Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment
James Gaines
In one corner, a godless young warrior, Voltaire’s heralded ‘philosopher-king’, the It Boy of the Enlightenment. In the other, a devout if bad-tempered old composer of ‘outdated’ music, a scorned genius in his last years. The sparks from their brief conflict illuminate a turbulent age.Behind the pomp and flash, Prussia's Frederick the Great was a tormented man, son of an abusive king who forced him to watch as his best friend (probably his lover) was beheaded. In what may have been one of history's crueler practical jokes, Frederick challenged ‘old Bach’ to a musical duel, asking him to improvise a six-part fugue based on an impossibly intricate theme (possibly devised for him by Bach's own son).Bach left the court fuming, but in a fever of composition, he used the coded, alchemical language of counterpoint to write ‘A Musical Offering’ in response. A stirring declaration of faith, it represented ‘as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and world view as an absolute monarch has ever received,’ Gaines writes. It is also one of the great works of art in the history of music.Set at the tipping point between the ancient and the modern world, the triumphant story of Bach's victory expands to take in the tumult of the eighteenth century: the legacy of the Reformation, wars and conquest, the birth of the Enlightenment. Brimming with originality and wit, ‘Evening in the Palace of Reason’ is history of the best kind – intimate in scale and broad in its vision.
Evening in the Palace of Reason
BACH meets FREDERICK THE GREAT
in the AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
JAMES GAINES
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_5d194edf-1463-51b1-af74-597f92ca2ef1)
Fourth Estate
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First published by Fourth Estate 2005
Copyright © James Gaines 2005
PS section copyright © Louise Tucker 2005, except
‘How I Came to Write This Book’ by James Gaines © James Gaines 2005
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James Gaines asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library
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Portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great © Bettman/CORBIS
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Source ISBN: 9780007153930
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007369461
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PRAISE (#ulink_8d597af9-7795-5631-b7fd-d5aa78791a3c)
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 piece 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
DEDICATION (#ulink_ac5fd910-77af-5c77-a2ee-3c165def3a46)
FOR ALLISON, NICK,
WILLIAM, AND LILLIAN
CONTENTS
Cover (#u6b35bac0-0039-591d-a76b-8d0a18069b33)
Title Page (#u0a838ef7-714f-59f4-bce5-ff9ea5a7f42d)
Copyright (#ue60b3e59-50e3-51d9-b1db-03bda09698e2)
Praise (#u5f9b1099-4a3d-5377-939a-fe8a675a3573)
Dedication (#ude126d6a-5be8-5d90-8f05-2d8cce1a2fd1)
Map (#u7506903b-51d9-5cf6-b27a-5ac0fb0cce55)
I. THEME FOR A PAS DE DEUX (#u08b71ba5-80c4-50f9-b760-cd8ce59aed83)
II. BIOGRAPHY OF A TEMPERAMENT (#u010b3cb7-d206-54ae-bdb8-11bbd70ed7bc)
III. THE HOHENZOLLERN REAL ESTATE COMPANY (#uf693cf84-177f-5c5e-b255-e2a23f40ce7b)
IV. A SMALL, UNREADY ALCHEMIST (#uc4040944-d9c4-5bc3-b417-7f5c1ca06102)
V. GIANTS, SPIES, AND THE LASH: LIFE WITH “FATTY” (#u0596c0b0-11fd-54de-b14a-bb01dd2c2390)
VI. THE SHARP EDGES OF GENIUS (#ud9802b16-2c64-5b0c-bb19-878c0d491007)
VII. WITNESS TO AN EXECUTION (#uab9215f4-8af8-520d-95b0-7800d51e5791)
VIII. SONG OF THE ENDLESSLY ORBITING SPHERES (#ucd7a7723-b120-5d05-a63f-2c522f15d40a)
IX. A CHANGELING AMONG THE SWANS (#u76c48235-f03d-5fa2-a8ab-3a1a8ccec0df)
X. THE ARTIST IN A PAINT-BY-NUMBERS WORLD (#uc0fe780b-d15b-55a7-a8f0-67fffae03722)
XI. WAR AND PEACE AND A MECHANICAL DUCK (#u91c3b780-342a-5cfc-891e-6cfd98e5a6a7)
XII. THE NIGHT OF A MUSICAL OFFERING (#u3b57a3ab-b040-570e-9c3e-a65bd82591b6)
XIII. AFTERLIVES: AN EPILOGUE (#uecde5811-74ef-5abf-9561-0fa516d8b340)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#u0de921a3-0eea-5a96-914a-ceec0ccbc203)
About the Author (#u844447d1-3df3-543d-82cc-235c0a3c8e4e)
A Passion for Thought
Life at a Glance (#ulink_3862f349-3da2-55d4-971f-693038d33a5e)
A Writing Life (#ulink_ba8504eb-f4e7-52bd-aa02-62fa366bb296)
Top Ten Books About Back (#ulink_6d0b75d5-47d5-568e-b8db-2641da5c3cc5)
About the Book (#uc9139f56-7bc3-5606-9a16-9fbd7345bbfb)
How I Came to Write This Book by James Gaines
Read On (#uda56cb5e-2f98-5c76-9beb-ba92b9ef362f)
Have You Read?
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#ulink_9c477c8f-022c-5cae-a261-749f4254e21e)
Find Out More (#ulink_d0754f41-4540-50b0-8b60-e3865fff8711)
Notes On Sources (#ud470a55e-032d-53f4-9cd6-0b6187616590)
A Selected Bibliography (#u5b362855-c1b1-5a3b-869b-4952d0701ba9)
A Very Selective Discography (#u6aa11ac1-5d39-589e-9300-ad0f83b1c860)
A Glossary of Musical Terms (#ufd297c64-0785-5ea3-98d4-0d74c61cb4af)
Index (#ua7b4351c-0eff-5837-a442-174d3b1b406f)
Acknowledgments (#u5f3a1ba5-add0-57dc-b00e-d1f69db29661)
About the Author (#u444a1b3e-0765-5804-aaf6-f3bf24ef6464)
By the Same Author (#u9c8f7f58-b947-5750-a4dc-6b1e3935df51)
About the Publisher (#ud749d458-269f-5e2c-ae36-fd20f8eeb147)
MAP (#ulink_7095c90e-6888-53c3-808d-da289d5bf8a1)
I. THEME FOR A PAS DE DEUX (#ulink_ebf22ac0-76c7-5be0-8999-09bcc2bfe2fc)
FREDERICK THE GREAT HAD ALWAYS LOVED TO PLAY the flute, which was one of the qualities in him that his father most despised. Throughout his youth, Frederick had to play in secret. Among his fondest memories were evenings at his mother’s palace, where he was free to dress up in French clothes, curl and puff his hair in the French style, and play duets with his soulmate sister Wilhelmina—he on the flute he called Principe, she on her lute Principessa. When Frederick’s father once happened unexpectedly on this scene, he flew into a rage. Even more than his son’s flute playing, Frederick William I hated everything French—French clothes, French food, French mannerisms, French civilization, all of which he dismissed as “effeminate.” He had of course been educated in French, like most German princes (he could not even spell Deutschland but habitually wrote Deusland), so he had to speak French, but he hated himself for it. He dressed convicts for their executions in French clothes as his own sort of fashion statement.
In this regard and others, Frederick’s father was at least half mad. Flagrantly manic-depressive and violently abusive, he also suffered from porphyria, a disease common among descendants of Mary Queen of Scots (which he was, on his mother’s side). Its afflictions included migraines, abscesses, boils, paranoia, and mind-engulfing stomach pains. The rages of Frederick William were frequent, infamous, and knew no rank: He hit servants, family members (no one more than Frederick), even visiting diplomats. Racked by gout, he lashed out with crutches, and if the pain was bad enough to put him in his wheelchair, he chased people down in it brandishing a cane. He was infamous for his canings—he left canes in various rooms of the castle so they would always be close at hand—but he also threw plates at people, pulled their hair, slapped them, knocked them down, and kicked them. A famous story has him walking down the street in Potsdam and noticing one of his subjects darting away. He ordered the man to stop and tell him why he ran. Because he was afraid, the man said. “Afraid?! Afraid?! You’re supposed to love me!” Out came the cane and down went the subject, the king screaming, “Love me, scum!” Such a rage could be sparked by the very word France.
Not until his father died when Frederick was twenty-eight could he play his flute free from the threat of censure or attack, so naturally it was among his most beloved and time-consuming pastimes as king. With the musicians in his court Kapelle, who were not only the best in Prussia but the best he could buy away from Saxony and Hanover and every other German territory, he played concerts virtually every evening from seven to nine o’clock, sometimes even on the battlefield. He cared as much about music as he cared about anything, except perhaps for war.
Having had both a love of the military and a cynical, self-protective ruthlessness literally beaten into him by his father, Frederick had already been dubbed “the Great” after only five years on the throne, by which time he had greatly enlarged his kingdom with a campaign of outrageously deceitful diplomacy and equally incredible military strokes that proved him a brilliant antagonist and made Prussia, for the first time, a top-rank power in Europe. A diligent amateur of the arts and literature—avid student of the Greek and Roman classics, composer and patron of the opera, writer of poetry and political theory (mediocre poetry and wildly hypocritical political theory, but never mind)—he had managed also to make himself known as the very model of the newly heralded “philosopher-king,” so certified by none less than Voltaire, who described young Frederick as “a man who gives battle as readily as he writes an opera.… He has written more books than any of his contemporary princes has sired bastards; and he has won more victories than he has written books.” Frederick’s court in Potsdam fast became one of the most glamorous in Europe, no small thanks to himself, who worked tirelessly to draw around him celebrities (like Voltaire) from every corner of the arts and sciences.
One Sunday evening in the spring of his seventh year as king, as his musicians were gathering for the evening concert, a courtier brought Frederick his usual list of arrivals at the town gate. As he looked down the list of names, he gave a start.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “old Bach is here.” Those who heard him said there was “a kind of agitation” in his voice.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH was sixty-two years old in 1747, only three years from his death, and making the long trip from Leipzig, which would be his last journey, was surely more a concession than a wish. An emphatically self-directed, even stubborn man, Bach took a dim view of this particular king, the Prussian army having overrun Leipzig less than two years before, and at his advanced age he could not have relished spending two days and a night being jostled about in a coach to meet the bitter enemy of his own royal patron, the elector of Saxony. Even more problematic than the political and physical difficulties of such a journey, though, the meeting represented something of a confrontation for the aging composer—a confrontation, one might say, with his age. In music and virtually every other sphere of life in mid-eighteenth-century Germany, Frederick represented all that was new and fashionable, while Bach’s music had come to stand for everything ancient and outmoded. His musical language, teaching, and tradition had been rejected and denounced by young composers and theorists, even by his own sons, and Bach had every reason to fear that he and his music were to be forgotten entirely after his death, had indeed been all but forgotten already. For this reason and others, his encounter with Prussia’s young king threatened to bring into question some of the most important qualities by which he defined himself, as a musician and as a man. It would also present him the opportunity for one of the most powerful and eloquent assertions of principle he had ever made, but that would have been anything but clear to him at the time.
Bach came despite the challenges involved because Frederick was the employer of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the chief harpsichordist in Prussia’s royal Kapelle. Carl had been hired on when Frederick was still crown prince, hiding from his father the fact that he had any musicians and paying their salaries by borrowing secretly from foreign governments and padding his expenses. It was even then an extraordinary group, including the best composers and musicians of the “modern” generation, most of them well known to—but a good deal younger than—Carl’s father. Frederick had been hinting broadly that he would like to meet “old Bach” ever since Carl had come to work for him, and Carl’s letters home had reflected a growing concern that at some point the king’s wish would become his command. But no one knew better than Carl just what a collision of worlds a meeting between his flashy, self-regarding employer and his irascible, deeply principled father would be.
There were very few similarities indeed between the young king and the old composer, but there was this one: They stood firm in their respective roles, their fields of work having been determined by long ancestry. The Hohenzollern dynasty had ruled in Germany for three hundred years before Frederick was born and would rule for two hundred more, to the end of World War I. The Bach line stretched from Luther across three centuries, and theirs too was a family business; more than five dozen Bachs held important musical positions in German towns, courts, and churches between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Such strong ancestral lines made the journey to Potsdam even more pointedly a foray into enemy territory for Bach, of course, not only literally, as a proud son of Saxony standing against the aggressive Prussian neighbor, but figuratively as well: The king and the composer faced each other as the embodiments of warring values. Bach was a devout Lutheran householder who had had twenty children with two wives; one left him a widower, the second was waiting for him at home. Frederick, a bisexual misanthrope in a childless, political marriage, was a lapsed Calvinist whose reputation for religious tolerance arose from the fact that he held all religions equally in contempt. Bach wrote and spoke German. Frederick boasted that he had “never read a German book.”
Nowhere were they more different, though, than in their attitudes toward music. Bach represented church music and especially the “learned counterpoint” of canon and fugue, a centuries-old craft that by now had developed such esoteric theories and procedures that some of its practitioners saw themselves as the custodians of a quasi-divine art, even as weavers of the cosmic tapestry itself. Frederick and his generation were having none of that. They denigrated counterpoint as the vestige of an outworn aesthetic, extolling instead the “natural and delightful” in music, by which they meant the easier pleasure of song, the harmonic ornamentation of a single line of melody. For Bach this new, so-called galant style, with all its lovely figures and stylish grace, was full of emptiness. Bach’s cosmos was one in which the planets themselves played the ultimate harmony, a tenet that had been unquestioned since the “sacred science” of Pythagoras; composing and performing music was for him and his musical ancestors a deeply spiritual enterprise whose sole purpose, as his works were inscribed, was “for the glory of God.” For Frederick the goal of music was simply to be “agreeable,” an entertainment and a diversion, easy work for performer and audience alike. He despised music that, as he put it, “smells of the church” and called Bach’s chorales specifically “dumb stuff.” Cosmic notions like the “music of the spheres” were for him so much dark-age mumbo jumbo.
In short, Bach was a father of the late Baroque, and Frederick was a son of the early Enlightenment, and no father-son conflict has ever been more pointed. Put all too simply, as any one-sentence description of the Enlightenment must be, myth and mysticism were giving way to empiricism and reason, the belief in the necessity of divine grace to a confidence in human perfectibility, the descendants of Pythagoras and Plato to those of Newton. In music, as in virtually every other intellectual pursuit, the intuitions, attitudes, and ideas of a thousand years were being exchanged for principles and habits of thought that are still evolving and in question three centuries later. Frederick the Great and Johann Sebastian Bach met at the tipping point between ancient and modern culture, and what flowed from their meeting would be a more than musical expression of that historic moment.
WHEN FREDERICK SAW “old Bach’s” name on the visitors’ list, he called for the composer to be brought to the palace immediately. Bach no doubt was looking forward to settling in at Carl’s house for the evening—he would have been exhausted—but this was a summons, not an invitation. What followed was reported in a palace press release that was picked up by newspapers in Prussia, Saxony, and other German territories.
One hears from Potsdam that last Sunday the famous Kapellmeister from Leipzig, Herr Bach, arrived [at the castle].… His August self [Frederick] went, at [Bach’s] entrance, to the so-called Forte et Piano, condescending also to play, in His Most August Person and without any preparation, a theme for the Kapellmeister Bach, which he should execute in a fugue. This was done so happily by the aforementioned Kapellmeister that not only His Majesty was pleased to show his satisfaction thereat, but also all those present were seized with astonishment. Herr Bach found the theme propounded to him so exceedingly beautiful that he intends to set it down on paper as a regular fugue and have it engraved on copper.…
The account is incomplete, and the blur of Baroque rhetoric somewhat obscures the story. The facts are these: Frederick gave Bach an impossibly long and complex musical figure and asked the old master to make a three-part fugue of it, which was a bit like giving the word salad to a poet and asking for a sonnet. So difficult was the figure Bach was given that the twentieth century’s foremost composer of counterpoint, Arnold Schoenberg, marveled at the fact that it had been so cleverly contrived that it “did not admit one single canonic imitation”—in other words, that the Royal Theme, as it has come to be known, was constructed to be as resistant to counterpoint as possible. Still, Bach managed, with almost unimaginable ingenuity, to do it, even alluding to the king’s taste by setting off his intricate counterpoint with a few galant flourishes.
When Bach had finished the three-part fugue, while his audience of virtuosi was still “seized with astonishment,” Frederick asked Bach if he could go himself one better, this time making the theme into a fugue for six voices. Knowing instantly that he had no hope of doing such a vastly more complex improvisation (Bach had never even written a six-part fugue for keyboard), he demurred with the observation that not every subject is suitable for improvisation in six voices; he said he would have to work it out on paper and send it to Frederick later. Clearly no one would have faulted him for turning aside Frederick’s challenge—every musician and especially the composers in the room would have realized just how ridiculously demanding it was—but there is no other recorded instance in Bach’s life when he had had to concede such a defeat, and this was an exceedingly proud man, the age’s acknowledged master of both fugue and improvisation, before an audience of fellow virtuosi as well as his two oldest sons.
Bach’s embarrassment may have been the reason he was invited to Frederick’s court in the first place. Writing two hundred years later, Arnold Schoenberg found in the Royal Theme’s uncanny complexity the evidence of a malicious scheme to humiliate Bach, to beat him at his own game. Schoenberg’s even darker conclusion, based on the belief that Frederick could never have written such an insidiously difficult theme by himself, was that the author could have been none other than Bach’s son Carl, the only person in Frederick’s court with a knowledge of counterpoint sufficient to trump his father’s. “Whether malice of his own induced [Carl], or whether the ‘joke’ was ordered by the king, can probably be proved only psychologically,” Schoenberg wrote, concluding from Frederick’s sadistic personality and bellicose martial history that his motive was “to enjoy the helplessness of the victim of his … well-prepared trap.”
“Johann Sebastian must have recognized the bad trick,” Schoenberg continued. “That he calls his ‘Offering’ a Musikalisches Opfer is very peculiar, because the German word Opfer has a double meaning: ‘offering,’ or rather ‘sacrifice,’ and ‘victim’—Johann sebastian knew that he had become the victim of a grand seigneur’s ’s ‘joke.’”
Schoenberg’s theory that Frederick wished to embarrass Bach cannot be proved or disproved, but some unfortunate facts support it. The Prussian king was infamous for mean-spiritedly baiting even (or perhaps especially) those for whom he had the greatest respect. As Voltaire put it at one of the many low points in their relationship, when Frederick said you were his friend, “he means ‘my slave.” My dear friend means ‘you mean less than nothing to me.’… Come to dinner means, ‘I feel like making fun of you tonight.’” Schoenberg’s theory that the author of the theme was actually Bach’s son Carl, though equally impossible to prove, is also at least plausible. More than once Carl seemed to feel that his respect and affection for his father was in some measure unrequited, a sense of filial injury that often afflicts second sons. There would have been an Oedipal aspect to such a “victory” over Bach for Frederick as well. When they met, Bach was roughly the age Frederick’s father would have been, a father at whose hands Frederick had suffered the worst kind of abuse, including the greatest trauma of his young life.
Whoever the author of the Royal Theme may have been, the nature of it leaves no doubt that Frederick meant to give history’s greatest master of counterpoint the most taxing possible challenge to his art, and it is easy to imagine that, as his carriage rattled over the rutted roads from Potsdam back to Leipzig, Bach was already working out the puzzle Frederick had presented to him. Certainly he lost no time working on it once he was back in Leipzig. At his composing desk in the southwest corner of the second floor of the St. Thomas School—the noise of the student dormitory barely muffled by a thin wall and the ad hoc insulation of bookshelves heaped with music—he finished his Musical Offering to Frederick within a fortnight, turning the king’s “joke,” if that is what it was, back upon him with all the force at his command.
At the end of a long life spent practicing the art of conveying words in music, this was a great deal of force indeed, and the very quickness o f Bach’s work suggests how urgent the project was to him. In the end, it implicated the most dissonant themes in his life and in the king’s as well: among others, the proper relations between art and power, and the competition between fathers and sons. Perhaps most important, the work addresses the point of greatest conflict between these two men and one of the thorniest of all the issues raised by the Enlightenment, for the eighteenth century and for its latter-day descendants: the role of belief in a world of reason. A work that may be read as a kind of last will and testament, Bach’s Musical Offering leaves us, among other things, a compelling case for the following proposition: that a world without a sense of the transcendent and mysterious, a universe ultimately discoverable through reason alone, can only be a barren place; and that the music sounding forth from such a world might be very pretty, but it can never be beautiful.
We may be grateful that Bach had spent a lifetime developing a musical language in which to say all that without fear of discovery or retribution, because his Musical Offering to Frederick represents as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and worldview as an absolute monarch has ever received. Not incidentally, it is also one of the great works of art in the history of music.
II. BIOGRAPHY OF A TEMPERAMENT (#ulink_03c152b4-a985-5505-9279-9174d5dfb984)
J. S. BACH WAS THE FIFTEENTH PERSON TO BE NAMED Johann in his family. Seven of his uncles were Johanns, his father was Johann, and his great-grandfather was Johann. Four of his five brothers were Johanns, the other was for some reason named Johannes, and there was a sister Johanna. As his parents must have done, if only for their sanity, we will call him Sebastian.
There had never been a Sebastian in the Bach family. The name belonged to one of his godfathers, who was the town piper of Gotha. On March 23, 1685, Sebastian Nagel had the honor of holding his two-day-old namesake at the baptismal font of St. George’s Church on the market square in Eisenach, a walled, many-spired town that like Gotha was tucked away in the thick forest of Thuringia. The rector of St. George’s Latin School, a friend of the family, performed the rite.
Nagel had a professional as well as personal relationship with Sebastian’s father, Ambrosius Bach, who was the town piper here in Eisenach: They helped each other musically on occasion, and they had common roots in nearby Gotha. The Bachs had been there for as long as any of them knew. The first Bach to make music his profession had learned his trade from the town piper of Gotha a hundred years before this (though he had kept his day job running his father’s bakery as well). Since then there had been Bachs in nearly all the courts, organ lofts, and town bands of Thuringia.
We do not know whether or not there was music at Sebastian’s christening, but given that it took place on a Saturday, when church musicians were off, it could have been supplied by all sorts of people: His “uncle” Christoph (actually a second cousin) was the organist at St. George’s; his father had not only the members of his band to choose from but even closer to hand all the assistants and journeymen who lived under his roof; and Sebastian Nagel might even have brought some of his musicians from Gotha. Professional musicians were brethren in the late seventeenth century, banded together in part by their campaign against the “beer-fiddlers” (i.e., “will play for beer”) who were forever trying to undercut their prices for playing funerals and weddings, fees that were more than incidental to their salaries. The guild worked as well to protect its members’ ability to bring sons into the business, as Ambrosius Bach managed to do with all of his Johanns, eventually including Sebastian. Even at St. George’s baptismal fount, Johann Sebastian Bach was being held in the arms of his future.
HE GREW UP also in the embrace of the Wartburg, a dark, imposing castle on a hill that had already been looming over Eisenach and St. George’s for five hundred years. Monument to an earlier, glorious era of German knighthood, it was more recently, like Eisenach itself, at the core of Lutheran myth and history. In the year that Sebastian Bach was born, the citizens of Eisenach did not care, if they knew, about Newton’s discovery of gravity, not to mention Brahe’s new star or Boyle’s air pump, which were right now turning the orderly, Aristotelian world of the past few thousand years on its ear. But the story of Luther’s time in Eisenach almost two hundred years before—he had attended St. George’s Latin School, sung in its choir, preached from this very pulpit before his climactic appearance at the inquisitorial convocation of imperial princes in 1521 that came to be known as the Diet of Worms—was alive among them. So was the infamous edict that the emperor, in the name of the Diet, had issued against Luther, which set the stage for so much heartbreak and bloodshed:
He has sullied marriage, disparaged confession and denied the body and blood of Our Lord. He makes the sacraments depend on the faith of the recipient. He is pagan in his denial of free will. This devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle.… Luther is to be regarded as a convicted heretic.… No one is to harbor him. His followers also are to be condemned. His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man.… Where you can get him, seize him and overpower him [and] send him to us under tightest security.
It was widely believed that Luther had been murdered on his way back to Thuringia from Worms, but fortunately for Luther, by this time the power of the emperor was not what it used to be. The Holy Roman Empire was a remnant, theoretically comprising the greater part of Europe but actually confined largely to modern-day Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the former Yugoslavia, and Germany—except that there was no Germany; there were just hundreds of independent princedoms, dukedoms, and bishoprics, the largest of which were Brandenburg (later to become the seat of Prussia) and Saxony. The imperial electors in particular—the most powerful Germanic princes, who had been given the right to elect the emperor—had as much freedom as they dared to take, absolute rulers in their own domains.
Still, Luther’s elector, Frederick III of Saxony, “Frederick the Wise,” took more liberty than any of the others would have done in Luther’s case: He ordered that Luther be closely guarded after the Diet ruled against him and that he be taken into hiding at the Wartburg. There, costumed as a knight and camouflaged by a long black beard, Luther spent the better part of a year: long months of insomniac nights spent beating back satanic visitations in the form of bats careening about his bedchamber, and days spent teaching himself Greek and writing his world-shifting German translation of the New Testament. In this part of the world, Luther was a great deal more compelling than gravity.
In contrast to the precision and rigor of his theology, the world inhabited by Martin Luther, and even the world of Sebastian Bach, was inhabited by wood nymphs, mermaids, and goblins, which had lived in the lakes, forests, minds, and hearts of Thuringia for centuries. Luther’s mother believed that evil spirits stole food from her kitchen. Luther himself told the story of a lake near his home into which, “if a stone be thrown, tempests will arise over the whole region, because the waters are the abode of captive demons.” Thuringians were famous for being superstitious, though of course they were not alone in that, only somewhat extreme examples. Combined with the desperate fear of God and therefore of hell, rampant superstition helps to explain the credulity of sixteenth – century Christians in Europe—or, to put it more charitably, their great capacity for the suspension of disbelief.
Every year on the eve of All Saints’ Day, in a display that in retrospect seems appropriate for Halloween, Frederick the Wise put his relics on display for his people. Over the years he had accumulated a collection rivaled only by Rome’s. Among his many thousands of sacred mementos were a piece of straw from the manger, three pieces of myrrh from the wise men, a strand of Jesus’ beard, one of the nails driven into His hands, a piece of bread left over from the Last Supper, and a branch of Moses’ burning bush. There were also nineteen thousand holy bones. The most potent piece in the collection was a thorn from the crown of Christ that was certified to have drawn His blood. Visiting these particular relics on this particular day would move the pope to grant you or your favorite departed loved one an “indulgence” good for the suspension of exactly 1,902,202 years and 270 days in purgatory. Of course, there was a certain financial price associated with such largesse, but who could possibly resist the argument of a man like Johannes Tetzel, personal pitchman for the Cardinal of Mainz (a Hohenzollern ancestor of Frederick the Great, incidentally, but we will come to that), who was completely without shame in parting the faithful from their ducats. “[Whoever] has put alms in the box … will have all his sins forgiven,” he pleaded,
so why are you standing about idly? Run, all of you, for the salvation of your souls.… Do you not hear the voices of your dead parents and other people, screaming and saying, “Have pity on me, have pity on me.… We are suffering severe punishments and pain, from which you could rescue us with a few alms, if only you would.” Open your ears, because the father is calling to the son and the mother to the daughter.
When Martin Luther, still an Augustinian monk, had the temerity to point out that nowhere in Scripture did it say the pope could move people around in the afterlife, that in fact “indulgences” were spiritually dangerous because they tempted people to believe they could sin now and pay their way out of it later, there was, you might say, hell to pay. Proceeds from indulgences had by then become a fiscal addiction, not only to the pope but also to the likes of Frederick the Wise, who needed the money to fund the University of Wittenberg, among other uses.
Frederick’s unhesitating and unwavering support of Martin Luther had several motives—among others, he resented a Hohenzollern cardinal raising money from his people—but one of them was principle. Frederick was a devout man in the best tradition of Christian princes, who considered themselves responsible for the spiritual as well as the practical welfare of their subjects. He actually believed in the power of his relics and in the pope’s ability to relieve souls from purgatory, but he would not allow Luther to be sacrificed for a contrary belief, and so kept him safe. In a letter to Frederick on behalf of himself and the emperor, the pope exploded:
We have you to thank that the Churches are without people, the people without priests, the priests without honor, and Christians without Christ. The veil of the temple is rent. Separate yourself from Martin Luther and put a muzzle on his blasphemous tongue [or] in the name of Almighty God and Jesus Christ our Lord, whom we represent on earth, we tell you that you will not escape punishment on earth and eternal fire hereafter. Pope Hadrian and Emperor Charles are in accord. Repent therefore before you feel the two swords.
Frederick wrote back simply, “I have never and do not now act other than as a Christian man.” Without such a friend—a prince and elector whom he continued to criticize harshly and publicly whenever he thought it right to do so—Martin Luther would long since have been burned at the stake.
WHAT LUTHER’S GREAT and wise biographer Roland Bainton said of Luther’s courage before the pope could help explain that of Frederick the Wise as well: “The most intrepid revolutionary is the one who has a fear greater than anything his opponents can inflict upon him.” What was the fury of the pope or the emperor to that of God? For Luther, for Frederick the Wise, for their time and place and Sebastian’s as well, the fear of God was beyond palpable, it was physical. Hell was not a metaphor. It was a place you went to, body and soul, where you would burn in actual, unquenchable fire, in unimaginable agony, forever and ever. The devil had form and face. He wanted your immortal soul desperately, and he was smarter and more clever than you could ever be. The world was a great battlefield, life an unending contest between him and Him, in which you were caught squarely in the middle, your eternal safety at stake, your only protection an amorphous wraith called belief.
Small wonder people believed. Horrifying examples of the devil’s work were appearing every day in the here and now of the sixteenth century—in the bubonic plague that wiped out half the population of Eisenach in one year, in the floods that surged through Thuringia, “the water [running] with so mighty a force, and such a stream, that it bare the bodies of the dead before it out of their graves in the Church-yard,” and in the frequent, widespread fires that sought out the timber of their homes.
And for all that, there was no horror to compare to what rained down during the wars that began in 1618, which fed themselves on belief. For thirty unimaginably long years, all the powers of Europe ruthlessly exploited the forces unleashed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to inspire and poison allegiances meant to serve nothing so much as expansionist ambitions. The play of shifting alliances and political treacheries was wanton, and in such a tangle of snakes Germans high and low were as powerless as souls on the battlefield of God and Satan. Using religion as a blunt diplomatic instrument proved so devastatingly successful that all the major combatants—Spain, France, England, Sweden, the Dutch, and the Hapsburgs—chronically ran short of money to pay their mercenary generals for their mercenary soldiers, who thereupon began to take what they could not earn through pillage the likes of which had never been seen before. Rural peasant families were the easiest prey, but even walled towns would fall to sieges that lasted long enough. Eventually the towns devised a crude bell-and-bonfire warning system that allowed some chance of escape from the various crisscrossing armies, but as often as not the soldiers would just take the time to hunt the escapees down, take their valuables, and murder them where they hid. Rape and massacre became the soldiers’ recreation, and revenge was terrible when peasants with pitchforks found themselves in a position to exact it. When all the animals were dead and the fields lay gleaned and fallow, epidemic famine caused soldiers and civilians alike to eat the unimaginable. They ate grass and twigs and the skins of dead rats. They ate bodies from gallows, corpses from graveyards, even babies from their cribs. Thirty years later, a third of the population was dead, and the people who remained on the battlefield of Germany—or rather of Germanies, the loose collation of a few thousand now bankrupt dukedoms and princelings—were consigned by the Treaty of Westphalia to an indefinite future of encirclement by Europe’s great powers and left to a deranged and hopeless peace.
EVERY ARMY HAD its camp followers of prostitutes, hustlers, procurers, and freelance impresarios, ready to whip up a party for their restive military clientele, and so among the followers of every camp were musicians. This was not a time when one could be fussy about jobs. As a result, among the less significant casualties of the Thirty Years War was the reputation of musicians, who had, as it were, accompanied the mayhem and, as the coarseness of what they saw took its toll on them, had taken their share in it. Thus was born the College or Union of Instrumental Musicians of the District of Upper and Lower Saxony and Other Interested Places, a formal musicians’ guild, whose bylaws give some hint of just how disreputable musicians were then held to be. The member was enjoined to “conduct himself decently … abstain from all blasphemous talk, profane cursing and swearing” and not to “divert himself by singing or performing coarse obscenities” or “give attendance with jugglers, hangmen, bailiffs, gaolers, conjurors, rogues or any other such low company.” The drafters further felt the need to say that at private parties “nothing shall be stolen from the invited guests.”
Sebastian Bach’s grandfather, born in 1613, lived through the worst of the Thirty Years War as an adult. After serving for a time “waiting on the Prince” in Weimar, he married the daughter of a town musician. (Such marriages inside the trade were common. Guild rules specified eight years’ training before a musician could hire himself out as a master, but marrying a master’s daughter cut two years from the mandatory time.) He no doubt suffered from the generally low opinion of musicians in his role as a town musician in Erfurt and later in Arnstadt, where his younger brother had secured the coveted post of chief organist to the court and churches. The brother too had married by then, a step that was a precarious act of faith, as Philipp Spitta pointed out in his magisterial nineteenth-century biography of Bach: During the war, men could guarantee neither the safety of their wives and children nor the security of their income. Despite his distinguished position in Arnstadt, which he held for fifty years, this Bach remembered that during the privations of the war, all the salary he received from the war-bankrupted court he had “to sue for, almost with tears.”
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.
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