Evening in the Palace of Reason - Vendido!

Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

by James R. Gaines
4th Estate US & UK; March 2005
Translation: DARHANSOFF, VERRILL, FELDMAN

*** Vendido para Editora Record ***


One Sunday evening in the spring of his seventh year as king, as his musicians were gathering for the evening concert, a courtier brought Frederick the Great his usual list of arrivals at the town gate. As he looked down the list of names, he gave a start.
"Gentlemen," he said, "old Bach is here." Those who heard him said there was "a kind of agitation" in his voice.
So begins James R. Gaines’s Evening in the Palace of Reason, setting up what seems to be the ultimate mismatch: a young, glamorously triumphant warrior-king, heralded by Voltaire as the very It Boy of the Enlightenment, pitted against a devout, bad-tempered composer of "outdated" music, a scorned genius in his last years, symbol of a bygone world. The sparks from their brief conflict illuminate a pivotal moment in history.

Behind the pomp and flash, Prussia’s Frederick the Great was a tormented man. His father, Frederick William I, was most likely mad; he had been known to chase frightened subjects down the street, brandishing a cane and roaring, "Love me, scum!" Frederick adored playing his flute as much as his father despised him for it, and he was beaten mercilessly for this and other perceived flaws. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape, Frederick was forced to watch as his best friend and coconspirator was brutally executed.

Twenty years later, Frederick’s personality having congealed into a love of war and a taste for manhandling the great and near-great, he worked hard and long to draw "old Bach" into his celebrity menagerie. He was aided by the composer’s own son, C. P. E. Bach, chief keyboardist in the king’s private chamber music group. The king had prepared a cruel practical joke for his honored guest, asking him to improvise a six-part fugue on a theme so fiendishly difficult some believe only Bach’s son could have devised it. Bach left the court fuming. In a fever of composition, he used the coded, alchemical language of counterpoint to write A Musical Offering in response. A stirring declaration of everything Bach had stood for all his life, it represented "as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and worldview as an absolute monarch has ever received." It is also one of the great works of art in the history of music.
Set at the tipping point between the ancient and the modern world, the triumphant story of Bach’s victory expands to take in the tumult of the eighteenth century: the legacy of the Reformation, wars and conquest, and the birth of the Enlightenment. Most important, it tells the story of that historic moment when Belief -- the quintessentially human conviction that behind mundane appearances lies something mysterious and awesome -- came face to face with the cold certainty of Reason. Brimming with originality and wit, Evening in the Palace of Reason is history of the best kind, intimate in scale and broad in its vision.


Quotes and reviews:
"James Gaines has given us a generous gift. Every reader hungers for history winningly told--characters who rise up and speak for the period with the immediacy of a great novel .. . his compassionate appreciation of the all-too-human qualities of two of the era’s loftiest geniuses casts a clear light on the Enlightenment and its legacy to us."
-- Mary Karr, author of The Liars Club

“This book will startle you. It’s a magical historical tale featuring an encounter between two amazing historical characters that gives insight into the nature of genius, reason and faith. Jim Gaines writes with great beauty and intelligence. The result is an exciting saga that brings the turmoil of the Enlightenment alive.”
-- Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin; An American Life

"Highly entertaining…Gaines masterfully weaves parallel narratives of the lives of Bach and Frederick leading up to their momentous meeting…lovers of music, European history, and Western philosophy will find this book an enormous pleasure."
--School Library Journal (starred review)

From Publisher’s Weekly:

EVENING IN THE PALACE OF REASON: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the
Age of Enlightenment
James R. Gaines. Fourth Estate,

Like contrapuntal voices in a Bach fugue, the lives of an aging composer and a young dictator are intertwined and interlocked in this absorbing cultural history. Gaines (The Lives of the Piano), former managing editor of Time, Life and People magazines, begins by recounting Frederick’s abrupt summons of Bach to his court at Potsdam. Here, in an apparent effort to humiliate the old-style composer, Frederick, enamored of the new in philosophy and art, sets Bach a succession of seemingly impossible musical challenges: to each, the composer responds with unthinkable genius, culminating in his Musical Offering. But beneath the biographical counterpoint traced by Gaines is a longer, unfinished duel between two visions of humankind-one that the sensitive and musically inclined Frederick was also fighting within himself. He had been brutally abused by his father and was increasingly committed to the cynical pursuit of military expansion; the sun gradually sets on the Prussian king, who is consumed by disillusionment, inflicting pain on himself and countless others. As night falls on the (un)enlightened despot, Bach’s star begins to rise, and later, he will acquire the veneration his genius merits, his music a perennial reminder that "the light of reason can blind us to a deeper kind of illumination."

llus. not seen by PW. Agent, Liz Darhansoff. (Mar. 4)


Library Journal for Feb. 1, 2005 Issue
Starred Review

"Lovers of music, European history, and Western philosophy will find this book an enormous pleasure," writes Library Journal in its starred review of EVENING IN THE PALACE OF REASON by Jim Gaines:


*GAINES, JAMES R. Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. HarperCollins. Mar. 2005. c.352p. illus. MUSIC

The best-documented event in the life of J.S. Bach was his meeting, three years before his death, with Frederick the Great of Prussia. The two were polar opposites: Bach, the learned contrapuntalist, was the devout composer of ornate, "old-fashioned" liturgical music, while Frederick the enlightened philosopher-king favored the lighter secular music of the era. At their meeting, in front of a distinguished audience of court musicians, Bach improvised a three-voiced fugue on a theme presented to him-and ostensibly composed by-the king himself. A few months later, Bach completed one of his greatest works-the Musical Offering-a collection of ten canons, two fugues, and a trio sonata based on the same theme and dedicated to the king. In this highly entertaining book, Gaines masterfully weaves parallel narratives of the lives of Bach and Frederick leading up to their momentous meeting. Gaines is not a musicologist but has drawn extensively on numerous up-to-date sources, and his journalistic background is evident in the stylish, often humorous prose, which never bogs down in dry musical or historical minutiae. There is some needless speculation, but lovers of music, European history, and Western philosophy will find this book an enormous pleasure. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/04.]-Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA

"Mr. Gaines elegantly sketches parallel biographies of the two protagonists....His enthusiasm for his subject is infectious," writes the New York Sun in its review today of EVENING IN THE PALACE OF REASON:
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The New York Sun
March 2, 2005 Wednesday

SECTION: ARTS & LETTERS; Pg. 17
BYLINE: By CORINNA DA FONSECA - WOLLHEIM


Frederick the Great had been on his throne for seven years when he summoned Johann Sebastian Bach to Potsdam in 1747. Music had been a passion of Frederick’s since his youth, when he secretly played flute and lute duets with his sister - and hid this from his father. According to witnesses, there was agitation in his voice when he heard of the 62-year-old master’s arrival at the gates one Sunday evening.

Once Bach was installed at the keyboard, he was given a challenge: a short theme, 21 notes in all, on which Bach was to improvise a three-part fugue. Bach did so to the "astonishment" of all present and was given another challenge. Could he now play a six-part fugue on the subject? To improvise a fugue of such complexity was beyond even Bach, but within a month he had published his response. The "Musical Offering," a series of movements - including a six-voice fugue - on the royal theme is still considered one of his great works.

Traditionally, the encounter between Bach and Frederick has been painted as the felicitous meeting of two great minds who reflected and enhanced each other’s glory. A new book by James R. Gaines, "Evening in the Palace of Reason" (Fourth Estate, 336 pages, $23.95) sees it as a clash between opposing world views and presents the "Musical Offering" as nothing less than a musical gauntlet.

Mr. Gaines elegantly sketches parallel biographies of the two protagonists. Bach is the devout follower of Luther in both faith and music, the pater familias whose intricately contrapuntal compositions are rooted in the belief in, and intended to mirror, a divinely ordained, harmonious universe. Frederick, a bisexual atheist, suffered an abusive childhood at the hands of a father who was in equal measure autocratic and insane. As crown prince, Frederick’s love for all things French and for his flute, which he called "Principessa," earned him public beatings from his father. By the time he ascended the throne, at the age of 28,his enthusiasm for the art and philosophy of the Enlightenment was only matched by that for military expansion and duplicitous diplomacy.

If their love for music united Bach and Frederick, their view of its mission in the world could not have been more different. Bach, who spent most of his career in the service of the church, believed that music "can be for nothing else but the glory of God and the restoration of the heart. Where this is not the case, there is no real music but only a demonic noise." For the young Frederick, music had been an escape, a balm to soften the countless acts of paternal humiliation. As king, he had assembled around him composers who rejected counterpoint for the new galant style, which favored a single accompanied melodic line. Its only aim: the enjoyment of the listener.

The meeting in Potsdam, then, was charged with tension. The theme Frederick proposed to Bach, with its jarring downward jump followed by a chromatic, snaky descent, was an open taunt. As Mr. Gaines writes, "These were twenty-one notes that, if they were not calculated to make the task as difficult as possible, had been thrown together in an accident of anti-contrapuntal genius." Bach was being set up for failure.

Bach resoundingly rebuked the king’s worldview in his "Musical Offering." Frederick hated canons in particular - counterpoint created by setting a theme against itself - yet Bach presents him with no fewer than 10 of them. One canon, prefaced by the words, "As the keys ascend so may the glory of the king also ascend," has the melody rising in whole tone steps, until it arrives back where it started - in other words, it doesn’t appear to ascend at all. In Bach’s oeuvre, the figure 10 often stands for the Ten Commandments, and there can be no accident to the number of canons he presents to the king: Beware of worldly glory, he seems to be saying, and heed only the law of God.

"Evening in the Palace of Reason" leaves many questions about the "Musical Offering" and its genesis unanswered, as any conscientious author is bound to do. Thankfully, Mr. Gaines resists the temptation to turn this story into another "Da Vinci Code," although there is no shortage of esoteric riddles in Bach’s music. There could be more on the actual piece and a little less on the admittedly entertaining antics of the Hohenzollern dynasty, but this would have made the book more technical and less generally appealing. Mr. Gaines overindulges in his conversational style, but his enthusiasm for his subject is infectious.

Whether Bach and Frederick were really children of such different ages should remain a matter of debate. Certainly Bach, for all his conservative faith, was not a backward-looking composer. Mr. Gaines spends a good deal of the earlier parts of his book exploring the connection between Baroque composition and alchemy, but Bach also showed a very modern, scientific delight in exploring the limits of counterpoint into the darkest harmonic recesses of the scale. His "Well-Tempered Clavier," in this sense, is closer in spirit to Diderot’s Encyclopedia than to a medieval alchemist’s cookbook.

As a new generation of composers today turns away from the rigors of serial music, which, paradoxically, sounds most random when it is at its most structured, the words of the galant composer Johann Mattheson sound oddly prophetic. "Do not expect after all that quill-chewing and toiling to be rewarded for your pains," Bach’s contemporary wrote in an attack on canons and learned counterpoint. "There will probably be not a single one among 2,000 listeners who will notice your finesse, unless he be alerted to it beforehand."

The struggle between music that is pleasing to the ear and that which is the pure expression of an inner architecture remains a dilemma in contemporary music. In the music of Bach, they were united.
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THE GUARDIAN

Strange meeting
When JS Bach met Frederick the Great the Middle Ages collided with the Enlightenment. Sparks fly in James R Gaines’ Evening in the Palace of Reason
John Banville
Saturday January 8, 2005
Guardian
Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment
by James R Gaines
352pp, Fourth Estate, £15.99
Certain encounters take on in retrospect an historical significance unrecognised at the time of their occurrence. Even Adam and Eve could not have known quite how thick would be the soup into which their meeting with the Serpent was going to plunge them. When Johann Sebastian Bach, cantor of the Thomas-school in Leipzig, arrived at Potsdam on a Sunday evening in May 1747 at the invitation of Frederick the Great, neither man, despite the acute sense each had of his own worth, would have seen in their confrontation the highly charged symbolism that James Gaines rightly confers upon it.
Bach was nearing the end of his life - he would die two years later - but was as stubborn and unpolished as he had always been. He was famous as a virtuoso, whose extended improvisations at the keyboard were the wonder of the musical world, but as a composer he was regarded as hopelessly of the old school. King Frederick, himself something of a virtuoso on the flute, was 35 and at the height of his powers; after two brilliantly conducted wars against Austria, he had wrested the territories of Upper and Lower Silesia from the Empress Maria Theresa, making Prussia into one of the most powerful European states.
This warrior-king was the very model of an enlightenment monarch, a superb strategist on the battlefield, and in the salon a paragon of good taste and artistic appreciation. He was widely read, especially in French literature -he could barely speak German - and was a friend and correspondent of Voltaire. From his earliest years, despite the violent disapproval of his father, the crazed King Frederick-William I, he had been a lover of music, and in his lifetime composed some 400 pieces for the flute, a few of which are still played.
The fascination of Frederick the Great has endured through the centuries. Twenty years after his death Napoleon, having conquered Prussia, led a group of his officers to Frederick’s grave in Berlin. "Hats off, gentlemen," Napoleon ordered. "If he were still alive, we would not be here." Frederick was a remarkable leader, giving tireless personal attention to the running of his country, often working, Gaines tells us, from four in the morning until midnight. In the decade of peace leading up the Seven Years war he built schools and hospitals, reclaimed lands and overhauled the economy, although, as one biographical encyclopaedia drily observes, his "energetic internal reforms were coloured by the expectation of renewed war". It is a measure of the breadth of his appeal that he was intensely admired by both Hitler and Thomas Mann.
If Frederick was a son of the Aufklärung , Bach was a child of that older, darker Germany - a vivid portrait of which Gaines sketches in the opening pages of the book. The Bachs had been musicians, in a modest fashion, for a century before Johann Sebastian was born, in 1685, in Eisenach, "a walled, many-spired town . . . tucked away in the thick forest of Thuringia", where Luther had lived and preached 150 years before. It was a tight, God-fearing town which even in Bach’s time still had its face turned firmly back towards the Middle Ages. Like much of the rest of Europe, Thuringia was subject to bouts of plague, famine and warfare. The Thirty Years war, which began in 1618, left large swaths of the land devastated; when the contending armies had at last ground each other to an exhausted halt, "a third of the population was dead", Gaines writes, "and the people who remained on the battlefield of Germany - or rather of Germanies, the loose collation of a few thousand now bankrupt dukedoms and princelings - were left by the Treaty of Westphalia to an indefinite future of encirclement by Europe’s great powers and consigned to a deranged and hopeless peace."
In such a time, it is little wonder that the people should cleave to religion. Bach’s father, Johann Ambrosius, was a vigorous-minded Lutheran, while his mother came from a family of Anabaptists, an extreme sect of Protestants reprehended by Lutherans and Calvinists alike. Throughout his life Johann Sebastian held fast to the faith of his fathers, if not quite to that of his mother, and consecrated his musical compositions to the greater glory of God. He was, however, anything but other-worldly. He enjoyed the pleasures of the bed - he fathered a score of children - and of the table and the cellar. Gaines’s Bach is corpulent, irascible, stubborn, a fierce fighter for his place in the world - which, for all his battening upon the good offices of princes of church and state, was never less than tenuous - and a consummate artist who in the face of hostility from his peers and indifference from audiences, never wavered in his belief in himself and his work.
Frederick was everything that Bach was not; the only thing they had in common was their greatness, along with a very differing love of music. Gaines, a former editor in chief of People magazine, has a keen eye for colour, and enjoys himself greatly with the Hohenzollerns - "a funny bunch" - regaling us with anecdotes, such as the one in which Frederick’s grandfather died of shock one morning when he mistook his mad wife for the "White Lady" whose apparition was said to herald a death in the family. Then there is Frederick’s father, King Frederick-William I - there were as many Fredericks among the Hohenzollerns as there were Johanns among the Bachs - a demented tyrant who might have sprung from the pen of Alexandre Dumas.
From the start Frederick-William took against his son, for the two were as unlike as possible. Young Frederick was an aesthete, possibly homosexual and almost certainly bisexual, a lover of books and music and all things French, who curled his hair and dressed in satin and played clandestine flute and lute duets with his beloved sister Wilhelmina. Before his death, when his son was 28, Frederick-William unrelentingly sought to mould his son to his own image, employing in the effort, Gaines writes, "a degree of violence perhaps unique in the annals of kings and their crown princes". He beat the boy, and continued to beat him when he was a man, flailing at him with his stick, knocking him to the ground and kicking him, often in full view of the court and even of the public. After one such assault, the old king declared: "Had I been so treated by my father I would have blown my brains out, but this man has no honour."
Frederick was by turns compliant and defiant. Then, at the age of 18, he made his most serious break for freedom, plotting with his friend Lieutenant Hans von Katte, son of a Prussian military family but, like Frederick, a flautist and art-lover, to run away to England and seek the protection of his grandfather, George I. The plot was foiled, and in his rage Frederick’s father contemplated having the young man executed, but contented himself with sentencing Katte to be beheaded below the window of Frederick’s cell. Hardly surprisingly, Frederick knuckled under to his father’s wishes, meanwhile biding his time and devoutly wishing for the old man’s death. That blessed release came in 1740. When the new king ascended the throne, his subjects were confident the fat times had arrived. Frederick, however, proved to be just as demanding, if less capricious, than his father. Within a very short time, Prussia had been hammered into an iron fighting machine.
The Frederick whom Bach met seven years after his accession was a man without illusions, an enlightenment figure who knew the measure of his fellow men, a philosophe , an atheist and a battle-hardened general. Bach was still a provincial music master, a composer who held to the strict contrapuntal style so firmly that even his son Carl, who worked for Frederick, regarded "old Bach" as hopelessly outdated. Having conducted Bach on a tour of his 15 pianofortes, that new-fangled instrument which Bach distrusted, Frederick presented him with a 21-note theme on which to improvise, a theme so devised - possibly, and if so treacherously, by Carl Bach - as to make contrapuntal variations well-nigh impossible. Nevertheless, Bach did wonders with it, astonishing the gathered courtiers and court musicians.
Not content with this tremendous display of musical genius, Frederick went on to invite Bach to make a six-part fugue on the theme. This really was impossible, and Bach had to withdraw, taking the theme back with him to Leipzig, where within two months he had elaborated out of the 21 notes a work he called the Musikalische Opfer (Musical Offering), one of the greatest achievements in the history of western music. It was in part, Gaines claims, Bach’s indignant condemnation of Frederick’s love of the galant style of enlightenment art, and a ringing vindication of the contrapuntal mode as the music of the spheres and the voice of the Lutheran Godhead itself.
Evening in the Palace of Reason is a wonderful work of popular history, intelligent, stylish, wryly witty, serious yet never solemn, and above all passionate in its celebration of a great composer whose music "makes no argument that the world is more than a ticking clock, yet leaves no doubt of it".
• John Banville’s Prague Pictures is published by Bloomsbury.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/story.jsp?story=613056
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About the author:

Jim Gaines is the author of Wit’s End, a literary biography of the Algonquin Round Table, and The Lives of the Piano, a collection of essays. He’s had a long and distinguished career in magazine publishing at Time Inc., where he was editor of Time and People. He lives in Paris.