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

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.

      As time went on, Frederick’s curiosity ranged further and further from the cramped curriculum his father had prescribed for him. Fortunately for his education, his tutor Jacques Duhan was a wise and intrepid teacher, who followed his student’s interests and even, over time, helped him to amass a secret library, hidden in the locked closets of a house he rented near the castle. The library eventually grew to almost four thousand volumes, ranging from pre-Socratic philosophers to the writers of the early Enlightenment. When his father ended Frederick’s formal education at the age of fifteen and pensioned off the tutor, Frederick wrote Duhan: “I promise that when I have my own money I will give you 2400 crown a year and I will always love you, even a little more than now if that is possible.”

      FREDERICK WILLIAM’S PROGRAM for his son was subtly but relentlessly subverted by Frederick’s mother. For much of his childhood he lived at her palace, called Monbijou, with his sister Wilhelmina, his elder by three years. Queen Sophia Dorothea was a Hanover, the daughter of England’s King George I and sister of George II. (She was also the first cousin of her husband, whose mother was a Hanover.) In a replay of his parents’ relationship, Frederick William loved his wife (he called her his Fiechen, a diminutive of Sophia), and Sophia Dorothea felt greatly diminished by her marriage. She painted Potsdam as rough and provincial in comparison to Hanover, and she let her children know of her distaste for her egregiously fat husband, who dressed every day in his faded military uniform, got drunk every night with his silly smoking party, and was forever talking about ein Plus machen. She was more than free with her opinions with her children: She consciously deployed them as part of a strategy to win them over to her vision of a real court (Hanover), the majesty of a real royal life (certainly not this one), the beauty of elaborate balls at which the latest in courtly music was played by the finest musicians. In this way and more direct ones, she made it clear to the children that they had a choice to make between her and their father. At one point, Wilhelmina wrote, her mother fiercely upbraided her for going to her father about some minor matter. She “reminded me that she had ordered me to attach myself to her exclusively; and that if I ever applied to the King again, she would be fiercely angry.…”

      Their father placed no less claim on their affection, of course, so Frederick and Wilhelmina, caught between antagonistic parents and their separate, dueling courts, found shelter in each other. They giggled conspiratorially at both parents’ dinner tables, made faces at each other when forced by their father to listen to his pastor’s sermons, and delighted in their common passion for music, which was perhaps the only unalloyed delight of their young lives.

      Both clearly came to favor their mother. In her memoir, Wilhelmina paints a distinctly (and justly) unfavorable portrait of both parents but reserves her faintest praise for the king. “His table was served with frugality,” she wrote. “It never exceeded necessities. His principal occupation was to drill a regiment.” As for Frederick, Wilhelmina (at least as a child) had only deep affection and loyalty. “He was the most amiable prince that could be seen,” she wrote of her younger brother, “handsome, well made, of an understanding superior to his years, and possessed of every quality that forms a perfect prince.”

      What the queen wanted more than anything was that her children would marry Hanovers, who were now England’s royal family. Wilhelmina was to marry the prince of Wales and Frederick his sister, Princess Amalia. Sophia Dorothea, then, would someday be mother not only to the king of Prussia but also to the queen of England, a prospect which suited her. The spies, of course, had to make sure that never happened, since it would put Prussia in England’s camp rather than the empire’s. Until the “double-marriage” plan could be completely unraveled, therefore, the spies worked “Fatty” hard, and so did the queen. Both sides used the same carrot: the aggrandizement of Prussia. The empire dangled two provinces on the Rhine, Jülich and Berg, that both the Great Elector and Frederick William’s father felt, with justice, the empire had taken from them wrongly. (The empire had no intention of actually supporting the claim, and it was characteristic of their view of Prussia that they offered as a prize something they had blatantly appropriated.) England, in its alliance with France against the empire, held out a future for Prussia as a coequal, independent, sovereign state rather than the role of imperial lackey and also support for his claim to Jülich-Berg. In trying to gain advantage for that position, the queen played a very treacherous game. Among other things, she recruited the French ambassador to Berlin, Konrad Alexander von Rothenburg, to be the conduit for secret messages to the English court, essentially plotting with them against her husband and king.

      Not surprisingly, Frederick William frequently had the feeling something was going on behind his back. Who would not have been confused and suspicious, caught between the pleading of an ambitious and deceitful wife whom he loved and the advice of spies whom he considered his best advisers and closest friends?

      AS HE GREW older, Frederick seemed to be less and less his father’s son and more and more his mother’s. He had never really liked hunting, and now when they went to the hunting lodge at Wusterhausen, he hid. Once when he should have been stalking game, his father found him in a clump of bushes reading. He fell off his horse. He curled his hair. He slept late. He called his uniform “the shroud.” He and his sister were ever more faithfully part of their mother’s cabal, to the point that she was able to draw Frederick into her conspiracy with the French minister, at which point her little prince began to demonstrate a distinct taste for intrigue.

      His mother’s ability to bring Frederick into her perilous orbit owed a great deal to the fact that he was being physically abused and humiliated by his father. The beatings began when Frederick was twelve, and on a fixed date. Father and son were at a dinner party given by one of the spies, Field Marshal von Grumbkow. (Grumbkow was Frederick William’s war minister, of all things. The other spy was the former imperial ordnance master Count von Seckendorff.) In his cups, the king wrapped his arm around the crown prince and began loudly to give him advice, the rest of the party his audience. According to a dispatch from the Saxon minister to Dresden after the party, as he spoke the king began patting his son’s cheek for emphasis. “Fritz, listen to what I am going to say to you. Keep always a good large army [light tap], you cannot have a better friend and without this friend you will not be able to sustain yourself [harder tap]. Our neighbors desire nothing better than to make us turn a somersault. I know their intentions; you will learn [very hard tap] to know them. Believe me, do not trust in vanity—attach thyself to the real [harder]. Have a good army and money [harder]. In these consist the glory [harder] of the king [harder].” Word of the incident made its way to the capitals of all nations represented at the Prussian court.

      From that point on, the beatings became increasingly frequent, humiliating, and severe. He beat Frederick for wearing gloves on a cold day at the hunt. He beat him for eating with a silver fork instead of a steel one. He beat him in front of servants, officers, and diplomats. He threw the prince to the floor and kicked him, berating him at the top of his lungs and beating him with his cane.

      Frederick