Evening in the Palace of Reason

III.

THE HOHENZOLLERN REAL ESTATE COMPANY

THE CHRISTENING TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER OF the infant who would become Frederick the Great lacked nothing in pomp. The infant Frederick of Brandenburg-Hohenzollern, Prince de Prusse et d’Orange, Count of Hohenzollern, Lord of Ravenstein, and so on, was dressed in a baptismal gown made of silver cloth studded with diamonds, and he was carried to the fount of the Chapel Royal at Potsdam by two margraves and a margravine. No fewer than six countesses carried the train. The godmothers were all dowagers of this and duchesses of that, and among the five godfathers were Czar Peter the Great, and the elector of Hanover, soon to be King George I of England. We know there was music at this christening but only because the baby’s father was not yet king. When he took the throne a year later, one of his first acts was to fire the musicians.

The royal Kapelle of Prussia’s king at the time, baby Frederick’s grandfather, Frederick I, included some of the best musicians of their day, so although the program does not survive we can be sure the music was entirely equal to the grandeur of the occasion. All the bells of the city rang out to announce the baptism of the crown prince, and we know from Thomas Carlyle (who produced his eight-volume History of Frederick the Great after thirteen years that he grimly described to Ralph Waldo Emerson as “the valley of the shadow of Frederick”) that the christening “spared no cannon-volleyings [and] kettle-drummings.” Happily, they appear to have kept the cannons at a distance. According to Carlyle, one previous heir to the Prussian throne had been killed by the shock of a triumphal volley fired too close to his crib. Another had died shortly after his christening because the infant crown had been forced onto his head. Possibly more reliable, certainly more conventional accounts lay the cause of death of both previous crown princes to trouble with teething. In any case, the baby’s grandfather, Frederick I, had cause to be delighted when at six months the infant crown prince Frederick had six teeth and was still alive.

A year later, Frederick I died, the victim of a mad third wife, who somehow eluded her custodians one morning wearing only a white shift and petticoat. She made straight for the bedchamber of the king, who mistook her for the apparition that was said always to herald death in the Hohenzollern family—“the White Lady”—and the shock killed him. Every account holds this story to be true.

THE HOHENZOLLERNS were a funny bunch, but Brandenburg was lucky to get them, which says something about its earlier history. A hill fortress town, it was taken by siege in the twelfth century by a prince of the Ascanian family, whose name, like many in the Brandenburg line, was pointed: Albert the Bear. The emperor had given Albert the task of protecting Germany’s North Mark from the heathen hordes to the east, and in time Albert found himself with the means to expand his territories, which eventually came to be a scattered patchwork collectively known as the Mark of Brandenburg.

After the Ascanian family died out, Brandenburg changed hands several times, and for a couple of centuries things went from bad to worse. First it went to the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, whose contest with the Hapsburgs for primacy in the empire inspired in them exactly no interest in an unimportant sandy wasteland to the north except as a source of taxes and whatever else they could grab from a distance. Their complete negligence of Brandenburg would have been a gift, but in the event, having soaked it for what they could and being unwilling even to visit the territory, the Wittelsbach elector sold it to Luxembourg, whose monarch simply gave it to a man named Frederick. This Frederick had fought beside him against the Turks, had become his good friend, and Frederick’s family had already acquired a few lands scattered around Germany over the past two centuries by marriage, by purchase, and by force. These were the Hohenzollerns, and the man named Frederick now became Frederick I of Brandenburg.

Understandably surly after the treatment it had received from its various overlords, Brandenburg’s snubbed, pickpocketed nobles gave this Frederick a very hard time. His successor beat them down, though, with a strategy whose subtlety can be deduced from his nickname, “Iron Tooth.”

The names of Iron Tooth’s successors seem less descriptive than ironic. In any case, Albert Achilles really had no notable weak point. In fact, it was Achilles who finally figured out the obvious virtues of primogeniture: that if you did not spread your inheritance among all of your descendants but gave it all to the first son, your lands and your power would be consolidated rather than fractionated. This sounds rather obvious, but the former policy made for a thousand tiny dukedoms and principalities and centuries of complicated, self-defeating German politics. The Hohenzollern policy of primogeniture would become one of their most important advantages.

Unfortunately, Achilles’ successor, John Cicero, was no Cicero either, being what historian Sidney Fay called “innocent of any interest in the new Renaissance movement that was beginning to transform the intellectual life of South Germany.”

THIS BRINGS US, roughly, to the reign of Frederick the Wise and the Hohenzollern cardinal Albert of Mainz, whose enthusiastic salesman Johann Tetzel did so much to color Martin Luther’s already jaundiced view of indulgences. We enter as well into some of the same historical territory passed through by the ancestors of Sebastian Bach, but to Albert and his descendant Hohenzollerns, the history of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly during the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, looked very different from the way it looked to the senior Bachs, rather like the difference in perspective between warden and prisoner.

The Hohenzollern Cardinal of Mainz was a ravenously ambitious and entirely secular figure who had bought two important bishoprics at the ridiculous age of twenty-three. At twenty-five he set out to buy the archbishopric of Mainz, which would make him primate of all Germany. Fine, said the pope’s man, that will be twelve thousand ducats for the Twelve Apostles. Albert said he thought maybe seven thousand ducats for the Seven Deadly Sins would be more appropriate. Thanks to the Ten Commandments, Albert got his red hat, but having already laid out cash for his other two bishoprics, he had to borrow the money.

To help him pay off the loan and to help with expenses for St. Peter’s in Rome (like Michelangelo’s fee), for which he would take half the receipts, the pope gave Albert a ten-year license to sell indulgences of unprecedented potency. These indulgences could actually work on future sins, so that, having paid the right price for a particular sin, you were preemptively absolved and presumably could feel at ease sinning likewise for the rest of your life. The pope authorized Albert to promise, seriously, that even violating the Mother of God Herself could be forgiven by these indulgences. It was the prospective-absolution feature of these indulgences, a patent encouragement to sin, that made Luther especially furious.

Albert clearly had chosen the right man for the job. When Tetzel came into a city he arrived in procession, holding a huge red cross, fronted by flags and drums and a herald proclaiming, “The Grace of God and of the Holy Father is at the gates!” Making straight for the cathedral, he would plant his cross by the high altar and set his strongbox up beside it. Taking the pulpit, he gave his pitch: “At the very instant that the money rattles at the bottom of the chest, the soul escapes from purgatory and flies liberated to heaven … I declare to you, though you have but a single coat, you ought to strip it off and sell it.” Then he would stand by the strongbox, examining each supplicant in turn to determine the amount due. Kings and princes were good for twenty-five ducats, barons ten, etc. The various sins had prices too. Witchcraft was forgiven for two ducats, polygamy for six, murder for eight, and the sin of all sins, stealing money from the church, cost nine. (It is hard to believe that this one could be forgiven indefinitely, however expensive the indulgence.)

Just as Albert and Tetzel had got started with their new indulgences, on the eve of All Saints’ Day 1517, when Frederick the Wise would have put out his relics and indulgence fever would be at a pitch, Luther pinned to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg his “95 Theses,” which took off directly from the promises in Tetzel’s latest spiel. For example:

27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].

28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone …

46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons …

75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God—this is madness! …

Drawing to a close, he posed a series of statements from which he diplomatically distanced himself by characterizing them as “shrewd questions from the laity”:

84. “… What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul’s own need, free it for pure love’s sake?”

86. Again: — “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”

The rest, as they say, is history, one of whose most wonderful ironies is that we have a Hohenzollern to thank, if only indirectly, for the Protestant Reformation.

A FEW YEARS LATER another Hohenzollern named Albert had an encounter with Martin Luther of a very different sort. This Albert was the cardinal’s cousin, who had managed to get himself elected grandmaster of the Order of Teutonic Knights, a once-powerful group of German nobles who had taken over Prussia by putting down its heathen locals, which involved pretty much exterminating them. They prospered for a time, but that was centuries ago. Now, despised by their subjects and beaten repeatedly on the battlefield when they attempted to expand into Poland and Lithuania, they had been reduced to a small Polish fiefdom. They kept their dreams of independence alive by electing ever richer grandmasters to fill their treasury for more doomed military exploits. That was the reason they elected Albert of Hohenzollern. It was a bad mistake.

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 Hohenzollern 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 converted 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 watched 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 is 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 during 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.”