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

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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.