Hohenzollern named Albert had an encounter with Martin Luther of a very different sort. This Albert was the cardinal’s cousin, who had managed to get himself elected grandmaster of the Order of Teutonic Knights, a once-powerful group of German nobles who had taken over Prussia by putting down its heathen locals, which involved pretty much exterminating them. They prospered for a time, but that was centuries ago. Now, despised by their subjects and beaten repeatedly on the battlefield when they attempted to expand into Poland and Lithuania, they had been reduced to a small Polish fiefdom. They kept their dreams of independence alive by electing ever richer grandmasters to fill their treasury for more doomed military exploits. That was the reason they elected Albert of Hohenzollern. It was a bad mistake.