Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  Despite the fact that the Hohenzollerns at this point supported the pope and the emperor, Albert was a secret admirer of Luther and an early convert. At the point when he had come to realize that the Teutonic Knights were hopeless, he asked the reformer for advice. Luther, with a pragmatic political sense for which he is not well known, advised Albert to dissolve the Knights and ask Poland in return to let him convert Prussia into a hereditary duchy. Startled by the thought—or perhaps by its source—he sat quiet with the idea for a moment, then erupted in laughter. It was a wonderful idea. All it would require was the betrayal of the order that had been entrusted to his care.

  So ended the reign of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, and thus did the Hohenzollerns add another major holding to Brandenburg and the other Albert’s bishoprics.

  The son of the new duke of Prussia was clinically insane, but even he managed to expand the Hohenzollem territories. The family arranged for him to marry the eldest daughter of one William the Rich, ruler of five small territories on the Rhine. (She found out he was mad after she was already on her way to Prussia but decided to go anyway, two previous fiancés having left the field.) One of the daughters from this union married the new elector of Brandenburg, Johann Sigismund, who happily convetted to Calvinism in order to placate these new Hohenzollern provinces. Since he could not conceivably impose Calvinism on Brandenburg or his subjects in East Prussia, he waived his right to do so. Like most other things Hohenzollern, their tradition of “religious toleration” was all about real estate.

  At the death of their crazy Prussian duke, the family agreed that Sigismund should take over Prussia as well, at which point a single branch of the family could lay credible claim to territories from the Rhine to the far side of the Elbe—

  Just in time for the Thirty Years War. Sigismund’s son had watch over the worst of it, and he was not equal even to a lesser task. His great-great-grandson, our baby crown prince Frederick, would write many years later:

  All the plagues of the world broke over this ill-fated Electorate—a prince incapable of governing, a traitor for his Minister, a war or rather a universal cataclysm, invasion by friendly and enemy troops equally thievish and barbarous.… Though [the elector] cannot be held responsible for all the misfortunes which befell his territories, his … weakness only left him a choice of errors.… Powerless and in continual uncertainty he always changed over to the strongest side; but he could offer too little to his allies to secure their protection against their common enemies.

  LUCKY FOR THE Hohenzollerns, the heir of this ill-starred elector proved to be the savior of the dynasty. Without Frederick William I of Brandenburg, known as the Great Elector, it is entirely possible that, for all their earlier success, there would have been no Hohenzollerns ruling in Germany after the war, and no way for the Great Elector’s great-grandson to become Great himself.

  Thanks to his father’s ineptitude, when the Great Elector came to power in the last decade of the war, all of his scattered lands were desolate and occupied. East of the Elbe, Prussia was overrun by Polish troops. To the west, Cleves-Mark was beset by a warring mix of Dutch, imperial, and Hessian forces. Brandenburg itself was occupied in the north by Sweden, which was everywhere else fighting imperial troops in the attempt to occupy the rest. Still not connected at any point, the Hohenzollern patchwork was difficult to defend at the best of times, and these were the worst. The electorate had lost nine hundred thousand people—two-thirds of the entire population—to war and murder. Its fields had been barren for years, and what commerce remained was undercut by plunder and counterfeit currency. The elector had lost virtually all of his power. His treasury was gone, and since most of his troops were mercenary, that meant he was all but defenseless.

  Almost miraculously, through drastic military reform and the exercise of a diplomacy no less frenetic but a good deal more effective than that of his father, he managed to get his country, very much scathed but dynastically whole, through the last years of the war to an armistice that led to the Treaty of Westphalia. In the negotiations leading up to that treaty, he managed not only to hold on to all of his occupied lands but to gain some more as well. The treaty left France at war with Spain, and the standoff between Poland and Sweden would lead to the first Northern War, so the Great Elector’s diplomatic finesse and military might continued to be tested; at various times he was allied with virtually all of the combatants—Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Spain, and England, not to mention a variety of German territories. But by the time he died in 1688, the population of his territories had almost tripled, he had won Prussia’s independence from Poland, he had created an efficient civil service, and by diligent effort and imaginative reforms he had brought a measure of prosperity to his lands, which came increasingly to be called by the collective name of “Prussia.”

  He had also created one of the largest, most disciplined and battle-hardened armies in Europe. In advice written to his son and heir long after the first Northern War was over, he credited not his diplomacy but his reform and expansion of the military for his success in aggrandizing his emerging nation. “Alliances, to be sure, are good,” he wrote,

  but a force of one’s own on which one can rely better. A ruler is treated with no consideration if he does not have troops and means of his own. It is these, Thank God! which have made me considerable since the time that I began to have them.

  It was this advice that would, for better and worse, become his most important legacy to the Hohenzollerns, to Germany, and to the history of the Western world.

  THE GREAT ELECTOR’S SON, grandfather to baby Frederick, was not Great, not even good for much, but despite a spinal deformity that kept him in bad health all of his life and despite living in the shadow of a beloved father, he seems to have been quite taken with himself, in a neurotic sort of way. Thanks to the steadily rising revenues that were his father’s gift to him, he spent wildly, multiplying by twenty the costs of his father’s household and court. Like many princes of his time, but with greater industry and commitment of resources, he loved all things French. He modeled his court on Versailles and himself on the Sun King, even to the point of taking a mistress despite the fact that he preferred his wife. The affection was not returned (which perhaps explains the mistress). His queen Sophie Charlotte, sister of England’s George I, was a knowing and educated woman who sensibly preferred the company of her court philosopher Leibniz to that of her husband. “Leibniz talked to me today about the infinitesimally small,” she cracked to a courtier one day, “as if I don’t know enough about that here.”

  Where his father’s diplomacy was treacherous but artful, the son’s was simply inept. As crown prince he had secretly solicited Austria for a loan to pay for his already outrageous expenses, promising to give back one of his father’s provinces upon his accession to the throne. As soon as he was king, he repudiated the deal, saying he could not be bound by the promise of someone who could not speak for the state (meaning himself as crown prince). It hardly needs to be said that his argument got him exactly nowhere, so that among his first acts was the surrender of territory. Among his proudest accomplishments was dreaming up the Order of the Black Eagle, his country’s highest honor, for which he came up with the thrilling motto “To each his own.”

  The greatest achievements of Frederick I were accidents that followed from his faults. He doubled the size of his military because loaning them out was the best way to support his extravagance. Green-eyed at the prospect of fellow electors becoming kings—his brother-in-law the Hanoverian elector was becoming king of England, the Saxon elector had already become king of Poland—he managed, for the loan of a few thousand soldiers, to get the emperor’s promise to recognize him as a king should he so proclaim himself in his eastern (nonimperial) province of Prussia. So of course he did. A procession of eighteen hundred carriages involving thirty thousand post horses (stationed at intervals to draw the carriages and carry supplies for a cast of thousands) accompanied him from Berlin du
ring a stately progress of fourteen days to the capital of Königsberg. There, before the forcibly assembled nobility, he placed a crown on his own head and another on his wife’s. The trip and festivities cost him upward of five million thalers, his budget for several years’ expenses at home.

  All that said, by the time the White Lady came to take him away, he had created for his son and heir a redoubled military and a Prussian monarchy. In deference to that fact and filial obligation, if not respect, Frederick William I threw his father the kind of funeral that Frederick I would have thrown himself. For eight days the king lay in state on a bed of diamond-dotted red velvet, a crown on his head, an ermine-and-purple mantle over his shoulders, the Order of the Black Eagle on his chest, his scepter to his left and sword to his right. Finally, draped in a gown of gold, he was carried in solemn procession to the palace chapel through a guard comprising virtually the entire Prussian army. The new king wore long mourning robes whose train was carried by his father’s grand equerry, and the entire court of Frederick I marched behind him. Frederick William I would never appear in such splendor again.

  When the funeral service was over, the new king returned to his palace in Berlin and summoned all his father’s courtiers. “Gentlemen, our good master is dead,” said the father of little Frederick. “The new king bids you all go to hell.”

  IV.

  A SMALL, UNREADY ALCHEMIST

  FOR ALL ITS SPIRES AND WATCHTOWERS AND RED-roofed houses, its cobblestoned market square bordered by church, town hall, and castle, the residents of Eisenach would not have called their hometown charming. To get a sense of Eisenach as it was when Sebastian Bach was a boy, one must conjure up the scent of animal dung from the livestock that shared its streets and walkways, the putrid breeze that wafted from the fish market and slaughterhouse in the square, and, under those red-tiled roofs, a general atmosphere strongly redolent of life before plumbing. The homes of all but Eisenach’s wealthiest residents were small—close and hot in the summer, frigid and smoky in winter—and crowded. At one point in the Bach household, Sebastian lived with seven siblings as well as two cousins (orphans from Ambrosius’s family whose parents had died of the plague) and his father’s apprentices. Death being the family’s constant visitor, Sebastian lost a brother when he was two months old, a sister died when he had just turned one, and his childhood continued to be punctuated, repeatedly and intimately, by death. In addition to the loss of numerous more distant relatives, his eighteen-year-old brother Balthasar died when he was six, and the next year one of the cousins who had been in the house his whole life died at sixteen. Both had been apprentices for his father, and Sebastian would have followed them about his father’s daily rounds, learning as he saw them learn and helping them with what small chores he could. These deaths, as difficult as they may have been, would not be the most painful losses to mark his youth and his character. Of the deaths in his adult life, it is enough for now to say that he buried twelve of his twenty children. Against this backdrop, the elaborately formal topiary gardens of the Baroque, inspired by the idea that nature needs to be tamed and improved, seem entirely understandable.

  What Eisenach had in great abundance, the solace and balm of its six thousand souls, was music. In the villages of Thuringia, by an account that dates from the year of Bach’s birth, “farmers … know their instruments [and] make all sorts of string music in the villages with violins, violas, viola da gambas, harpsichords, spinets and small zithers, and often we also find in the most modest church music some works for the organ with arrangements and variations that are astonishing.” Among the Bachs especially, music was a powerful tonic, and it helped to keep the extended family together. Once a year, as Carl told Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, they gathered at one or another Thuringian town for a day of festivities at which music of a sort not meant for the church was the main event. “They sang popular songs, the contents of which were partly comic and partly naughty, all together and extempore, but in such a manner that the several parts thus extemporized made a kind of harmony together, the words, however, in every part being different. They called this kind of extemporary harmony a Quodlibet, and not only laughed heartily at it themselves, but excited an equally hearty and irresistible laughter in everybody that heard them.”

  Every day of Sebastian’s childhood was filled with music. His father, as director of town music and the town band, was chief dispenser of all the instrumental music in town, and his house was as busy with it as a conservatory’s practice rooms. Every morning at ten and afternoon at five, looking over the marketplace from the balcony of the town hall, Ambrosius Bach’s band played dances and folk tunes and the chorales that Luther and Lutheranism had made the most cherished of popular songs. The ensemble for such “tower pieces” included violin, viola da gamba, and other strings, brass, flutes, oboes and other reeds, and various percussion instruments. The town band numbered only five, but each member was trained on several instruments, and there were the apprentices and journeymen to call on.

  Ambrosius also played regularly at St. George’s and in the duke’s court Kapelle, as did his older cousin Christoph, organist for the court as well as for the city’s three main churches. Sebastian’s “uncle” Christoph appears to have been a bit of a crank. He complained chronically of being short of funds and badly kept (he was finally given a home and stable at the Prince’s Mint, a rather grand establishment for an organist), but despite having more than sufficient skill and reputation to better himself, he complained about the same job for sixty years. Having a family member under his watch whom he could not quite control would have been an embarrassment for Ambrosius, and in fact, whether for this reason or another, the two men did not get along. But for Sebastian, having Uncle Christoph around was very good luck. Ambrosius gave the boy his first instruction on stringed instruments, but it was Uncle Christoph who would have given him his first inside view of the bellows, action, and pipes of the church organ, which with the possible exception of the clock was the most complicated mechanism of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the family’s greatest musician before Sebastian and the only person writing serious new music in Eisenach, a musician even more accomplished than Ambrosius, Christoph was also the boy’s first model as a composer. One of Sebastian’s favorite works by Christoph was an elaborate piece for choir and orchestra in which the archangel Michael and his celestial host take on Satan in the form of a dragon along with his cohort of dark angels, a story taken from Revelations 12:7–12:

  And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels.… The great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

  Scored for two choirs, eight stringed instruments, organ, trumpets, and timpani, it must have been a sensation in its first performance on St. Michael’s Day, but we do not know whether young Sebastian was struck more by the beauty of the work or by the thrilling story of an archangel fighting a fire-breathing monster.

  Childhood then being an unprivileged state, in which children were considered simply small, unready adults, Ambrosius would have pressed Sebastian into service as soon as he was able, just as he had pressed all his sons into such menial tasks as cleaning brass and stringing violins. Sebastian’s boyhood was anything but carefree. Infractions were severely punished, at home and at St. George’s School, where the eighty-one children in Sebastian’s quinta* class were packed into one small room whose high Gothic windows were filled not with sunlight and sky but the gray stone walls of the church. The school day ran in two sessions, mornings from seven to ten and afternoons from one to three, which left time for midday and late-afternoon work at home. The only vacation they had during the twelve-month school year was at harvesttime, which was no vacation. Choristers like Sebastian had longer hours than others to accommodate music classes and rehearsals; they had performances every Sunday a
nd feast day and at weddings and funerals. A few times a year Sebastian would also join some of his fellow choristers to sing in the streets of Eisenach and nearby villages for small donations, called Chorgeld, a source of income for Sebastian throughout his school years.

  Martin Luther had done the same thing early in the previous century, an experience that helped to seal his love of music and its place in the Lutheran liturgy. Music had had a somewhat ambiguous history in the church before the Reformation; some of the early church fathers, even Saint Augustine, were suspicious of its emotional power, but Luther put an end to that too.

  You will find that from the beginning of the world [music] has been instilled and implanted in all creatures, individually and collectively. For nothing is without sound or harmony.… Music is a gift and largesse of God, not a human gift. Praise through word and music is a sermon in sound.

  Sebastian had Luther to thank that his youth had at least the light of music in it.

  ALL OTHER LIGHT was shut off abruptly in his ninth year. In the spring, his mother died. In the fall, his father, having quickly remarried, died as well, leaving his second wife a widow and Sebastian, suddenly, an orphan. Though more common in those days, losing both parents was just as disorienting as it has ever been. Like all newly orphaned children, Sebastian would have felt abandoned, hurt, angry; and if he had had any wish to stay in Eisenach with Uncle Christoph or his new stepmother, it was not fulfilled. He was sent to Ohrdruf, a nearby town, to live with a brother he barely knew.