Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  Friedrich Wilhelm

  There was a terrible amount of animus, posturing, and truth in both letters, and the exchange had the predictable effect, which was none. Frederick did not modify his behavior, and his father kept beating and humiliating him for it. The prince seemed to have brought some illness back from Dresden, speculatively identified as venereal disease. Whatever it was, it laid him low, and was no doubt made worse by the constant battles with his father.

  He had revived by the time Augustus paid a visit to Potsdam a few months later, and along with his many mistresses (including Frederick’s favorite), he brought his Kapelle, for which he had recruited the best musicians in Europe. One of them was Johann Joachim Quantz, a flautist of formidable reputation with whom Frederick had played in Dresden. On this trip he agreed to become Frederick’s teacher on the instrument, which was no small commitment, since the lessons and expenses were to be paid by the queen and kept secret from the king.

  This little plot had the predictable outcome as well. The king came unexpectedly to Frederick’s apartment in the middle of one of his musical evenings, where Frederick was decked out in the red-and-gold robe he wore when he played duets with Wilhelmina. His hair was curled and puffed, and everything was just so, very French. There was a mad scramble when the lookout spotted the king coming. Frederick tore off the robe and stuffed it in a corner, the others, including Quantz, grabbed their instruments and found a firewood closet to hide in, but Frederick’s hair gave the game away. Very quickly the king sized up what was happening and began casting around the room for proof and co-conspirators. Where are they? he wanted to know. Hardened in his rebellion and protecting what was closest to him, Frederick said nothing. The king grew angrier, too angry, apparently, to think of looking in the closet. Finally he found and confiscated a few French books. Otherwise all he found was the red-and-gold robe. He stuffed it into the fire.

  Sometime after that the king took Frederick with him again (for reasons unknown and unfathomable) to see King Augustus, who was holding military maneuvers in Mühlberg as the excuse for a great raucous party. On the last day, Augustus gave a dinner for all thirty thousand of his soldiers at two long—apparently very long—lines of tables, at each end of which was the head of an ox, with the skin of oxen covering the roasted quarters on the tables. Between the two lines of tables rode the kings of Poland and Prussia and their two crown princes, receiving the hosannas of the crowd. Frederick, however, could not have been regarded with unmixed awe. A day or two before he had been forced to stand at parade with his hair and clothes badly askew. For one reason or another, the king had beat him hard that day, throwing him to the ground, kicking him, and dragging him around by the hair, in full view of the crowd. When he had finished with his son, Frederick William spat at him: “Had I been so treated by my father I would have blown my brains out, but this man has no honor.”

  Not long after Frederick returned to Berlin, Rothenburg informed Paris: “I have reason to believe that he is thinking of making his escape.”

  VI.

  THE SHARP EDGES OF GENIUS

  FREDERICK HAD NOT YET BEEN BORN AND HIS FATHER was still just the fourteen-year-old maniac crown prince of Prussia, promising to hang his tutors the minute he took the throne, when, at the age of seventeen, Sebastian finished his studies at St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg. By that time he was a skilled composer, his improvisations were dazzlingly original, and his virtuosity was outrageous. After what was probably his first audition for a real job, the council of Sangerhausen, a large town with a serious musical tradition, voted unanimously to make him their principal organist. For all the hard work his early mastery had required of him, however, and despite the obvious fact of his genius, all he could have taken from that remarkable early triumph was confirmation of just how far the support of a town council would get him: After they had voted unanimously in his favor and made him a firm offer, the job went to a favorite of the local duke. As a result, Sebastian’s first job was as a “lackey” at the court of Weimar, where he filled in for the aging organist and sat in with the ducal Kapelle as needed. He later elevated himself to “house musician” on his résumé, but in fact he worked at the level of a valet, in livery full-time. Never one to underestimate his gifts or his due, Sebastian quickly found his way out of Weimar, out of uniform, and out of any vestigial naïveté of youth. The next time he went into an audition, he had the job wired, possibly even rigged.

  The Thuringian town of Arnstadt needed an organist, and the Bach family had deep roots there. During the Thirty Years War Sebastian’s great-grandfather had lived in the castle’s clock tower, responsible for winding the clock, caroling the hours, and sounding the alarm for fires and approaching armies. Since then no fewer than six of Sebastian’s forebears had held musical positions in Arnstadt, including his father, so his connections could hardly have been better. Beyond family pull, his main sponsor appears to have been Arnstadt’s sometime mayor Martin Feldhaus, who happened also to be Uncle Christoph’s brother-in-law. Feldhaus had been charged with supervising the construction of an organ for the town’s so-called New Church, which by this time was far from new. It replaced a church that had burned down more than a hundred years before, but it had never had an organ. Thanks to a wealthy citizen’s bequest of a thousand thalers, a third of the organ’s total cost (three thousand thalers was the equivalent of more than two hundred thousand dollars), it was finally completed while Bach was at Weimar.

  Feldhaus nominated Bach* to do the final examination of the organ. A coach was sent to Weimar for him, and he was paid a per diem, a handsome fee, and all expenses. Why he was chosen for the job is something of a mystery. He had as yet no history as an organ expert, and although he certainly was one, there were quite a few others around (including several Bachs) who were not still in their teens. Having done the examination, he also played the official concert to inaugurate the organ, for which he was given another fee, recorded by Feldhaus as having been paid to the “Court Organist to the Prince of Saxe-Weimar,” a very impressive and entirely fictitious promotion. Almost immediately thereafter Bach was offered the organist’s job. There is no record of anyone else even auditioning for it.

  Not only did he get the job, he also got a very light workload and an unusually generous salary: for only four services a week, he was paid fifty florins (his father’s salary for running all of the town music in Eisenach), as well as an additional thirty-four for board and lodging. By way of comparison, an Arnstadt organist senior to Bach was paid twenty florins for ten services, and an in-kind payment for board that was exactly one and a half bushels of wheat. Bach’s pay no doubt recognized his genius, but there is more than a hint of self-dealing on Feldhaus’s part as well. The salary was drawn from various sources—twenty-five florins from the church treasury, another twenty-five from the tax on beer (among the biggest pots in many town treasuries), and, oddly, a bonus of thirty-four florins from St. George’s Hospital. Not coincidentally, the inspector of hospitals was none other than Martin Feldhaus, the amount of the hospital bonus was exactly what Bach needed for room and board, and Feldhaus was the owner of the house where he ended up living. (Also staying there was Feldhaus’s niece, who would become Bach’s first wife.)

  A few years later, Feldhaus was the object of a nasty set of charges, including “much incorrectness and embezzlement,” and removed from his positions of responsibility. Still, his entrepreneurial flourish of 1703 launched one of world’s great composers—and made Bach’s hagiographic memory a little more human. Even at eighteen, fresh out of livery, he was working the system. “You have just come into the affairs and dealings of the world,” Luther wrote (in a passage of Bible commentary that Bach marked for emphasis), “and you have just begun to understand … the world. You have swallowed some water, and you have learned to swim.”

  AS A CHURCH organist, Bach had to confront at the very outset of his career the need to incorporate Lutheran theology into his musical ideas. The greatest part
of his job at the New Church was to introduce congregational singing with “chorale preludes,” sometimes improvised but always artfully contrived introductions to the hymns that had become the soul music of Protestant Germany. Seeded by thirty-six hymns handed down from Luther himself, the chorale repertoire by this time had matured under a century and a half of care and propagation by a thousand pastors, schoolmasters, and cantors, to the point that it became the very melody of daily life. Like a later (much later) generation’s “golden oldies,” Germany’s beloved chorales carried widely shared meanings and memories with them, a world of associations conjured in a phrase. During the Thirty Years War, they were expressions of hope uttered in the face of violence and chaos. Soldiers sang them as they marched to war; peasants and townsfolk sang them as they awaited the approach of foreign armies, bracing themselves with memories of a better time and the hope of better times to come. Not surprisingly, having been composed during years of plague, famine, and war, many of the chorales dwelled longingly on the sweetness of death.

  Luther had encouraged making chorales out of popular songs—“Why should the devil have all the best tunes?”—but he insisted that each melody be yoked securely to its proper spiritual message, the music chosen and arranged precisely to promote the text. Luther’s chief musical assistant, Johann Walter, harmonized the first chorales during a marathon work session with Luther in Wittenberg. “He kept me [there] for three weeks,” Walter wrote later.

  It is clear, I think, that the Holy Spirit was at work.… Luther set the notes to the text, with the correct accentuation and prosody throughout—a masterful accomplishment. I was curious, and asked him where he had learned how to do it. He laughed at my simplicity, and said: “The poet Virgil taught me. He was able to fit his meter and diction to the story he was telling. Just so should music fit its notes and melodies to the text.”

  Luther’s idea of music as the faithful servant of theology inspired every Baroque composer’s defining challenge: to devise melodies and harmonies that could carry and dramatize meaning, or, to put it a bit oversimply, to make music speak in words.

  Luther’s mandate for music to deliver “sermons in sound” had several important results over time. It gave new life to an ancient connection between musical composition and classical rhetoric, which after all shared music’s new purpose of moving an audience in a particular direction. It reinforced the Baroque composer’s notion of himself as an artisan: not as an artist “expressing” a personal idea or feeling—a conception the Baroque composer would have found entirely strange—but as a professional with an assigned task and learnable, teachable methods of doing it. Combined with the Baroque infatuation with encoded allegory (viz. how much 3 plus 4 could really add up to, see page 50), this concept of music as an oratorical craft inspired a vast compositional vocabulary of passages, rhythms, key changes, and other devices that could telegraph in music the meaning of a text, the language of what came to be known as “musical-rhetorical” figures. For example:

  In the Musical Lexicon of J. G. Walther (namesake but no relation to Luther’s musical assistant, actually Bach’s cousin, of whom more soon), the term anabasis or ascensus is defined as a passage of rising notes

  through which something ascending into the heights is expressed. For example on the words: “He is risen,” “God has ascended,” and similar texts.

  Its opposite is a catabasis or descensus, which Walther defines as a passage of descending notes

  through which lowly, insignificant and disdainful things are represented, for example: “He has descended,” “I am greatly humbled,” and similar texts. For that reason a phrase or a theme which descends in semitones by step and without any leaps is called a subjectum catabatum.

  Another negative figure is a saltus duriusculus, a dissonant leap downward, literally “hard leap,” used to point out, often didactically, something harshly negative. A saltus duriusculus of a falling diminished seventh, for example, signifies “false.” A passus duriusculus is a chromatically descending catabasis “meant to express sorrowful emotions.” All of these are examples of pathopoeia, a general term for figures that aim to elicit a specific positive or negative message, what Baroque composers called an “affection.” There are hundreds of such terms, each of them representing an emotional or spiritual arrow in the Baroque composer’s quiver.

  Walther is to be cherished for having written all this down, because we might otherwise never suspect Bach’s music contained such figures. For the Baroque composer, though, our ignorance of that would be neither here nor there, because consciously hearing and comprehending such effects did not, in theory, matter; the composer’s evocation of an affection was thought to rely not on conscious perception but on a quasi-mechanical reaction to vibrations of the sound itself. Being able to move people without their having any idea how they were being moved made the Baroque composer into something of a wizard, and to understand the mysteries over which Baroque composers claimed command requires taking a moment to peek behind the curtain.

  Descartes made one of the first attempts to explain the concept of the affections in his last book, The Passions of the Soul of 1649, which boiled our feelings down to six—wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. They were caused, he wrote, “by the spirits which are contained in the cavities of the brain, in so far as these operate by way of the nerves which serve to enlarge or contract the orifices of the heart.” (This, remember, was from a patron saint of rationalism, albeit at a time when rationalism could still have saints.) Descartes’s book was followed a year later by the Musurgia universalis of the “last Renaissance man,” Athanasius Kircher. A Jesuit-trained mathematician and scholar of sometimes dubious credibility, Kircher was fluent in Hebrew and Greek and translated everything from Coptic script to Egyptian hieroglyphics, where he discovered “secrets” of the universe that no one ever found again. He actually was a creditable inventor, notably of the “magic lantern” that is the ancestor of the film projector; his tinkering also profited thermometers, microscopes, air pumps, and telescopes. On the other hand, his Musurgia spoke of echoes that could return in translation, bells that rang themselves, a keyboard that made melody by variously pinching the tails of cats, and other funhouse fictions. Still, it was the most widely read treatise on musical philosophy of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Kircher was very much a believer in music not only as a mirror but as a fundamental element of Creation itself: In the last chapter of the Musurgia he gives a chart of nine tones which he identifies not just as nice basic notes but as the framework of all that exists. How he gets there is a trip we need not take, but at his destination we discover that music was not so much a reflection or approximation of God’s perfect design but an emanation of the divine Itself. Kircher’s motto was: “Music is nothing other than the knowledge of the order of all things.” He certainly seemed to think that he, at least, knew just about everything.

  To explain how the Pythagorean numbers actually work to elicit the affections in music, Kircher invoked the four humors. (This will be over soon.) For those who may be a little rusty on their ancient Greek medical theory, the four humors were temperaments that were thought to correspond to the secretions of four organs and also to the four elements of matter (as well as certain animals, gems, trees, fish, and archangels). The four humors—sanguine (heart/air), choleric (liver/fire), melancholic (spleen/earth), and phlegmatic (brain/water)—correspond to specific affections: respectively, love and joy; anger and fury; sorrow and pain; and middling degrees of both sadness and joy. As Kircher explained it, affections result from anything that changes the balance of the humors and so releases a certain gaseous “animal spirit” that rises through the blood. This animal-spirit-gas flows into the nerves, which are narrow tubes that take it all around the body and in particular to the soul, which is located in the pineal gland, the place where affections are produced.

  For the Baroque composer, the point was that this animal-spirit-gas can be launched into the t
ube nerves by evoking numerical proportions through musical intervals. Yes, that is what they thought: The animal-spirit-gas can be launched into the tube nerves by evoking numerical proportions through musical intervals. Unfortunately, Kircher’s explanation of how this was supposed to work is, perhaps not surprisingly, unhelpful: “When the harmonic numerus (i.e., the musical proportions and the vibrations emanating therefrom) first stirs up the spiritual breath, and when these vapores [vapors] are mixed with the inner breath or mind, then they move a human being in the direction they are going; and in this way harmony moves passions and affections.” Just like that.

  Against the suspicion that this whole project of the affections was just one last neuronal series firing off in the medieval mind, here is Handel’s friend Johann Mattheson, a music critic for the Enlightenment, in 1739:

  With nothing more than gigue [a quick French dance] I can express four important affects: anger or eagerness, pride, simple-minded desire, and flightiness. On the other hand, if I had to set open-hearted and frank words to music, I should choose no species of melody other than the Polish one, the polonaise [ceremonial, processional music].

  Far from being anachronistic, the doctrine of affections had an almost Newtonian character: Specific musical figures had been demonstrated empirically—by Baroque audiences said in contemporary reports to swoon, wail, weep, and shout for joy at just the right moments—to evoke specific emotional results, with a force as reliable as the one that attracts an apple to the ground. But of course they worked: Our reaction to the numerical proportions (thus musical intervals) was divinely ordained, after all, given that they are the fundament of our universe and ourselves. “It cannot be otherwise that an individual’s temperament is moved and controlled through well-written music,” Werckmeister wrote. “For an individual is both inwardly and outwardly, spiritually and physically, a divinely created harmonic being.”