Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

286 Pages·2014·1.96 MB·English

by  James Gaines

Evening in the Palace of Reason
BACH meets FREDERICK THE GREAT
in the AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
JAMES GAINES
COPYRIGHT
William Collins
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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
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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be identified as the author of this work Cover images: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library Portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great
© Bettman/CORBIS
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Source ISBN: 9780007153930
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007369461
Version:2015-05-19
DEDICATION
FOR ALLISON, NICK,
WILLIAM, AND LILLIAN
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
I. THEME FOR A PAS DE DEUX
II. BIOGRAPHY OF A TEMPERAMENT
III. THE HOHENZOLLERN REAL ESTATE COMPANY
IV. A SMALL, UNREADY ALCHEMIST
V. GIANTS, SPIES, AND THE LASH: LIFE WITH “FATTY”
VI. THE SHARP EDGES OF GENIUS
VII. WITNESS TO AN EXECUTION
VIII. SONG OF THE ENDLESSLY ORBITING SPHERES
IX. A CHANGELING AMONG THE SWANS
X. THE ARTIST IN A PAINT-BY-NUMBERS WORLD
XI. WAR AND PEACE AND A MECHANICAL DUCK
XII. THE NIGHT OF A MUSICAL OFFERING
XIII. AFTERLIVES: AN EPILOGUE
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …
About the Author
A Passion for Thought
Life at a Glance
A Writing Life
Top Ten Books About Back
About the Book
How I Came to Write This Book by James Gaines
Read On
Have You Read?
If You Loved This, You Might Like …
Find Out More
Notes On Sources
A Selected Bibliography
A Very Selective Discography
A Glossary of Musical Terms
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
MAP
I.
THEME FOR A PAS DE DEUX
F
REDERICK 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