Andrés Vaccari

Evening in the Palace of Reason
by James Gaines

(The Weekend Australian May 6-7, 2006)

History is a messy business that rarely offers neat closures or a good story. Nonetheless, the exceptions can be more wonderful than any fiction. One such case is the meeting of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great of Prussia, the subject of Evening in the Palace of Reason.

These two legendary figures locked horns one Sunday evening in May of 1747, during Bach’s visit to the King’s court in Potsdam, where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel was employed as chief harpsichordist. Frederick II was in his prime then, and Bach was well past his. This would be the great composer’s last journey, three years before his death, while Frederick had only recently earned his nickname ‘the Great’. In seven eventful years he had considerably expanded his kingdom, transforming Prussia into one of the most feared superpowers in Europe.

As a cruel jest to humiliate the old, unfashionable musician, Frederick II presented him with an impossible musical challenge: to write a six-part fugue on a deliberately intractable theme. In a fugue, all voices have to play the same melody, which may be altered in various ways to harmonize with itself. This ingenious sequence of notes (possibly written by Bach’s son Carl) was specifically conceived to frustrate any attempts at harmony. Moreover, the King requested a six-part composition, when the maximum that Bach had ever attempted was a fugue in five parts.

Taking the challenge very seriously, Bach set to work as soon as he returned to Leipzig. In two weeks he produced what musicologists unanimously consider one of the most astounding, beautiful and mind-bogglingly complex works of music ever written, the Musical Offering. James Gaines describes it as a “work of incomprehensibly comprehensive intellectual and sensual beauty … a feast of inexpressibly delicious delights.” In this devastating retort, Bach returned Frederick’s derision tenfold, carefully coding in the music and annotations a message of contempt for the monarch and everything he stood for.

There was a lot more at stake here than music. Gaines presents these two figures as warring incarnations of two contrasting eras: the Baroque and the Enlightenment. The meeting of Bach and Frederick is posed as a struggle between mysticism and science, faith and rationality, humility and power.

A meticulous, hard-working and fastidious man, Bach was a devoted Lutheran for whom music was an expression of religious belief. He was one of the last practitioners of esoteric music genres such as the canon, where the mathematically precise deployment of recurring themes articulates ideals of purity, order and perfection. Bach lived and died in obscurity, often ridiculed openly by superiors and inferiors alike. To our eternal gratitude, he paid no attention to what people said, and created what is, without doubt or overstatement, some of the most extraordinarily beautiful music ever conceived.

Gaines’ lovingly researched portrait shows an earthly Bach engaged in vain power struggles, fond of brandy and the conjugal bed. Rather than a stuffy traditionalist, Gaines sees Bach as an innovator, and knowledgeable of current musical trends, which he incorporated and mixed into his work. Gaines argues that Bach’s inspiration did not come from Platonic fancies or religious navel-gazing, but from the sorrows of worldly life. Bach buried twelve of his twenty children, and death was a frequent visitor in his family; for him the search for order and meaning was not a merely intellectual issue.

Frederick the Great receives a less luminous treatment, although Gaines shows here the same good eye for colourful anecdote and revealing detail. Frederick II comes through as an enigmatic, Machiavellian leader who put Prussia back on the map at an abysmal human cost. His father carries most of the blame, a comically brutal and grumpy man who hated music and everything French. Behind the old king’s back, young Frederick assembled a court of musicians and a vast library. He was seduced by the emerging ideas of the Enlightenment, and recruited Voltaire to his court so that the philosopher could teach him French. In accordance with the reigning fashion, Frederick believed music had to cast off all pretence of spiritual significance and become an amusement, pure entertainment. The emergent rationalism had its musical expression in the galant style, which junked the weighty and ornate instrumentation of the Baroque (scornfully referred to as ‘church music’) in favour of simple leading melodies and a light-hearted approach. To the Enlightenment, Bach was the incarnation of everything stuffy and outmoded.

In alternating chapters, Gaines moves back and forth between these two lives. This narrative approach emulates counterpoint: two contrasting melodies balancing each other. But despite Gaines’ best efforts the harmony is hard to discern, and often this book reads like two separate stories with only incidental points of contact.

But there’s a more serious failing: Gaines’ premise hinges on a clumsy but widespread historical misinterpretation. The Enlightenment owes to Bach’s world a lot more than we usually give it credit for. The ‘mystical’ world of Pythagorean Christianity is not that distant from the Newtonian clockwork universe of the Enlightenment. The search for unity in diversity animates both the Baroque vision of cosmic order and the scientific search for constancies in nature. Besides, Bach’s Offering does not constitute a refutation of the Enlightenment; its learned, coded jokes target the person of the king rather than the new rationalism.

If we are willing to overlook these shortcomings, Evening offers an engaging, vivid, and passionately written glimpse into a crucial turning point in history. But it also illustrates the pitfalls of sacrificing history at the altar of a good story.