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

imagined the moment when the first contrapuntist, stumbling on a perpetual canon, found “the beginning and end bound together” and discovered “the eternal unending origins as well as the harmony of all eternity”

      From such a celestial height, perhaps it is possible to look again at a young boy copying music from his brother’s notebook on a moonlit night and see what he is doing a bit more clearly. The composers in the “moonlight manuscript”—Kerll, Froberger, Pachelbel—were the reigning masters of counterpoint, men who knew about the great design, who plied its strings and levers. To a boy so recently an orphan, simply the belief that there was such a design—that God was present in an orderly universe—must have been as comforting as it was elusive. His brother’s notebook was the closest Sebastian had ever come to such an idea of life and music, and the gesture of putting his hand through the grille of that cupboard was about more than the desire for a musical education: He was reaching for answers. Christoph had been Pachelbel’s (the sorcerer’s) apprentice, so the secrets in his notebook were worth any amount of lost sleep to Sebastian. But in this light, Christoph’s attitude is no less understandable: What gave his little brother, a schoolboy, the right to such precious and hard-won knowledge? Of course his brother took away Sebastian’s copy of the notebook, and of course he would have forbidden anyone to copy it in the first place.

      Such a reading of this anecdote requires no great psychoanalytic reach. Sebastian’s worldview was profoundly allegorical, like that of his time and culture. The favored allegories at the time were Lutheran, of course, but not exclusively so. After all, Kepler had read horoscopes, and both Newton and Leibniz still had hopes for alchemy. Efforts to advance the education of Sebastian’s day could hardly be called enlightened, confounded as they still were by ignorance and superstition. The seventeenth-century educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius, for example, introduced physics into the curriculum, but it was a physics in which the world’s qualities were exactly three: “consistence, oleosity and aquasity,” the attributes of salt, sulfur, and mercury, a decidedly medieval stew. So Sebastian’s education was as thoroughly theological, or, more broadly, mythological, as his father’s and grandfather’s had been.

      In tertia, where Sebastian began his Lyceum studies in Ohrdruf, there was some reading of classics and history, but it was carefully edited for religious content; most of his class time was spent on Scripture and the catechism. In secunda and the first part of prima, he got lots of Latin—especially rhetoric and oratory—as well as some Greek, math, history and science, but his hardest work was on Leonhard Hutter’s exhaustive and exhausting exegesis on Lutheran doctrine, the Compendium locorum theologicorum, hundreds and hundreds of pages in Latin, great chunks of which he was expected to memorize.

      Given his class standing, he obviously mastered it, but it is difficult to see how, even for someone trying to throw himself into work. Outside of class, the lovely singing voice that got him his scholarship made him an anchor not only of the chorus musicus but also of a smaller group that did advanced works for the church as well as weddings and funerals. At the same time he must have been practicing the organ and harpsichord for long hours every day. He credited his brother Christoph with giving him his first keyboard lessons, but by the time he left Ohrdruf, after only five years, his technical mastery was already prodigious. The transformation of a novice into a budding virtuoso in five years would have been a remarkable feat even without all his other work, an accomplishment for which even the best teacher could not take credit.

      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 Lunüeburg, 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 Luüneburg 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 collection, 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