Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines

house, “The Silver Pocket,” and hauled them twenty miles west to Eisenach, where he had rented an apartment in the home of the duke’s head forester. His position placed him among the town’s most visible and affluent figures. In a few years he became a citizen, bought a home on the market square, and joined the town council, an honorific body that met rarely and served mainly as the local duke’s rubber stamp but was at least a democratic bunch, including not only a doctor and the town organist, his cousin Christoph, but also a butcher, several keepers of the town clocks and watchtowers, a gravedigger, and three shepherds. The Bach household was large from the very beginning in Eisenach, including his three apprentices and a journeyman as well as his widowed mother-in-law and his nineteen-year-old sister, who was profoundly impaired both physically and psychologically. (When she died a few years later, the preacher at her graveside called her “a simple creature, not knowing her right hand from her left … like a child.”) Given the size of his household, Ambrosius must have been grateful for his generous starting salary and housing supplement of fifty florins, and with the promise he could double that with fees for weddings and funerals and for playing in the court Kapelle. By way of comparison, with that much money, roughly four times the town barber’s salary, he could have bought several harpsichords every year, or a dozen good lutes. Of course, he had more pressing uses for the money. Ambrosius and Maria Elisabeth brought their first baby Bach with them to Eisenach, and during the next fourteen years there they christened seven more, little imagining that the last of them, their one and only Sebastian, would someday make St. George’s baptismal font a music lovers’ site of pilgrimage.

       III.

       THE HOHENZOLLERN REAL ESTATE COMPANY

      THE CHRISTENING TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER OF the infant who would become Frederick the Great lacked nothing in pomp. The infant Frederick of Brandenburg-Hohenzollern, Prince de Prusse et d’Orange, Count of Hohenzollern, Lord of Ravenstein, and so on, was dressed in a baptismal gown made of silver cloth studded with diamonds, and he was carried to the fount of the Chapel Royal at Potsdam by two margraves and a margravine. No fewer than six countesses carried the train. The godmothers were all dowagers of this and duchesses of that, and among the five godfathers were Czar Peter the Great, and the elector of Hanover, soon to be King George I of England. We know there was music at this christening but only because the baby’s father was not yet king. When he took the throne a year later, one of his first acts was to fire the musicians.

      The royal Kapelle of Prussia’s king at the time, baby Frederick’s grandfather, Frederick I, included some of the best musicians of their day, so although the program does not survive we can be sure the music was entirely equal to the grandeur of the occasion. All the bells of the city rang out to announce the baptism of the crown prince, and we know from Thomas Carlyle (who produced his eight-volume History of Frederick the Great after thirteen years that he grimly described to Ralph Waldo Emerson as “the valley of the shadow of Frederick”) that the christening “spared no cannon-volleyings [and] kettle-drummings.” Happily, they appear to have kept the cannons at a distance. According to Carlyle, one previous heir to the Prussian throne had been killed by the shock of a triumphal volley fired too close to his crib. Another had died shortly after his christening because the infant crown had been forced onto his head. Possibly more reliable, certainly more conventional accounts lay the cause of death of both previous crown princes to trouble with teething. In any case, the baby’s grandfather, Frederick I, had cause to be delighted when at six months the infant crown prince Frederick had six teeth and was still alive.

      A year later, Frederick I died, the victim of a mad third wife, who somehow eluded her custodians one morning wearing only a white shift and petticoat. She made straight for the bedchamber of the king, who mistook her for the apparition that was said always to herald death in the Hohenzollern family—“the White Lady”—and the shock killed him. Every account holds this story to be true.

      THE HOHENZOLLERNS were a funny bunch, but Brandenburg was lucky to get them, which says something about its earlier history. A hill fortress town, it was taken by siege in the twelfth century by a prince of the Ascanian family, whose name, like many in the Brandenburg line, was pointed: Albert the Bear. The emperor had given Albert the task of protecting Germany’s North Mark from the heathen hordes to the east, and in time Albert found himself with the means to expand his territories, which eventually came to be a scattered patchwork collectively known as the Mark of Brandenburg.

      After the Ascanian family died out, Brandenburg changed hands several times, and for a couple of centuries things went from bad to worse. First it went to the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, whose contest with the Hapsburgs for primacy in the empire inspired in them exactly no interest in an unimportant sandy wasteland to the north except as a source of taxes and whatever else they could grab from a distance. Their complete negligence of Brandenburg would have been a gift, but in the event, having soaked it for what they could and being unwilling even to visit the territory, the Wittelsbach elector sold it to Luxembourg, whose monarch simply gave it to a man named Frederick. This Frederick had fought beside him against the Turks, had become his good friend, and Frederick’s family had already acquired a few lands scattered around Germany over the past two centuries by marriage, by purchase, and by force. These were the Hohenzollerns, and the man named Frederick now became Frederick I of Brandenburg.

      Understandably surly after the treatment it had received from its various overlords, Brandenburg’s snubbed, pickpocketed nobles gave this Frederick a very hard time. His successor beat them down, though, with a strategy whose subtlety can be deduced from his nickname, “Iron Tooth.”

      The names of Iron Tooth’s successors seem less descriptive than ironic. In any case, Albert Achilles really had no notable weak point. In fact, it was Achilles who finally figured out the obvious virtues of primogeniture: that if you did not spread your inheritance among all of your descendants but gave it all to the first son, your lands and your power would be consolidated rather than fractionated. This sounds rather obvious, but the former policy made for a thousand tiny dukedoms and principalities and centuries of complicated, self-defeating German politics. The Hohenzollern policy of primogeniture would become one of their most important advantages.

      Unfortunately, Achilles’ successor, John Cicero, was no Cicero either, being what historian Sidney Fay called “innocent of any interest in the new Renaissance movement that was beginning to transform the intellectual life of South Germany.”

      THIS BRINGS US, roughly, to the reign of Frederick the Wise and the Hohenzollern cardinal Albert of Mainz, whose enthusiastic salesman Johann Tetzel did so much to color Martin Luther’s already jaundiced view of indulgences. We enter as well into some of the same historical territory passed through by the ancestors of Sebastian Bach, but to Albert and his descendant Hohenzollerns, the history of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly during the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, looked very different from the way it looked to the senior Bachs, rather like the difference in perspective between warden and prisoner.

      The Hohenzollern Cardinal of Mainz was a ravenously ambitious and entirely secular figure who had bought two important bishoprics at the ridiculous age of twenty-three. At twenty-five he set out to buy the archbishopric of Mainz, which would make him primate of all Germany. Fine, said the pope’s man, that will be twelve thousand ducats for the Twelve Apostles. Albert said he thought maybe seven thousand ducats for the Seven Deadly Sins would be more appropriate. Thanks to the Ten Commandments, Albert got his red hat, but having already laid out cash for his other two bishoprics, he had to borrow the money.

      To help him pay off the loan and to help with expenses for St. Peter’s in Rome (like Michelangelo’s fee), for which he would take half the receipts, the pope gave Albert a ten-year license to sell indulgences of unprecedented potency. These