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

Prussia, promising to hang his tutors the minute he took the throne, when, at the age of seventeen, Sebastian finished his studies at St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg. By that time he was a skilled composer, his improvisations were dazzlingly original, and his virtuosity was outrageous. After what was probably his first audition for a real job, the council of Sangerhausen, a large town with a serious musical tradition, voted unanimously to make him their principal organist. For all the hard work his early mastery had required of him, however, and despite the obvious fact of his genius, all he could have taken from that remarkable early triumph was confirmation of just how far the support of a town council would get him: After they had voted unanimously in his favor and made him a firm offer, the job went to a favorite of the local duke. As a result, Sebastian’s first job was as a “lackey” at the court of Weimar, where he filled in for the aging organist and sat in with the ducal Kapelle as needed. He later elevated himself to “house musician” on his résumé, but in fact he worked at the level of a valet, in livery full-time. Never one to underestimate his gifts or his due, Sebastian quickly found his way out of Weimar, out of uniform, and out of any vestigial naïveté of youth. The next time he went into an audition, he had the job wired, possibly even rigged.

      The Thuringian town of Arnstadt needed an organist, and the Bach family had deep roots there. During the Thirty Years War Sebastian’s great-grandfather had lived in the castle’s clock tower, responsible for winding the clock, caroling the hours, and sounding the alarm for fires and approaching armies. Since then no fewer than six of Sebastian’s forebears had held musical positions in Arnstadt, including his father, so his connections could hardly have been better. Beyond family pull, his main sponsor appears to have been Arnstadt’s sometime mayor Martin Feldhaus, who happened also to be Uncle Christoph’s brother-in-law. Feldhaus had been charged with supervising the construction of an organ for the town’s so-called New Church, which by this time was far from new. It replaced a church that had burned down more than a hundred years before, but it had never had an organ. Thanks to a wealthy citizen’s bequest of a thousand thalers, a third of the organ’s total cost (three thousand thalers was the equivalent of more than two hundred thousand dollars), it was finally completed while Bach was at Weimar.

      Feldhaus nominated Bach^* to do the final examination of the organ. A coach was sent to Weimar for him, and he was paid a per diem, a handsome fee, and all expenses. Why he was chosen for the job is something of a mystery. He had as yet no history as an organ expert, and although he certainly was one, there were quite a few others around (including several Bachs) who were not still in their teens. Having done the examination, he also played the official concert to inaugurate the organ, for which he was given another fee, recorded by Feldhaus as having been paid to the “Court Organist to the Prince of Saxe-Weimar,” a very impressive and entirely fictitious promotion. Almost immediately thereafter Bach was offered the organist’s job. There is no record of anyone else even auditioning for it.

      Not only did he get the job, he also got a very light workload and an unusually generous salary: for only four services a week, he was paid fifty florins (his father’s salary for running all of the town music in Eisenach), as well as an additional thirty-four for board and lodging. By way of comparison, an Arnstadt organist senior to Bach was paid twenty florins for ten services, and an in-kind payment for board that was exactly one and a half bushels of wheat. Bach’s pay no doubt recognized his genius, but there is more than a hint of self-dealing on Feldhaus’s part as well. The salary was drawn from various sources—twenty-five florins from the church treasury, another twenty-five from the tax on beer (among the biggest pots in many town treasuries), and, oddly, a bonus of thirty-four florins from St. George’s Hospital. Not coincidentally, the inspector of hospitals was none other than Martin Feldhaus, the amount of the hospital bonus was exactly what Bach needed for room and board, and Feldhaus was the owner of the house where he ended up living. (Also staying there was Feldhaus’s niece, who would become Bach’s first wife.)

      A few years later, Feldhaus was the object of a nasty set of charges, including “much incorrectness and embezzlement,” and removed from his positions of responsibility. Still, his entrepreneurial flourish of 1703 launched one of world’s great composers—and made Bach’s hagiographic memory a little more human. Even at eighteen, fresh out of livery, he was working the system. “You have just come into the affairs and dealings of the world,” Luther wrote (in a passage of Bible commentary that Bach marked for emphasis), “and you have just begun to understand … the world. You have swallowed some water, and you have learned to swim.”

      AS A CHURCH organist, Bach had to confront at the very outset of his career the need to incorporate Lutheran theology into his musical ideas. The greatest part of his job at the New Church was to introduce congregational singing with “chorale preludes,” sometimes improvised but always artfully contrived introductions to the hymns that had become the soul music of Protestant Germany. Seeded by thirty-six hymns handed down from Luther himself, the chorale repertoire by this time had matured under a century and a half of care and propagation by a thousand pastors, schoolmasters, and cantors, to the point that it became the very melody of daily life. Like a later (much later) generation’s “golden oldies,” Germany’s beloved chorales carried widely shared meanings and memories with them, a world of associations conjured in a phrase. During the Thirty Years War, they were expressions of hope uttered in the face of violence and chaos. Soldiers sang them as they marched to war; peasants and townsfolk sang them as they awaited the approach of foreign armies, bracing themselves with memories of a better time and the hope of better times to come. Not surprisingly, having been composed during years of plague, famine, and war, many of the chorales dwelled longingly on the sweetness of death.

      Luther had encouraged making chorales out of popular songs—“Why should the devil have all the best tunes?”—but he insisted that each melody be yoked securely to its proper spiritual message, the music chosen and arranged precisely to promote the text. Luther’s chief musical assistant, Johann Walter, harmonized the first chorales during a marathon work session with Luther in Wittenberg. “He kept me [there] for three weeks,” Walter wrote later.

      It is clear, I think, that the Holy Spirit was at work.… Luther set the notes to the text, with the correct accentuation and prosody throughout—a masterful accomplishment. I was curious, and asked him where he had learned how to do it. He laughed at my simplicity, and said: “The poet Virgil taught me. He was able to fit his meter and diction to the story he was telling. Just so should music fit its notes and melodies to the text.”

      Luther’s idea of music as the faithful servant of theology inspired every Baroque composer’s defining challenge: to devise melodies and harmonies that could carry and dramatize meaning, or, to put it a bit oversimply, to make music speak in words.