Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 34
Weimar, court musicians of, 77, 97–98
Weimar, Johann Ernst, Duke of, 125, 128
Well-Tempered Clavier (Bach), 129, 134, 227, 262, 270
Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein (Bach), 251
Werckmeister, Andreas, 50, 51–52, 85, 98, 116
Westphalia, Treaty of (1648), 20, 35
Wieneren, Anna Cunigunda, 24–25
Wilhelmina, Princess, 73, 75, 107, 151, 158
childhood of, 3, 68, 69
death of, 243
Frederick II’s relationship with, 109, 145, 211, 212, 243–44
on Frederick II’s social circle, 102–3, 153
lute played by, 3, 60
marriage of, 69–70, 99–100, 145, 211
on royal parents, 69
William the Rich, 33
Wittelsbach family, 29
Wolff, Christian, 116, 153, 154, 155, 182, 184
Wolff, Christoph, 86n, 232, 234
Wolfslast, Wilhelm, 267
World War II, 266–67
Xenophon, 178
Yearsley, David, 46, 192, 193, 252
Zachow, Friedrich Wilhelm, 126
Zelter, Friedrich, 262, 263
Zwingli, Huldrych, 23
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Attempting to write an interpretive essay about Bach’s Musical Offering that involves the lives of two men as outsize as Bach and Frederick involves more than the usual hazards of biography. Both men have large, scholarly canons, but while the works on Frederick add up to a single person, there are virtually as many Sebastians as he has students. Bach was too little inclined and too busy writing and performing music to leave much record of himself, and that has resulted in a body of scholarship that is enormous and conflicted. Choices among sources must be made. I have been living with all these Bachs ever since I began playing his music as a child, and one of the reasons I wrote this book was to find out who he was, which really meant to find out which choices in the literature made sense to me. Bach could not have been both a radically secular composer forced by his times into the costume of a Lutheran cantor (an old East German interpretation, admittedly) and the “fifth Evangelist” whose feet barely touched ground (the opinion of a substantially larger group).
With deep gratitude and deference to all Bach scholars, without whose work I could hardly have undertaken this book, I found myself having to proceed according to the premise that no man with twenty children, a temper, and an engulfing life’s work could have been anything but a very tough nut. My favorite representation of him, unlike the usual portraits of a rotund, bewigged, serious burgher, is a statue by Bernd Göbel in the market square of Arnstadt, the town that gave him his first full-time job as a musician. Something of a sensation when it was installed in the 1980s, it depicts a lithe young man in tight pants and an open shirt, with large hands and a steady gaze, a vivid Bach with blood in his veins and a little lust in his heart. There is no doubt that Bach was a deeply religious man—the many NBs and exclamation marks in the margins of his Bible leave no doubt of that—but spirituality and a hard edge do not of course represent a contradiction. Martin Luther was no saint either.
In any case, I am acutely conscious of having added yet another Sebastian to the literature that draws on a huge amount of scholarly research and scant information. In particular, Bach’s silence left a great deal of room for subjectivity and speculation about the “extra-musical” meanings embedded in his work, which are central to this book. Albert Schweitzer, among others, has been accused of finding somewhat more meanings in Bach’s music than there are. My prejudice has been that, on balance and within sensible limits, this was the right mistake to make, since finding too little meaning in his work risked a greater disservice to his command as a composer than finding too much. In approaching the ambiguities of interpretation, I tried to keep in mind both the injunction about Freudian dream interpretation, that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” and the fact that Freud, a cigar smoker, died of jaw cancer. This is why I have shied away from some of the woollier areas of Bach scholarship (all the intellectual mischief associated with the fact that there are numerological meanings in his music, for instance), and why I have not strayed beyond good current scholarship without making plain that I have done so.
CHIEF AMONG THOSE to whom I owe thanks for help in the making of this book is Courtney Hodell, without whose editorial acuity and hard work it would be very much poorer. She is every writer’s best friend, a very painstaking and exacting reader, the sort of book editor who is said not to be around much anymore. Her partner at Fourth Estate, Christopher Potter, also demonstrated a quality of support that many writers are not lucky enough to get from their publishers. Also at Fourth Estate I must thank Amy Baker for her staunch and effective advocacy of this book as it made its way into the world, and Rachel Safko for her work on the book’s behalf and for her gracious forbearance. Susan Bolotin gave me the initial push to write this book, and Liz Darhansoff gave me the support, both material and moral, that was needed to pursue it. She and several other friends, including Lee Aitken, Andras Fejer, and James Graff, made valuable observations at various stages. Dan Okrent, who was the recipient of several e-mail attachments in the course of this work, has given me lots of invariably sound advice and years of great friendship.
Many ingenious and devoted research librarians are the bulwark of this book. I thank especially the staffs of the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street and at Lincoln Center, where this book was first conceived, and the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, particularly the librarians at L’Opeéra and those in the rare books collection at the Mitterrand center, custodians of Frederick’s Oeuvres. For research help in Germany I am indebted to Dr. Ursula Sautter. I wish also to thank all the teachers who educated my understanding of Bach, music, and the subtleties of biography (in order of appearance): Donald Hageman, Julian DeGray, Donald Rock, McNeil Robinson, Anthony Newman, and Richard Gartner.
The substance of this book owes everything to the people listed in the notes and bibliography, and the ones from whom I have learned the most are cited in the text as well. One of these is the Bach scholar and organist David Yearsley, who made the foolhardy offer to read this book in an early draft. The benefit of his scholarship and of his generosity with it are everywhere on the pages of this book. So too is the work of Michael Marissen, whose essay on the Musical Offering in Bach Studies 2 inspired and provides an underpinning for this book. Neither of them, I hasten to add, would agree entirely with what I have written. I have always found it odd when authors find it necessary to declare their sources and influences innocent of their errors, something that has always seemed to go without saying. I see now that it does not, that they have worked too carefully and too hard for too long to have their work used without some immunity from its misuse, and so I hereby absolve them, the teachers listed above, and the many other scholars on whose work I have drawn of any responsibility for whatever errors of fact and interpretation I may have made.
Finally and most important, I must acknowledge more than gratitude to the incomparable Karen Gaines, whose patience, love, support, and a certain amount of benign neglect during some very difficult years made writing this book at least marginally compatible with the wonderful and very lived life that she inspires in me and the terrific children to whom this book is dedicated.
—Paris
May 2004
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A widely published journalist and the former chief editor of People, Life and Time magazines, James Gaines has published two previous books: Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table and The Lives of the Piano. He lives with his family in Paris.
PRAISE
From the reviews of Evening in the Palace of Reason:
‘A wonderful work of popular history, intelligent, stylish, wryly witty, serious yet never solemn, and above all passionate’
JOHN BANVILLE, Guardian
‘Wonderfully engaging … a pie
ce of theatre that is witty, instructive and often bizarre … It is a book that is almost impossible to put down when one is dancing, swerving, stumbling through the extraordinary brilliance, blood-thirst, cruelty, fecundity and religious and other feuds of the society that helped to inspire Bach and sustain Frederick’
Independent on Sunday
‘Gaines’s style is readable, crisp and compelling. He is an excellent guide: informed, unpretentious and frank … The impressive research is lightly worn … The minor parts are well played: Voltaire, Handel, Maria Theresa and George II all contribute beautifully drawn cameos. The reader retains a strong sense of their deeper and more complex historical characters. Above all, the musical prose is first-rate. Gaines is thoroughly acquainted with the repertoire, and his ability to convey a sense of Bach’s unique sensibility and spiritual power is often remarkable … A story told with wit, knowledge, the odd flight of fancy, and love’
Times Literary Supplement
‘James Gaines vividly brings to life the personalities involved … [A] dramatic story, told with great pace and gusto’
Scotland on Sunday
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table
The Lives of the Piano
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