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

encounter with Prussia’s young king threatened to bring into question some of the most important qualities by which he defined himself, as a musician and as a man. It would also present him the opportunity for one of the most powerful and eloquent assertions of principle he had ever made, but that would have been anything but clear to him at the time.

      Bach came despite the challenges involved because Frederick was the employer of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the chief harpsichordist in Prussia’s royal Kapelle. Carl had been hired on when Frederick was still crown prince, hiding from his father the fact that he had any musicians and paying their salaries by borrowing secretly from foreign governments and padding his expenses. It was even then an extraordinary group, including the best composers and musicians of the “modern” generation, most of them well known to—but a good deal younger than—Carl’s father. Frederick had been hinting broadly that he would like to meet “old Bach” ever since Carl had come to work for him, and Carl’s letters home had reflected a growing concern that at some point the king’s wish would become his command. But no one knew better than Carl just what a collision of worlds a meeting between his flashy, self-regarding employer and his irascible, deeply principled father would be.

      There were very few similarities indeed between the young king and the old composer, but there was this one: They stood firm in their respective roles, their fields of work having been determined by long ancestry. The Hohenzollern dynasty had ruled in Germany for three hundred years before Frederick was born and would rule for two hundred more, to the end of World War I. The Bach line stretched from Luther across three centuries, and theirs too was a family business; more than five dozen Bachs held important musical positions in German towns, courts, and churches between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

      Such strong ancestral lines made the journey to Potsdam even more pointedly a foray into enemy territory for Bach, of course, not only literally, as a proud son of Saxony standing against the aggressive Prussian neighbor, but figuratively as well: The king and the composer faced each other as the embodiments of warring values. Bach was a devout Lutheran householder who had had twenty children with two wives; one left him a widower, the second was waiting for him at home. Frederick, a bisexual misanthrope in a childless, political marriage, was a lapsed Calvinist whose reputation for religious tolerance arose from the fact that he held all religions equally in contempt. Bach wrote and spoke German. Frederick boasted that he had “never read a German book.”

      Nowhere were they more different, though, than in their attitudes toward music. Bach represented church music and especially the “learned counterpoint” of canon and fugue, a centuries-old craft that by now had developed such esoteric theories and procedures that some of its practitioners saw themselves as the custodians of a quasi-divine art, even as weavers of the cosmic tapestry itself. Frederick and his generation were having none of that. They denigrated counterpoint as the vestige of an outworn aesthetic, extolling instead the “natural and delightful” in music, by which they meant the easier pleasure of song, the harmonic ornamentation of a single line of melody. For Bach this new, so-called galant style, with all its lovely figures and stylish grace, was full of emptiness. Bach’s cosmos was one in which the planets themselves played the ultimate harmony, a tenet that had been unquestioned since the “sacred science” of Pythagoras; composing and performing music was for him and his musical ancestors a deeply spiritual enterprise whose sole purpose, as his works were inscribed, was “for the glory of God.” For Frederick the goal of music was simply to be “agreeable,” an entertainment and a diversion, easy work for performer and audience alike. He despised music that, as he put it, “smells of the church” and called Bach’s chorales specifically “dumb stuff.” Cosmic notions like the “music of the spheres” were for him so much dark-age mumbo jumbo.

      In short, Bach was a father of the late Baroque, and Frederick was a son of the early Enlightenment, and no father-son conflict has ever been more pointed. Put all too simply, as any one-sentence description of the Enlightenment must be, myth and mysticism were giving way to empiricism and reason, the belief in the necessity of divine grace to a confidence in human perfectibility, the descendants of Pythagoras and Plato to those of Newton. In music, as in virtually every other intellectual pursuit, the intuitions, attitudes, and ideas of a thousand years were being exchanged for principles and habits of thought that are still evolving and in question three centuries later. Frederick the Great and Johann Sebastian Bach met at the tipping point between ancient and modern culture, and what flowed from their meeting would be a more than musical expression of that historic moment.

      WHEN FREDERICK SAW “old Bach’s” name on the visitors’ list, he called for the composer to be brought to the palace immediately. Bach no doubt was looking forward to settling in at Carl’s house for the evening—he would have been exhausted—but this was a summons, not an invitation. What followed was reported in a palace press release that was picked up by newspapers in Prussia, Saxony, and other German territories.

      One hears from Potsdam that last Sunday the famous Kapellmeister from Leipzig, Herr Bach, arrived [at the castle].… His August self [Frederick] went, at [Bach’s] entrance, to the so-called Forte et Piano, condescending also to play, in His Most August Person and without any preparation, a theme for the Kapellmeister Bach, which he should execute in a fugue. This was done so happily by the aforementioned Kapellmeister that not only His Majesty was pleased to show his satisfaction thereat, but also all those present were seized with astonishment. Herr Bach found the theme propounded to him so exceedingly beautiful that he intends to set it down on paper as a regular fugue and have it engraved on copper.…

      The account is incomplete, and the blur of Baroque rhetoric somewhat obscures the story. The facts are these: Frederick gave Bach an impossibly long and complex musical figure and asked the old master to make a three-part fugue of it, which was a bit like giving the word salad to a poet and asking for a sonnet. So difficult was the figure Bach was given that the twentieth century’s foremost composer of counterpoint, Arnold Schoenberg, marveled at the fact that it had been so cleverly contrived that it “did not admit one single canonic imitation”—in other words, that the Royal Theme, as it has come to be known, was constructed to be as resistant to counterpoint as possible. Still, Bach managed, with almost unimaginable ingenuity, to do it, even alluding to the king’s taste by setting off his intricate counterpoint with a few galant flourishes.

      When Bach had finished the three-part fugue, while his audience of virtuosi was still “seized with astonishment,” Frederick asked Bach if he could go himself one better, this time making the theme into a fugue for six voices. Knowing instantly that he had no hope of doing such a vastly more complex improvisation (Bach had never even written a six-part fugue for keyboard), he demurred with the observation that not every subject is suitable for improvisation in six voices; he said he would have to work it out on paper and send it to Frederick later. Clearly no one would have faulted him for turning aside Frederick’s challenge—every musician and especially the composers in the room would have realized just how ridiculously demanding it was—but there is no other recorded instance in Bach’s life when he had had to concede such a defeat, and this was an exceedingly proud man, the age’s acknowledged master of both fugue and improvisation, before an audience of fellow virtuosi as well as his two oldest sons.

      Bach’s embarrassment may have been the reason he was invited to Frederick’s court in the first place. Writing two hundred years later, Arnold Schoenberg found in the Royal Theme’s uncanny complexity the evidence of a malicious scheme to humiliate Bach, to beat him at his own game. Schoenberg’s even darker conclusion, based on the belief that Frederick could never have written such an insidiously difficult theme by himself, was that the author could have been none other than Bach’s son Carl, the only person in Frederick’s court with a knowledge of counterpoint sufficient to trump his father’s. “Whether malice of his own induced [Carl], or whether the ‘joke’ was ordered by the king, can probably be proved only psychologically,” Schoenberg wrote, concluding from Frederick’s sadistic personality and bellicose martial history that his motive was “to enjoy the helplessness of the victim of his … well-prepared trap.”

      “Johann Sebastian must have recognized the bad trick,” Schoenberg continued. “That he calls his ‘Offering’ a Musikalisches Opfer is very peculiar,