Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines

and Sweden would lead to the first Northern War, so the Great Elector’s diplomatic finesse and military might continued to be tested; at various times he was allied with virtually all of the combatants—Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Spain, and England, not to mention a variety of German territories. But by the time he died in 1688, the population of his territories had almost tripled, he had won Prussia’s independence from Poland, he had created an efficient civil service, and by diligent effort and imaginative reforms he had brought a measure of prosperity to his lands, which came increasingly to be called by the collective name of “Prussia.”

      He had also created one of the largest, most disciplined and battle-hardened armies in Europe. In advice written to his son and heir long after the first Northern War was over, he credited not his diplomacy but his reform and expansion of the military for his success in aggrandizing his emerging nation. “Alliances, to be sure, are good,” he wrote,

      but a force of one’s own on which one can rely is better. A ruler is treated with no consideration if he does not have troops and means of his own. It is these, Thank God! which have made me considerable since the time that I began to have them.

      It was this advice that would, for better and worse, become his most important legacy to the Hohenzollerns, to Germany, and to the history of the Western world.

      THE GREAT ELECTOR’S SON, grandfather to baby Frederick, was not Great, not even good for much, but despite a spinal deformity that kept him in bad health all of his life and despite living in the shadow of a beloved father, he seems to have been quite taken with himself, in a neurotic sort of way. Thanks to the steadily rising revenues that were his father’s gift to him, he spent wildly, multiplying by twenty the costs of his father’s household and court. Like many princes of his time, but with greater industry and commitment of resources, he loved all things French. He modeled his court on Versailles and himself on the Sun King, even to the point of taking a mistress despite the fact that he preferred his wife. The affection was not returned (which perhaps explains the mistress). His queen Sophie Charlotte, sister of England’s George I, was a knowing and educated woman who sensibly preferred the company of her court philosopher Leibniz to that of her husband. “Leibniz talked to me today about the infinitesimally small,” she cracked to a courtier one day, “as if I don’t know enough about that here.”

      Where his father’s diplomacy was treacherous but artful, the son’s was simply inept. As crown prince he had secretly solicited Austria for a loan to pay for his already outrageous expenses, promising to give back one of his father’s provinces upon his accession to the throne. As soon as he was king, he repudiated the deal, saying he could not be bound by the promise of someone who could not speak for the state (meaning himself as crown prince). It hardly needs to be said that his argument got him exactly nowhere, so that among his first acts was the surrender of territory. Among his proudest accomplishments was dreaming up the Order of the Black Eagle, his country’s highest honor, for which he came up with the thrilling motto “To each his own.”

      The greatest achievements of Frederick I were accidents that followed from his faults. He doubled the size of his military because loaning them out was the best way to support his extravagance. Green-eyed at the prospect of fellow electors becoming kings—his brother-in-law the Hanoverian elector was becoming king of England, the Saxon elector had already become king of Poland—he managed, for the loan of a few thousand soldiers, to get the emperor’s promise to recognize him as a king should he so proclaim himself in his eastern (nonimperial) province of Prussia. So of course he did. A procession of eighteen hundred carriages involving thirty thousand post horses (stationed at intervals to draw the carriages and carry supplies for a cast of thousands) accompanied him from Berlin during a stately progress of fourteen days to the capital of Königsberg. There, before the forcibly assembled nobility, he placed a crown on his own head and another on his wife’s. The trip and festivities cost him upward of five million thalers, his budget for several years’ expenses at home.

      All that said, by the time the White Lady came to take him away, he had created for his son and heir a redoubled military and a Prussian monarchy. In deference to that fact and filial obligation, if not respect, Frederick William I threw his father the kind of funeral that Frederick I would have thrown himself. For eight days the king lay in state on a bed of diamond-dotted red velvet, a crown on his head, an ermine-and-purple mantle over his shoulders, the Order of the Black Eagle on his chest, his scepter to his left and sword to his right. Finally, draped in a gown of gold, he was carried in solemn procession to the palace chapel through a guard comprising virtually the entire Prussian army. The new king wore long mourning robes whose train was carried by his father’s grand equerry, and the entire court of Frederick I marched behind him. Frederick William I would never appear in such splendor again.

      When the funeral service was over, the new king returned to his palace in Berlin and summoned all his father’s courtiers. “Gentlemen, our good master is dead,” said the father of little Frederick. “The new king bids you all go to hell.”

       IV.

       A SMALL, UNREADY ALCHEMIST

      FOR ALL ITS SPIRES AND WATCHTOWERS AND RED-ROOFED houses, its cobblestoned market square bordered by church, town hall, and castle, the residents of Eisenach would not have called their hometown charming. To get a sense of Eisenach as it was when Sebastian Bach was a boy, one must conjure up the scent of animal dung from the livestock that shared its streets and walkways, the putrid breeze that wafted from the fish market and slaughterhouse in the square, and, under those red-tiled roofs, a general atmosphere strongly redolent of life before plumbing. The homes of all but Eisenach’s wealthiest residents were small—close and hot in the summer, frigid and smoky in winter—and crowded. At one point in the Bach household, Sebastian lived with seven siblings as well as two cousins (orphans from Ambrosius’s family whose parents had died of the plague) and his father’s apprentices. Death being the family’s constant visitor, Sebastian lost a brother when he was two months old, a sister died when he had just turned one, and his childhood continued to be punctuated, repeatedly and intimately, by death. In addition to the loss of numerous more distant relatives, his eighteen-year-old brother Balthasar died when he was six, and the next year one of the cousins who had been in the house his whole life died at sixteen. Both had been apprentices for his father, and Sebastian would have followed them about his father’s daily rounds, learning as he saw them learn and helping them with what small chores he could. These deaths, as difficult as they may have been, would not be the most painful losses to mark his youth and his character. Of the deaths in his adult life, it is enough for now to say that he buried twelve of his twenty children. Against this backdrop, the elaborately formal topiary gardens of the Baroque, inspired by the idea that nature needs to be tamed and improved, seem entirely understandable.

      What Eisenach had in great abundance, the solace and balm of its six thousand souls, was music. In the villages of Thuringia, by an account that dates from the year of Bach’s birth, “farmers … know their instruments [and] make all sorts of string music in the villages with violins, violas, viola da gambas, harpsichords, spinets and small zithers, and often we also find in the most modest church music some works for the organ with arrangements and variations that are astonishing.” Among the Bachs especially, music was a powerful tonic, and it helped to keep the extended family together. Once a year, as Carl told Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, they gathered at one or another Thuringian town for a day of festivities at which music of a sort not meant for the church was the main event. “They sang popular songs, the contents of which were partly comic and partly naughty, all together and extempore, but in such a manner that the several parts thus extemporized made a kind of harmony together, the words, however, in every part being different. They called this kind of extemporary harmony a Quodlibet, and not only laughed heartily at it themselves, but excited an equally hearty and irresistible laughter in everybody that heard them.”