Evening in the Palace of Reason
TEN DAYS BEFORE his fifteenth birthday, Sebastian put his clothes in a bag, strung a violin over his shoulder, and set out, on foot, for a new school more than two hundred miles away. Nobody in his family had ventured so far from their Thuringian heartland, but of course Sebastian was not anybody else. The move was forced on him. Christoph’s home was becoming overcrowded as his family grew, and Sebastian could no longer pay for his keep because for unknown reasons he had lost his job as a tutor to the children of wealthy citizens. He may have felt he was being orphaned yet again, but in fact the offer of a choral scholarship to St. Michael’s Lyceum in Lüneburg, a town almost four times the size of Ohrdruf, was providential. His brother would probably have told him not to go there but to apprentice himself to a master as Christoph had done at this age. None of Sebastian’s siblings or ancestors had gone as far in school as he had gone already. But there was a wonderful library at St. Michael’s, with a famous collection of all the contrapuntal art of Europe; and Lüneburg was not far from Hamburg, the largest and most musical city in Germany.
For a boy who had known only Eisenach and Ohrdruf, Lüneburg was another country, with large open public squares, Renaissance architecture, and a distractingly robust musical life. We know that Sebastian graduated St. Michael’s, but there are no claims for his academic excellence there. When his voice changed soon after he arrived, he kept his music scholarship by singing bass and playing keyboards and violin, but apart from choral service the plainest trail he left in Lüneburg was extravagantly extracurricular.
While St. Michael’s tried to teach him yet more Latin, Sebastian taught himself French and Italian, which he needed to make his way through the music library. As Leo Schrade noted in his deceptively small book, Bach: The Conflict Between the Sacred and the Secular, the richness of the library at St. Michael’s must have been dazzling to Sebastian but also somewhat disorienting: There was a great deal of German church music in the collec-tion, but none of it was as German as it was the work of German composers writing in French or English or Italian or Dutch, the problem that sent Handel off to Italy and Telemann into the opera. After serving as a battleground for the great powers, Germany had not developed its own musical (or any other) traditions since the Thirty Years War so much as it absorbed them, a fact which Bach’s foremost predecessor, the great composer Heinrich Schütz, bemoaned in his late life even as he continued to write in the style of Monteverdi. German princes spoke French. The best music came to Germany from Venice or Amsterdam—by sea, to the port of Hamburg.
Hamburg thus became the seedbed of change for German music, and in search of Germany’s musical future and his own, Sebastian more than once made the arduous several days’ walk to Hamburg and back, taking on the role of journeyman musician. Hamburg had not only a robust, distinctly German school of organists but also an opera. Astride both was the octogenarian Johann Adam Reinken, organist at St. Catherine’s Church and one of the opera’s founders. Reinken’s magnificent organ, with its four keyboards, fifty-eight stops, and full pedal keyboard, had enormous range and power—from the great thirty-two-foot pipes and their thunderous bass to the tiniest whistles, for piccolo and flute. Reinken’s was the largest organ Bach had ever seen and became the measure by which he would judge all others. Perhaps first at Reinken’s Hamburg apartment, he came under the influence of the great Dietrich Buxtehude, organist at St. Mary’s in Lübeck and a composer of outsize ambition and ability who was working with all the styles and traditions of Europe. Buxtehude would have a more than musical influence on Sebastian in his first job, and it was in him perhaps more than anywhere else that Sebastian would find the inspiration for what was perhaps his greatest gift to Western culture: forging from a multinational babel a single language of European music.
SIXTY MILES OF very bad roads from St. Michael’s school in Lüneburg, in another direction entirely from the road to Hamburg, lay one of Germany’s many mini-Versailles, the very fashionable dukedom of Celle, where, according to his son Carl, Sebastian was exposed to the latest in French culture and music, including the works of Lebègue, Marais, Marchand, Couperin, and especially Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Sun King’s own composer and so the paragon of French music (himself however a Florentine, an embarrassment Louis was persuaded to overlook only by the richness of Lully’s sycophancy).
Though he learned and adopted a great deal from French music, Sebastian must have been mystified by the French attitude toward it. Like everything else at Versailles and in seventeenth-century France, music was a slave to the narcissism and power of Louis XIV. Its purpose was, simply, to serve the king: as background to his clavecin or lute playing, as accompaniment to the ballets he danced in, and to cover for the noise of the brilliant new machines that allowed whales to belch fireworks and permitted Louis himself to fly as Jupiter on the back of an eagle and as various other deities to float along on clouds in the ostentatious theatricals staged to reinforce his myth. Bach certainly would write flattering music to and for kings and princes, but his music always had a higher goal in mind, the glory of which royal power was but a pale shadow. In France, though, music had only one purpose more important than the glorification of Louis. The palace gossip sheet Mercure galant prattled on about how music mirrored the harmony of the universe and was therefore the king’s handmaiden as the arbiter and source of all good order, etc., but the fact was that Louis needed music and musical spectacles to keep his nobles occupied. Dukes with time on their hands had been no end of trouble to his father and Cardinal Richelieu, and Louis knew that a rich court life would keep them distracted and keep them where he could see them. He learned that from his own Cardinal Mazarin, who imported Italian singers, composers, and instrumentalists to distract Louis himself from the notion of meddling in state affairs as a boy king.
In time the Italian composers began to experiment with chromaticism and dissonance, to introduce passion into their music. This was controversial, and so the Italians were banished. Louis then put his imprimatur on Lully’s elaborately ornamented, courtly pleasantries, whose halting, ceremonial rhythms were difficult enough to walk much less dance to, a kind of musical Stump the Nobles. (There were other, similarly hobbling fashions; ladies were forced to kneel in their coaches, for example, to compete in that heyday of haute coiffure.) Lully’s Florentine background was inconvenient, but the Mercure galant, which commented frequently and with great assurance on matters of music theory, reported that Lully
knew perfectly well the necessity of renouncing the taste of his nation in order to accommodate himself to ours; he found that the French judged some things more sanely than the Italians; and he knew that music had no other end than to titillate the ear; it was unnecessary to charge it with affected dissonances.
One of Lully’s jobs was to rationalize, in just so many words, Louis’s various religious and territorial wars. In Amadis, as French armies marched on the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1683, Lully put this operatic encomium to Louis in the mouth of his heroine Urgande:
This hero triumphs so that everything will be peaceful. In vain, thousands of the envious arm themselves on all sides. With one word, with one of his glances he knows how to bend their useful fury to his will. It is for him to teach the great Art of war to the Masters of the Earth … The whole universe admires his exploits; let us go to live happily under his laws.
Pleased, Louis gave Lully a state monopoly on the staging of operas, and Lully became filthy rich. Scandal attached to him now and then. People were given to having sex in the upper galleries at the opera, Lully himself was upbraided by Louis more than once for outrageously gay behavior in public, and the nobles kept getting his singers pregnant. Fiercely disliked and openly opposed by many, including Molière and Boileau (who called Lully an “odious buffoon”), he hung on, getting richer and richer, until finally he made them all happy by impaling himself in the foot with his baton and dying of gangrene. In one of the many satires at his death, an Italian composer attempts to turn him back at the gates of Parnassus, arguing that he had played upon the French weakness for the merely fashionable in order to line his pockets. Lully replies loftily, “I declare quite frankly … that I have worked usefully for the corruption of my country, but they [the French] are no less deserving of the glory, because they have followed the composer’s intentions.”
It hardly needs to be said that nothing could be further from Bach’s exalted sense of purpose for music than Louis’s utilitarian or Lully’s mercenary one, but this early exposure to French music turns up in his earliest compositions and clearly left a deep impression on him.
Attached to St. Michael’s was a school for young nobles, called a Knights’ Academy, and probably through a friendly sponsor there he had access to the recently completed castle in Lüneburg of Duke Georg Wilhelm, where he also heard the latest music of France. The Knights’ Academy also exposed him to a less pleasant aspect of his future. The curriculum of these cadet princelings included not only the usual Latin, history, and science but also French, dancing, heraldry, and other prerequisites for the life of a francophone German noble. Bach and the other choral scholars slept every night in a dormitory just next to that of the Knights’ Academy, and some of them served the young princes as valets or tutors. Whether as valet, tutor, or just another invisible spectator among the scholarship boys, Sebastian would have witnessed every day the worst aspects of the petty nobles then living off Germany’s fractured territories, and he had every reason to be sobered by the thought that one of them might someday be his patron.
V.
GIANTS, SPIES, AND THE LASH: LIFE WITH “FATTY”
AT ABOUT THE SAME AGE BACH HAD BEEN WHEN HE walked the two hundred miles to Lüneburg, Crown Prince Frederick could be found in his favorite red-and-gold embroidered robe and slippers, his hair curled and puffed, playing flute-and-lute duets with his sister Wilhelmina. Usually a lookout was posted at the door because of the intensity with which his father despised this scene. Frederick William had set himself the task of eradicating Frederick’s “effeminate” (read: French) tastes, and in that entirely fruitless effort he employed a degree of violence perhaps unique in the annals of kings and their crown princes. What his son endured at his hands explains almost everything about the sort of man and king Frederick would become, but before getting into that we should give the father his due.
Unlike most of his aristocratic peers, Frederick William was a devoted (not devout) Protestant, a faithful husband, hardworking, plain in his tastes, and thrifty. For two years before taking the throne he had investigated the spending habits and ministers of his father, and upon his accession he got rid of both, slashing the royal budget by three quarters, sacking virtually the entire court (including the musicians), selling off most of his father’s horses, the royal silver, and the crown jewels. When he made the obligatory trip to Königsberg to receive Prussia’s homage to its new king, he took fifty horses and four days (to his father’s thirty thousand horses and two weeks), and instead of five million he spent exactly 2,547 thalers on the trip. From the first days of his reign, he made it plain that this would not be his father’s monarchy. The Saxon ambassador reported to Dresden:
Every day his majesty gives new proofs of his justice. Walking recently at Potsdam at 6 in the morning, he saw a post coach arrive with several passengers who knocked for a long time at the post house which was still closed. The King, seeing that no one opened the door, joined them in knocking and even knocked in some window-panes. The master of the post then opened the door and scolded the travelers, for no one recognized the King. But His Majesty let himself be known by giving the official some good blows of his cane and drove him from his house and his job after apologizing to the travelers for his laziness. Examples of this sort, of which I could relate several others, make everybody alert and exact.
Very much in contrast to the contemporary German princes Bach knew at the Knights’ Academy, a bunch of narcissistic, free-spending little Sun Kings, Frederick William built a model orphanage, provided for poor widows, recovered large tracts of wetlands for agriculture, and helped to elevate the craft of administration to the level of science, creating in his two universities the first chairs in cameralism, a theoretical approach to managing a centralized economy. In service to his almost obsessive attention to his kingdom’s finances—he was forever telling his son about the virtues of ein Plus machen, making a profit—he radically reorganized his administration with a remarkable “Instruction” to his ministers that covered everything from punctuality to trade policy. The structure he created became a fairly efficient bureaucracy, but the Instruction itself betrayed its autocratic (not to mention compulsive) author. For example, he was determined not to let Prussian goods get away by allowing his people to export wool, so he decreed that all of it would be used—and how:
The General Directory shall compare the total of the wool manufactured with the total of the wool produced. Let us suppose the first total to be inferior to the second, and that 2,000 pounds of the wool at first quality and 1,000 pounds of medium quality will not find buyers. The General Directory shall establish in a city nine drapers, each of which will use 300 pounds of good wool, and employ one hundred operatives in the stocking manufactories, each of which will work up at least 10 pounds of medium wool. The evil is remedied.
After he published this Instruction, the penalty for anyone caught exporting wool was strangulation.
“A king needs to be strong,” he said. “In order to be strong he must have a good army. In order to maintain a good army he must pay it. In order to pay it he must raise the money.” His ideas were few and those borrowed—this one was the advice of his grandfather, the Great Elector—but he lived by them. During his reign he would build up ein Plus of no less than eight million thalers, he would double the size of his army, and through drill, discipline, and innovation, he would make them the envy of the great powers of Europe. Powerful nations, he told his son, “will always be obliged to seek a prince who has a hundred thousand men ready for action and twenty-five million crowns to sustain them … All the most imposing powers seek me, and emulate each other in fondling me, as they would a bride.”
Really it was beyond fondling, they were all over him, but most of the time he had no clue they were taking advantage of him. His two closest ministers were employed as spies by the Hapsburgs. Their code name for the him was “Fatty.” “Have no fears,” one of them wrote in a dispatch. “Fatty’s heart is in my hands, I can do with him as I like …” Frederick William would have called this man one of his best friends.
The result was a foreign policy that could only be described as a mess. At a time when diplomacy was as shadowy and filled with intrigue as it would ever be, Prussia had a king who did not deal well with ambiguity, and no one was more aware of this weakness than himself, one of the reasons he was frequently in a rage. The French ambassador wrote to Versailles: “The variable moods of the King of Prussia and his profound dissimulation are infinitely above all that Your Majesty can imagine.” In fact, though, he was less deceitful than simply confused most of the time, acting on the advice of spies, always stumbling out of the trouble they made for him and that he made for himself. He had witnessed and resented how his father and grandfather had been undercut and cheated by a variety of powers, including the Hapsburgs, but he was powerless to avenge them. “Follow the example of your father in finance and military affairs,” he told Frederick one day. “Take care not to imitate him in what is called ministerial affairs, for he understands nothing about that.”
Frederick William’s chief consolations in life were getting drunk and kidnapping giants (not at the same time). He had stolen hundreds and thousands of very large, mostly moronic men for his ornamental guard, the Potsdam Grenadiers, from their homes and fields and from the armies of enemies and friends alike (another diplomatic blooper). At one point kidnapping the giants got a little expensive for him, so he tried breeding them instead, insisting that every large citizen of the realm marry an equally large person, but mixed results sent him back to kidnapping. His methods were varied and no-nonsense. A priest was taken from the altar of his church during mass. “Prussian recruiters hover about barracks, parade-grounds, in Foreign Countries,” Carlyle reports, adding that they “hunt with some vigor.”
For example, in the town of Jülich there lived and worked a tall young carpenter: one day a well-dressed, positive-looking gentleman … enters the shop; wants “a stout chest, with lock on it [and] … must be six feet six in length … an indispensable point,—in fact it will be longer than yourself, Herr Zimmerman.” … At the appointed day he reappears; the chest is ready … “Too short, as I dreaded!” says the positive gentleman. “Nay, your Honor,” says the carpenter … “Well, it is.”—“No, it isn’t!” The carpenter, to end the matter, gets into the chest [and] the positive gentleman, a Prussian recruiting officer in disguise, slams down the lid upon him; locks it; whistles in three stout fellows, who pick up the chest [and go].
In most cases these stories had unhappy endings, and this one was unhappier than most. When the coffin was opened the carpenter was found to have suffocated, and the positive gentleman, one Baron von Hompesch, spent the rest of his life in prison. Obviously, given the lengths to which the baron was willing to go, Frederick William’s gratitude for his giants was extreme. When he was in one of his melancholy moods, which were frequent, having a few hundred of them file past him was known to be a reliable pick-me-up.
The other was beer. At night, almost every night, he took his place with his fellows—one hesitates to call anyone in his life a friend—on a wooden bench around a wooden table set with clay pipes, tobacco, wine, and beer. Here in the so-called Tobacco College, he and his closest advisers, most of them senior military officers, consulted, at least briefly, until they muzzily transitioned into song, loud toasts, and curses at the French. (It was in the Tobacco College, later rather than earlier in the evening, that the spies did their best work.) The unwitting jester at these revels was a man named Gundling, a university-educated drunk who had been found near destitution in a tavern by one of the spies and brought into the court to read the newspaper to the family at meals. He was the master of a thousand odd facts of geography, history, and other subjects, about all of which, being credulous as well as besotted, he was easily persuaded to speak. He was the easiest and most appealing kind of target for the king, who loved nothing more than to humiliate the pompous, and Gundling bore the brunt of jokes that became more brutal the more they all drank. Frederick’s biographer Nancy Mitford reports that the group once set him on fire. He objected to their taunts (especially, one imagines, to being set ablaze), but he always came back. To reward his loyalty, to keep him around, and most of all to show how little the king thought of scholars and scholarship, Gundling was appointed to succeed Leibniz, the most profound philosopher of his generation, as head of the Berlin Academy of Sciences.
THE EGREGIOUS FLAWS of Frederick William would simply be of academic interest or entertainment value were it not for the remarkable fact that his son, a man so different from him in so many ways, would unconsciously incorporate so many of the qualities in his father that he most despised.
Of course, Frederick William carefully presided over his crown prince’s growth and education. Presided is in fact a small word for what he did. Frederick’s days and lessons were prescribed minutely by another obsessive-compulsive “Instruction” from the king to his tutors. This is Sunday:
[Frederick] is to rise at seven; and as soon as he has got his slippers on, shall kneel at his bedside, and pray to God so as all the room shall hear it … in these words: Lord God, blessed Father, I thank thee from my heart that thou hast so graciously preserved me through this night. Fit me for what thy holy will is; and grant that I do nothing this day, or all the days of my life, which can divide me from thee. For the Lord Jesus my Redeemer’s sake. Amen. After which the Lord’s prayer. Then rapidly and vigorously wash himself clean, dress and powder and comb himself … Prayer, with washing, breakfast, and the rest, to be done pointedly [by] a quarter-past seven.
That was the first fifteen minutes of a schedule that took him minute by minute up to early evening, and Sunday was his easy day.
What is most notable about the education his father set out for Frederick is what was not there: no reading in the classics, no history prior to the sixteenth century, no natural sciences or philosophy (Frederick William called it “wind-making”), no Latin. He was, however, steeped in Calvinist theology. His father instructed his pastors not to teach the boy to believe in predestination, since he was convinced it would lead to desertions by fatalist soldiers, but they taught it to Frederick anyway. In fact, years later, even when he seemed not to believe anything at all, Frederick still spoke well of predestination.
Other than religion and economics, there was only one lesson that Frederick William insisted Frederick’s tutors teach: They were charged to “infuse into my son a true love for the [life of a] Soldier … and impress on him that, as there is nothing in the world which can bring a Prince renown and honour like the sword, so he would be a despised creature before all men, if he did not love it, and seek his sole glory therein.” The same year he was submitted to the Instruction—that is to say, at the age of six—the crown prince was given his own corps of human toy soldiers, the “Crown Prince Royal Battalion of Cadets,” 131 luckless little boys whom he was to drill to Prussian standards. Two years later he was also given his own little arsenal, complete with miniature versions of the weapons in the Prussian armory, and a working cannon.
For a few years, Frederick appeared to be all his father could have hoped. Not long after he began working with his cadets, he wrote the king a letter in which he praised his troops for their precision in maneuvers and reported that he had shot his first partridge (Frederick William was an avid huntsman). The following year, at the age of seven, he sent his father an essay he had written, “How the Prince of a Great House Should Live” (“he must love his father and mother … he must love God with all his heart … he must never think evil,” etc.). At the same time his teacher was reading to him from Telemachus, a novel by Fénelon, pen name of the Archbishop of Cambrai, who wrote his novel about the son of Odysseus as a manual on monarchy for the education of Louis XIV’s grandson. Frederick William’s mother had read the book to him, and it was filled with the sort of advice to a monarch-in-waiting of which the king very much approved. “The Gods did not make him king for his own sake,” Mentor advises Telemachus. “He was intended to be the man of his people: he owes all his time to his people, all his care and all his affection, and he is worthy of royalty only in as much as he forgets his own self and sacrifices himself to the common weal.” In the age of Louis XIV, that sentiment could not have been popular at the French court, but both Frederick’s later characterization of himself as “first servant of the state” and Frederick William’s rebellion from the splendiferous court and self-image of his father have a root here.