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

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.

* In the Latin school system there were six grades for students ranging in age from seven to the early twenties—sixth grade (sextaj to first (prima), the last grade before university.

       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