EVENING IN THE PALACE OF REASON
BACH meets FREDERICK THE GREAT in the AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
James Gaines

Copyright

Fourth Estate

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First published by Fourth Estate 2005

Copyright © James Gaines 2005

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‘How I Came to Write This Book’ by James Gaines © James Gaines 2005

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Praise

From the reviews of Evening in the Palace of Reason:

‘A wonderful work of popular history, intelligent, stylish, wryly witty, serious yet never solemn, and above all passionate’

JOHN BANVILLE, Guardian

‘Wonderfully engaging … a piece of theatre that is witty, instructive and often bizarre … It is a book that is almost impossible to put down when one is dancing, swerving, stumbling through the extraordinary brilliance, blood-thirst, cruelty, fecundity and religious and other feuds of the society that helped to inspire Bach and sustain Frederick’

Independent on Sunday

‘Gaines’s style is readable, crisp and compelling. He is an excellent guide: informed, unpretentious and frank … The impressive research is lightly worn … The minor parts are well played: Voltaire, Handel, Maria Theresa and George II all contribute beautifully drawn cameos. The reader retains a strong sense of their deeper and more complex historical characters. Above all, the musical prose is first-rate. Gaines is thoroughly acquainted with the repertoire, and his ability to convey a sense of Bach’s unique sensibility and spiritual power is often remarkable … A story told with wit, knowledge, the odd flight of fancy, and love’

Times Literary Supplement

‘James Gaines vividly brings to life the personalities involved … [A] dramatic story, told with great pace and gusto’

Scotland on Sunday

Dedication

FOR ALLISON, NICK,

WILLIAM, AND LILLIAN

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Map

I. THEME FOR A PAS DE DEUX

II. BIOGRAPHY OF A TEMPERAMENT

III. THE HOHENZOLLERN REAL ESTATE COMPANY

IV. A SMALL, UNREADY ALCHEMIST

V. GIANTS, SPIES, AND THE LASH: LIFE WITH “FATTY”

VI. THE SHARP EDGES OF GENIUS

VII. WITNESS TO AN EXECUTION

VIII. SONG OF THE ENDLESSLY ORBITING SPHERES

IX. A CHANGELING AMONG THE SWANS

X. THE ARTIST IN A PAINT-BY-NUMBERS WORLD

XI. WAR AND PEACE AND A MECHANICAL DUCK

XII. THE NIGHT OF A MUSICAL OFFERING

XIII. AFTERLIVES: AN EPILOGUE

P. S. Insights, Interviews & More …

About the Author

A Conversation with James R. Gaines

Life at a Glance

About the Book

How I Came to Write Evening in the Palace of Reason

Read On

Author’s Picks

The Ten Best Books about Bach

Have You Read?

The Web Detective

Footnotes

Notes on Sources

A Selected Bibliography

A Very Selective Discography

A Glossary of Musical Terms

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Map

I.
THEME FOR A PAS DE DEUX

FREDERICK THE GREAT HAD ALWAYS LOVED TO PLAY the flute, which was one of the qualities in him that his father most despised. Throughout his youth, Frederick had to play in secret. Among his fondest memories were evenings at his mother’s palace, where he was free to dress up in French clothes, curl and puff his hair in the French style, and play duets with his soul-mate sister Wilhelmina—he on the flute he called Principessa, she on her lute Principe. When Frederick’s father once happened unexpectedly on this scene, he flew into a rage. Even more than his son’s flute playing, Frederick William I hated everything French—French clothes, French food, French mannerisms, French civilization, all of which he dismissed as “effeminate.” He had of course been educated in French, like most German princes (he could not even spell Deutschland but habitually wrote Deusland), so he had to speak French, but he hated himself for it. He dressed convicts for their executions in French clothes as his own sort of fashion statement.

In this regard and others, Frederick’s father was at least half mad. Flagrantly manic-depressive and violently abusive, he also suffered from porphyria, a disease common among descendants of Mary Queen of Scots (which he was, on his mother’s side). Its afflictions included migraines, abscesses, boils, paranoia, and mind-engulfing stomach pains. The rages of Frederick William were frequent, infamous, and knew no rank: He hit servants, family members (no one more than Frederick), even visiting diplomats. Racked by gout, he lashed out with crutches, and if the pain was bad enough to put him in his wheelchair, he chased people down in it brandishing a cane. He was infamous for his canings—he left canes in various rooms of the castle so they would always be close at hand—but he also threw plates at people, pulled their hair, slapped them, knocked them down, and kicked them. A famous story has him walking down the street in Potsdam and noticing one of his subjects darting away. He ordered the man to stop and tell him why he ran. Because he was afraid, the man said. “Afraid?! Afraid?! You’re supposed to love me!” Out came the cane and down went the subject, the king screaming, “Love me, scum!” Such a rage could be sparked by the very word France.

Not until his father died when Frederick was twenty-eight could he play his flute free from the threat of censure or attack, so naturally it was among his most beloved and time-consuming pastimes as king. With the musicians in his court Kapelle, who were not only the best in Prussia but the best he could buy away from Saxony and Hanover and every other German territory, he played concerts virtually every evening from seven to nine o’clock, sometimes even on the battlefield. He cared as much about music as he cared about anything, except perhaps for war.

Having had both a love of the military and a cynical, self-protective ruthlessness literally beaten into him by his father, Frederick had already been dubbed “the Great” after only five years on the throne, by which time he had greatly enlarged his kingdom with a campaign of outrageously deceitful diplomacy and equally incredible military strokes that proved him a brilliant antagonist and made Prussia, for the first time, a top-rank power in Europe. A diligent amateur of the arts and literature—avid student of the Greek and Roman classics, composer and patron of the opera, writer of poetry and political theory (mediocre poetry and wildly hypocritical political theory, but never mind)—he had managed also to make himself known as the very model of the newly heralded “philosopher-king,” so certified by none less than Voltaire, who described young Frederick as “a man who gives battle as readily as he writes an opera … He has written more books than any of his contemporary princes has sired bastards; and he has won more victories than he has written books.” Frederick’s court in Potsdam fast became one of the most glamorous in Europe, no small thanks to himself, who worked tirelessly to draw around him celebrities (like Voltaire) from every corner of the arts and sciences.

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 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.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH was sixty-two years old in 1747, only three years from his death, and making the long trip from Leipzig, which would be his last journey, was surely more a concession than a wish. An emphatically self-directed, even stubborn man, Bach took a dim view of this particular king, the Prussian army having overrun Leipzig less than two years before, and at his advanced age he could not have relished spending two days and a night being jostled about in a coach to meet the bitter enemy of his own royal patron, the elector of Saxony. Even more problematic than the political and physical difficulties of such a journey, though, the meeting represented something of a confrontation for the aging composer—a confrontation, one might say, with his age. In music and virtually every other sphere of life in mid-eighteenth-century Germany, Frederick represented all that was new and fashionable, while Bach’s music had come to stand for everything ancient and outmoded. His musical language, teaching, and tradition had been rejected and denounced by young composers and theorists, even by his own sons, and Bach had every reason to fear that he and his music were to be forgotten entirely after his death, had indeed been all but forgotten already. For this reason and others, his 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 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, because the German word Opfer has a double meaning: ‘offering,’ or rather ‘sacrifice,’ and ‘victim’—Johann Sebastian knew that he had become the victim of a grand seigneur’s ‘joke.’ ”

Schoenberg’s theory that Frederick wished to embarrass Bach cannot be proved or disproved, but some unfortunate facts support it. The Prussian king was infamous for mean-spiritedly baiting even (or perhaps especially) those for whom he had the greatest respect. As Voltaire put it at one of the many low points in their relationship, when Frederick said you were his friend, “he means ‘my slave.’ My dear friend means ‘you mean less than nothing to me.’ … Come to dinner means, ‘I feel like making fun of you tonight.’ ” Schoenberg’s theory that the author of the theme was actually Bach’s son Carl, though equally impossible to prove, is also at least plausible. More than once Carl seemed to feel that his respect and affection for his father was in some measure unrequited, a sense of filial injury that often afflicts second sons. There would have been an Oedipal aspect to such a “victory” over Bach for Frederick as well. When they met, Bach was roughly the age Frederick’s father would have been, a father at whose hands Frederick had suffered the worst kind of abuse, including the greatest trauma of his young life.

Whoever the author of the Royal Theme may have been, the nature of it leaves no doubt that Frederick meant to give history’s greatest master of counterpoint the most taxing possible challenge to his art, and it is easy to imagine that, as his carriage rattled over the rutted roads from Potsdam back to Leipzig, Bach was already working out the puzzle Frederick had presented to him. Certainly he lost no time working on it once he was back in Leipzig. At his composing desk in the southwest corner of the second floor of the St. Thomas School—the noise of the student dormitory barely muffled by a thin wall and the ad hoc insulation of bookshelves heaped with music—he finished his Musical Offering to Frederick within a fortnight, turning the king’s “joke,” if that is what it was, back upon him with all the force at his command.

At the end of a long life spent practicing the art of conveying words in music, this was a great deal of force indeed, and the very quickness of Bach’s work suggests how urgent the project was to him. In the end, it implicated the most dissonant themes in his life and in the king’s as well: among others, the proper relations between art and power, and the competition between fathers and sons. Perhaps most important, the work addresses the point of greatest conflict between these two men and one of the thorniest of all the issues raised by the Enlightenment, for the eighteenth century and for its latter-day descendants: the role of belief in a world of reason. A work that may be read as a kind of last will and testament, Bach’s Musical Offering leaves us, among other things, a compelling case for the following proposition: that a world without a sense of the transcendent and mysterious, a universe ultimately discoverable through reason alone, can only be a barren place; and that the music sounding forth from such a world might be very pretty, but it can never be beautiful.

We may be grateful that Bach had spent a lifetime developing a musical language in which to say all that without fear of discovery or retribution, because his Musical Offering to Frederick represents as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and worldview as an absolute monarch has ever received. Not incidentally, it is also one of the great works of art in the history of music.

II.
BIOGRAPHY OF A TEMPERAMENT

J. S. BACH WAS THE FIFTEENTH PERSON TO BE NAMED Johann in his family. Seven of his uncles were Johanns, his father was Johann, and his great-grandfather was Johann. Four of his five brothers were Johanns, the other was for some reason named Johannes, and there was a sister Johanna. As his parents must have done, if only for their sanity, we will call him Sebastian.

There had never been a Sebastian in the Bach family. The name belonged to one of his godfathers, who was the town piper of Gotha. On March 23, 1685, Sebastian Nagel had the honor of holding his two-day-old namesake at the baptismal font of St. George’s Church on the market square in Eisenach, a walled, many-spired town that like Gotha was tucked away in the thick forest of Thuringia. The rector of St. George’s Latin School, a friend of the family, performed the rite.

Nagel had a professional as well as personal relationship with Sebastian’s father, Ambrosius Bach, who was the town piper here in Eisenach: They helped each other musically on occasion, and they had common roots in nearby Gotha. The Bachs had been there for as long as any of them knew. The first Bach to make music his profession had learned his trade from the town piper of Gotha a hundred years before this (though he had kept his day job running his father’s bakery as well). Since then there had been Bachs in nearly all the courts, organ lofts, and town bands of Thuringia.

We do not know whether or not there was music at Sebastian’s christening, but given that it took place on a Saturday, when church musicians were off, it could have been supplied by all sorts of people: His “uncle” Christoph (actually a second cousin) was the organist at St. George’s; his father had not only the members of his band to choose from but even closer to hand all the assistants and journeymen who lived under his roof; and Sebastian Nagel might even have brought some of his musicians from Gotha. Professional musicians were brethren in the late seventeenth century, banded together in part by their campaign against the “beer-fiddlers” (i.e., “will play for beer”) who were forever trying to undercut their prices for playing funerals and weddings, fees that were more than incidental to their salaries. The guild worked as well to protect its members’ ability to bring sons into the business, as Ambrosius Bach managed to do with all of his Johanns, eventually including Sebastian. Even at St. George’s baptismal fount, Johann Sebastian Bach was being held in the arms of his future.

HE GREW UP also in the embrace of the Wartburg, a dark, imposing castle on a hill that had already been looming over Eisenach and St. George’s for five hundred years. Monument to an earlier, glorious era of German knighthood, it was more recently, like Eisenach itself, at the core of Lutheran myth and history. In the year that Sebastian Bach was born, the citizens of Eisenach did not care, if they knew, about Newton’s discovery of gravity, not to mention Brahe’s new star or Boyle’s air pump, which were right now turning the orderly, Aristotelian world of the past few thousand years on its ear. But the story of Luther’s time in Eisenach almost two hundred years before—he had attended St. George’s Latin School, sung in its choir, preached from this very pulpit before his climactic appearance at the inquisitorial convocation of imperial princes in 1521 that came to be known as the Diet of Worms—was alive among them. So was the infamous edict that the emperor, in the name of the Diet, had issued against Luther, which set the stage for so much heartbreak and bloodshed:

He has sullied marriage, disparaged confession and denied the body and blood of Our Lord. He makes the sacraments depend on the faith of the recipient. He is pagan in his denial of free will. This devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle … Luther is to be regarded as a convicted heretic … No one is to harbor him. His followers also are to be condemned. His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man … Where you can get him, seize him and overpower him [and] send him to us under tightest security.

It was widely believed that Luther had been murdered on his way back to Thuringia from Worms, but fortunately for Luther, by this time the power of the emperor was not what it used to be. The Holy Roman Empire was a remnant, theoretically comprising the greater part of Europe but actually confined largely to modern-day Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the former Yugoslavia, and Germany—except that there was no Germany; there were just hundreds of independent princedoms, dukedoms, and bishoprics, the largest of which were Brandenburg (later to become the seat of Prussia) and Saxony. The imperial electors in particular—the most powerful Germanic princes, who had been given the right to elect the emperor—had as much freedom as they dared to take, absolute rulers in their own domains.

Still, Luther’s elector, Frederick III of Saxony, “Frederick the Wise,” took more liberty than any of the others would have done in Luther’s case: He ordered that Luther be closely guarded after the Diet ruled against him and that he be taken into hiding at the Wartburg. There, costumed as a knight and camouflaged by a long black beard, Luther spent the better part of a year: long months of insomniac nights spent beating back satanic visitations in the form of bats careening about his bedchamber, and days spent teaching himself Greek and writing his world-shifting German translation of the New Testament. In this part of the world, Luther was a great deal more compelling than gravity.

In contrast to the precision and rigor of his theology, the world inhabited by Martin Luther, and even the world of Sebastian Bach, was inhabited by wood nymphs, mermaids, and goblins, which had lived in the lakes, forests, minds, and hearts of Thuringia for centuries. Luther’s mother believed that evil spirits stole food from her kitchen. Luther himself told the story of a lake near his home into which, “if a stone be thrown, tempests will arise over the whole region, because the waters are the abode of captive demons.” Thuringians were famous for being superstitious, though of course they were not alone in that, only somewhat extreme examples. Combined with the desperate fear of God and therefore of hell, rampant superstition helps to explain the credulity of sixteenth-century Christians in Europe—or, to put it more charitably, their great capacity for the suspension of disbelief.

Every year on the eve of All Saints’ Day, in a display that in retrospect seems appropriate for Halloween, Frederick the Wise put his relics on display for his people. Over the years he had accumulated a collection rivaled only by Rome’s. Among his many thousands of sacred mementos were a piece of straw from the manger, three pieces of myrrh from the wise men, a strand of Jesus’ beard, one of the nails driven into His hands, a piece of bread left over from the Last Supper, and a branch of Moses’ burning bush. There were also nineteen thousand holy bones. The most potent piece in the collection was a thorn from the crown of Christ that was certified to have drawn His blood. Visiting these particular relics on this particular day would move the pope to grant you or your favorite departed loved one an “indulgence” good for the suspension of exactly 1,902,202 years and 270 days in purgatory. Of course, there was a certain financial price associated with such largesse, but who could possibly resist the argument of a man like Johannes Tetzel, personal pitchman for the Cardinal of Mainz (a Hohenzollern ancestor of Frederick the Great, incidentally, but we will come to that), who was completely without shame in parting the faithful from their ducats. “[Whoever] has put alms in the box … will have all his sins forgiven,” he pleaded,

so why are you standing about idly? Run, all of you, for the salvation of your souls … Do you not hear the voices of your dead parents and other people, screaming and saying, “Have pity on me, have pity on me … We are suffering severe punishments and pain, from which you could rescue us with a few alms, if only you would.” Open your ears, because the father is calling to the son and the mother to the daughter.

When Martin Luther, still an Augustinian monk, had the temerity to point out that nowhere in Scripture did it say the pope could move people around in the afterlife, that in fact “indulgences” were spiritually dangerous because they tempted people to believe they could sin now and pay their way out of it later, there was, you might say, hell to pay. Proceeds from indulgences had by then become a fiscal addiction, not only to the pope but also to the likes of Frederick the Wise, who needed the money to fund the University of Wittenberg, among other uses.

Frederick’s unhesitating and unwavering support of Martin Luther had several motives—among others, he resented a Hohenzollern cardinal raising money from his people—but one of them was principle. Frederick was a devout man in the best tradition of Christian princes, who considered themselves responsible for the spiritual as well as the practical welfare of their subjects. He actually believed in the power of his relics and in the pope’s ability to relieve souls from purgatory, but he would not allow Luther to be sacrificed for a contrary belief, and so kept him safe. In a letter to Frederick on behalf of himself and the emperor, the pope exploded:

We have you to thank that the Churches are without people, the people without priests, the priests without honor, and Christians without Christ. The veil of the temple is rent. Separate yourself from Martin Luther and put a muzzle on his blasphemous tongue [or] in the name of Almighty God and Jesus Christ our Lord, whom we represent on earth, we tell you that you will not escape punishment on earth and eternal fire hereafter. Pope Hadrian and Emperor Charles are in accord. Repent therefore before you feel the two swords.

Frederick wrote back simply, “I have never and do not now act other than as a Christian man.” Without such a friend—a prince and elector whom he continued to criticize harshly and publicly whenever he thought it right to do so—Martin Luther would long since have been burned at the stake.

WHAT LUTHER’S GREAT and wise biographer Roland Bainton said of Luther’s courage before the pope could help explain that of Frederick the Wise as well: “The most intrepid revolutionary is the one who has a fear greater than anything his opponents can inflict upon him.” What was the fury of the pope or the emperor to that of God? For Luther, for Frederick the Wise, for their time and place and Sebastian’s as well, the fear of God was beyond palpable, it was physical. Hell was not a metaphor. It was a place you went to, body and soul, where you would burn in actual, unquenchable fire, in unimaginable agony, forever and ever. The devil had form and face. He wanted your immortal soul desperately, and he was smarter and more clever than you could ever be. The world was a great battlefield, life an unending contest between him and Him, in which you were caught squarely in the middle, your eternal safety at stake, your only protection an amorphous wraith called belief.

Small wonder people believed. Horrifying examples of the devil’s work were appearing every day in the here and now of the sixteenth century—in the bubonic plague that wiped out half the population of Eisenach in one year, in the floods that surged through Thuringia, “the water [running] with so mighty a force, and such a stream, that it bare the bodies of the dead before it out of their graves in the Church-yard,” and in the frequent, widespread fires that sought out the timber of their homes.

And for all that, there was no horror to compare to what rained down during the wars that began in 1618, which fed themselves on belief. For thirty unimaginably long years, all the powers of Europe ruthlessly exploited the forces unleashed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to inspire and poison allegiances meant to serve nothing so much as expansionist ambitions. The play of shifting alliances and political treacheries was wanton, and in such a tangle of snakes Germans high and low were as powerless as souls on the battlefield of God and Satan. Using religion as a blunt diplomatic instrument proved so devastatingly successful that all the major combatants—Spain, France, England, Sweden, the Dutch, and the Hapsburgs—chronically ran short of money to pay their mercenary generals for their mercenary soldiers, who thereupon began to take what they could not earn through pillage the likes of which had never been seen before. Rural peasant families were the easiest prey, but even walled towns would fall to sieges that lasted long enough. Eventually the towns devised a crude bell-and-bonfire warning system that allowed some chance of escape from the various crisscrossing armies, but as often as not the soldiers would just take the time to hunt the escapees down, take their valuables, and murder them where they hid. Rape and massacre became the soldiers’ recreation, and revenge was terrible when peasants with pitchforks found themselves in a position to exact it. When all the animals were dead and the fields lay gleaned and fallow, epidemic famine caused soldiers and civilians alike to eat the unimaginable. They ate grass and twigs and the skins of dead rats. They ate bodies from gallows, corpses from graveyards, even babies from their cribs. Thirty years later, a third of the population was dead, 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 consigned by the Treaty of Westphalia to an indefinite future of encirclement by Europe’s great powers and left to a deranged and hopeless peace.

EVERY ARMY HAD its camp followers of prostitutes, hustlers, procurers, and freelance impresarios, ready to whip up a party for their restive military clientele, and so among the followers of every camp were musicians. This was not a time when one could be fussy about jobs. As a result, among the less significant casualties of the Thirty Years War was the reputation of musicians, who had, as it were, accompanied the mayhem and, as the coarseness of what they saw took its toll on them, had taken their share in it. Thus was born the College or Union of Instrumental Musicians of the District of Upper and Lower Saxony and Other Interested Places, a formal musicians’ guild, whose bylaws give some hint of just how disreputable musicians were then held to be. The member was enjoined to “conduct himself decently … abstain from all blasphemous talk, profane cursing and swearing” and not to “divert himself by singing or performing coarse obscenities” or “give attendance with jugglers, hangmen, bailiffs, gaolers, conjurors, rogues or any other such low company.” The drafters further felt the need to say that at private parties “nothing shall be stolen from the invited guests.”

Sebastian Bach’s grandfather, born in 1613, lived through the worst of the Thirty Years War as an adult. After serving for a time “waiting on the Prince” in Weimar, he married the daughter of a town musician. (Such marriages inside the trade were common. Guild rules specified eight years’ training before a musician could hire himself out as a master, but marrying a master’s daughter cut two years from the mandatory time.) He no doubt suffered from the generally low opinion of musicians in his role as a town musician in Erfurt and later in Arnstadt, where his younger brother had secured the coveted post of chief organist to the court and churches. The brother too had married by then, a step that was a precarious act of faith, as Philipp Spitta pointed out in his magisterial nineteenth-century biography of Bach: During the war, men could guarantee neither the safety of their wives and children nor the security of their income. Despite his distinguished position in Arnstadt, which he held for fifty years, this Bach remembered that during the privations of the war, all the salary he received from the war-bankrupted court he had “to sue for, almost with tears.”

Spitta reported of Sebastian’s grandfather, perhaps diplomatically, that he found “no record to show that [he] stood forth as a pattern of moral worth,” but said he was pretty sure about his brother, since the preacher at his funeral praised his piety. “There may be conditions under which it seems to be no particular merit to be called a pious man,” Spitta observed,

but there are times, too, when piety is the … sole guarantee for a sound core of human nature. The German nation was living through such a period … The mass of people vegetated in dull indifference or gave themselves up to a life of coarse and immoral enjoyment; the few superior souls who had not lost all courage to live, when a fearful fate had crushed all the real joys of life around them, fixed their gaze above and beyond the common desolation, on what they hoped in as eternal and imperishable.

THREE YEARS BEFORE the end of the war, in the winter of 1645, Sebastian’s father Johann Ambrosius and his twin brother Johann Christoph were born in Erfurt, the largest city in Thuringia. According to a note made by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in the family genealogy, Ambrosius and his brother were “perhaps the only [twins] of their kind ever known. They loved each other extremely [and] looked so much alike that even their wives could not tell them apart … They were an object of wonder on the part of great gentlemen and everyone who saw them. Their speech, their way of thinking—everything was the same.” This is good to know, because while little is known directly about the character of Ambrosius, his twin left a trail.

When the boys were eight or nine, the family moved from Erfurt eleven miles south to Arnstadt, where their father joined the town band and began to concentrate in earnest on the musical training of his sons. He died when they were in their teens, however, and their education was undertaken by his brother, who by then had been the Arnstadt organist for a dozen years. After their apprenticeship and years as an assistant were over, the twins moved back to Erfurt, where they had secured jobs in the town band (thanks to their cousin, its new director).

Ambrosius soon married, and married well, into the family of Valentin Lämmerhirt, an affluent furrier and an influential citizen. The Lämmerhirts were a devout Anabaptist family, which was saying something. The Anabaptists were zealous even by the standards of their onetime leader Zwingli, who espoused a Christianity more ascetic than Luther’s but finally denounced the Anabaptists for extremism. The Anabaptists were best known for denouncing infant baptism (at a time when theology had become so narrow and poisonous that baptizing an adult who had been christened in childhood was a capital offense), but their differences with mainstream Protestantism were comprehensive. They renounced all physical adornments, they refused to swear oaths or bear arms, and each member was expected at a moment’s notice to give up home and family to take up the life of a missionary. The Lämmerhirts did not live by every tenet of this faith, but merely to remain identified with it in orthodox Lutheran Erfurt was a sign of great commitment. In the bizarrely charged atmosphere of dueling Protestant sects that pitted Lutheran against Lutheran, not to mention Lutheran against Calvinist, both Lutherans and Calvinists had sentenced Anabaptists to the stake. Sebastian Bach’s mother came from strong-minded people who were dead serious about religion.

A bit less serious about religion perhaps (most of the Bachs before Sebastian were secular musicians for the courts and towns rather than the churches), the Bachs were no less strong-minded. After Ambrosius’s marriage, his twin Christoph moved back to Arnstadt, where we find him in the records of the town consistory fighting off a young woman named Anna Cunigunda Wieneren, who came before them, with her mother, to accuse Christoph of breaking his promise to marry her. The consistory was the ecclesiastical body responsible for hearing such disputes, among other supervisory duties, and given the clerk’s matter-of-fact record of the hearing, it was not the first of its kind.

Both parties appeared before the Consistory, and Anna Cunigunda confessed that she had promised to marry Bach, and he her … They had done no less than give each other rings in pledge of marriage, which they still had … and it was now on Bach’s conscience whether he thought he could withdraw from her under these circumstances without injuring her …

Christoph Bach confessed, indeed, that he had offered marriage to Anna Cunigunda, but they had merely considered the matter provisionally, and he had not in any way considered himself bound … He had given her a ring … but not in pledge of marriage … Besides, Anna Cunigunda has asked for her ring back again …

After Bach had withdrawn from her and his affection had died out, she had desired to have her ring back, on these conditions: she put it to his conscience that if she were not good enough for him, and if he only meant to make a fool of her, he should return her the ring and answer for it in his conscience before God … He, in answer, had sent her word that he had no fear of punishment from God on that account.

The dispute went on for more than a year, when finally the consistory ruled that Bach should marry the girl. That was predictable, given current practice. What was not predictable was that Christoph Bach promptly took the matter over the heads of officials in Arnstadt by appealing to the authorities in Weimar. At this point, according to the records, he “hated the Wieneren so that he could not bear the sight of her.” After more weeks and months of appeals, the officials of Weimar overruled Arnstadt and lifted his obligation to marry.

By the time it was over, the affair had lasted more than two years, Christoph Bach had made enemies of his hometown consistory, which comprised its most influential citizens, and he had indeed made a fool of Anna Cunigunda Wieneren, who had become the talk of Arnstadt. But he had done what it took to get his way, and when we try later to interpret some of the more intemperate behavior of his nephew Sebastian, including his own even more severe problems with the consistory of Arnstadt, this antecedent will be worth remembering.

IN THE FALL OF 1671, Ambrosius and Maria Elisabeth Bach moved their belongings out of their rooming 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 indulgences could actually work on future sins, so that, having paid the right price for a particular sin, you were preemptively absolved and presumably could feel at ease sinning likewise for the rest of your life. The pope authorized Albert to promise, seriously, that even violating the Mother of God Herself could be forgiven by these indulgences. It was the prospective-absolution feature of these indulgences, a patent encouragement to sin, that made Luther especially furious.

Albert clearly had chosen the right man for the job. When Tetzel came into a city he arrived in procession, holding a huge red cross, fronted by flags and drums and a herald proclaiming, “The Grace of God and of the Holy Father is at the gates!” Making straight for the cathedral, he would plant his cross by the high altar and set his strongbox up beside it. Taking the pulpit, he gave his pitch: “At the very instant that the money rattles at the bottom of the chest, the soul escapes from purgatory and flies liberated to heaven … I declare to you, though you have but a single coat, you ought to strip it off and sell it.” Then he would stand by the strongbox, examining each supplicant in turn to determine the amount due. Kings and princes were good for twenty-five ducats, barons ten, etc. The various sins had prices too. Witchcraft was forgiven for two ducats, polygamy for six, murder for eight, and the sin of all sins, stealing money from the church, cost nine. (It is hard to believe that this one could be forgiven indefinitely, however expensive the indulgence.)

Just as Albert and Tetzel had got started with their new indulgences, on the eve of All Saints’ Day 1517, when Frederick the Wise would have put out his relics and indulgence fever would be at a pitch, Luther pinned to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg his “95 Theses,” which took off directly from the promises in Tetzel’s latest spiel. For example:

27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].

28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone …

46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons …

75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God—this is madness! …

Drawing to a close, he posed a series of statements from which he diplomatically distanced himself by characterizing them as “shrewd questions from the laity”:

84. “… What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul’s own need, free it for pure love’s sake?”

86. Again: — “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”

The rest, as they say, is history, one of whose most wonderful ironies is that we have a Hohenzollern to thank, if only indirectly, for the Protestant Reformation.

A FEW YEARS LATER another Hohenzollern named Albert had an encounter with Martin Luther of a very different sort. This Albert was the cardinal’s cousin, who had managed to get himself elected grandmaster of the Order of Teutonic Knights, a once-powerful group of German nobles who had taken over Prussia by putting down its heathen locals, which involved pretty much exterminating them. They prospered for a time, but that was centuries ago. Now, despised by their subjects and beaten repeatedly on the battlefield when they attempted to expand into Poland and Lithuania, they had been reduced to a small Polish fiefdom. They kept their dreams of independence alive by electing ever richer grandmasters to fill their treasury for more doomed military exploits. That was the reason they elected Albert of Hohenzollern. It was a bad mistake.

Despite the fact that the Hohenzollerns at this point supported the pope and the emperor, Albert was a secret admirer of Luther and an early convert. At the point when he had come to realize that the Teutonic Knights were hopeless, he asked the reformer for advice. Luther, with a pragmatic political sense for which he is not well known, advised Albert to dissolve the Knights and ask Poland in return to let him convert Prussia into a hereditary duchy. Startled by the thought—or perhaps by its source—he sat quiet with the idea for a moment, then erupted in laughter. It was a wonderful idea. All it would require was the betrayal of the order that had been entrusted to his care.

So ended the reign of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, and thus did the Hohenzollerns add another major holding to Brandenburg and the other Albert’s bishoprics.

The son of the new duke of Prussia was clinically insane, but even he managed to expand the Hohenzollern territories. The family arranged for him to marry the eldest daughter of one William the Rich, ruler of five small territories on the Rhine. (She found out he was mad after she was already on her way to Prussia but decided to go anyway, two previous fiancés having left the field.) One of the daughters from this union married the new elector of Brandenburg, Johann Sigismund, who happily converted to Calvinism in order to placate these new Hohenzollern provinces. Since he could not conceivably impose Calvinism on Brandenburg or his subjects in East Prussia, he waived his right to do so. Like most other things Hohenzollern, their tradition of “religious toleration” was all about real estate.

At the death of their crazy Prussian duke, the family agreed that Sigismund should take over Prussia as well, at which point a single branch of the family could lay credible claim to territories from the Rhine to the far side of the Elbe—

Just in time for the Thirty Years War. Sigismund’s son had watched over the worst of it, and he was not equal even to a lesser task. His great-great-grandson, our baby crown prince Frederick, would write many years later:

All the plagues of the world broke over this ill-fated Electorate—a prince incapable of governing, a traitor for his Minister, a war or rather a universal cataclysm, invasion by friendly and enemy troops equally thievish and barbarous … Though [the elector] cannot be held responsible for all the misfortunes which befell his territories, his … weakness only left him a choice of errors … Powerless and in continual uncertainty he always changed over to the strongest side; but he could offer too little to his allies to secure their protection against their common enemies.

LUCKY FOR THE Hohenzollerns, the heir of this ill-starred elector proved to be the savior of the dynasty. Without Frederick William I of Brandenburg, known as the Great Elector, it is entirely possible that, for all their earlier success, there would have been no Hohenzollerns ruling in Germany after the war, and no way for the Great Elector’s great-grandson to become Great himself.

Thanks to his father’s ineptitude, when the Great Elector came to power in the last decade of the war, all of his scattered lands were desolate and occupied. East of the Elbe, Prussia was overrun by Polish troops. To the west, Cleves-Mark was beset by a warring mix of Dutch, imperial, and Hessian forces. Brandenburg itself was occupied in the north by Sweden, which was everywhere else fighting imperial troops in the attempt to occupy the rest. Still not connected at any point, the Hohenzollern patchwork was difficult to defend at the best of times, and these were the worst. The electorate had lost nine hundred thousand people—two-thirds of the entire population—to war and murder. Its fields had been barren for years, and what commerce remained was undercut by plunder and counterfeit currency. The elector had lost virtually all of his power. His treasury was gone, and since most of his troops were mercenary, that meant he was all but defenseless.

Almost miraculously, through drastic military reform and the exercise of a diplomacy no less frenetic but a good deal more effective than that of his father, he managed to get his country, very much scathed but dynastically whole, through the last years of the war to an armistice that led to the Treaty of Westphalia. In the negotiations leading up to that treaty, he managed not only to hold on to all of his occupied lands but to gain some more as well. The treaty left France at war with Spain, and the standoff between Poland 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.”

Every day of Sebastian’s childhood was filled with music. His father, as director of town music and the town band, was chief dispenser of all the instrumental music in town, and his house was as busy with it as a conservatory’s practice rooms. Every morning at ten and afternoon at five, looking over the marketplace from the balcony of the town hall, Ambrosius Bach’s band played dances and folk tunes and the chorales that Luther and Lutheranism had made the most cherished of popular songs. The ensemble for such “tower pieces” included violin, viola da gamba, and other strings, brass, flutes, oboes and other reeds, and various percussion instruments. The town band numbered only five, but each member was trained on several instruments, and there were the apprentices and journeymen to call on.

Ambrosius also played regularly at St. George’s and in the duke’s court Kapelle, as did his older cousin Christoph, organist for the court as well as for the city’s three main churches. Sebastian’s “uncle” Christoph appears to have been a bit of a crank. He complained chronically of being short of funds and badly kept (he was finally given a home and stable at the Prince’s Mint, a rather grand establishment for an organist), but despite having more than sufficient skill and reputation to better himself, he complained about the same job for sixty years. Having a family member under his watch whom he could not quite control would have been an embarrassment for Ambrosius, and in fact, whether for this reason or another, the two men did not get along. But for Sebastian, having Uncle Christoph around was very good luck. Ambrosius gave the boy his first instruction on stringed instruments, but it was Uncle Christoph who would have given him his first inside view of the bellows, action, and pipes of the church organ, which with the possible exception of the clock was the most complicated mechanism of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the family’s greatest musician before Sebastian and the only person writing serious new music in Eisenach, a musician even more accomplished than Ambrosius, Christoph was also the boy’s first model as a composer. One of Sebastian’s favorite works by Christoph was an elaborate piece for choir and orchestra in which the archangel Michael and his celestial host take on Satan in the form of a dragon along with his cohort of dark angels, a story taken from Revelations 12:7–12:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels … The great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Scored for two choirs, eight stringed instruments, organ, trumpets, and timpani, it must have been a sensation in its first performance on St. Michael’s Day, but we do not know whether young Sebastian was struck more by the beauty of the work or by the thrilling story of an archangel fighting a fire-breathing monster.

Childhood then being an unprivileged state, in which children were considered simply small, unready adults, Ambrosius would have pressed Sebastian into service as soon as he was able, just as he had pressed all his sons into such menial tasks as cleaning brass and stringing violins. Sebastian’s boyhood was anything but carefree. Infractions were severely punished, at home and at St. George’s School, where the eighty-one children in Sebastian’s quinta[1] class were packed into one small room whose high Gothic windows were filled not with sunlight and sky but the gray stone walls of the church. The school day ran in two sessions, mornings from seven to ten and afternoons from one to three, which left time for midday and late-afternoon work at home. The only vacation they had during the twelve-month school year was at harvesttime, which was no vacation. Choristers like Sebastian had longer hours than others to accommodate music classes and rehearsals; they had performances every Sunday and feast day and at weddings and funerals. A few times a year Sebastian would also join some of his fellow choristers to sing in the streets of Eisenach and nearby villages for small donations, called Chorgeld, a source of income for Sebastian throughout his school years.

Martin Luther had done the same thing early in the previous century, an experience that helped to seal his love of music and its place in the Lutheran liturgy. Music had had a somewhat ambiguous history in the church before the Reformation; some of the early church fathers, even Saint Augustine, were suspicious of its emotional power, but Luther put an end to that too.

You will find that from the beginning of the world [music] has been instilled and implanted in all creatures, individually and collectively. For nothing is without sound or harmony … Music is a gift and largesse of God, not a human gift. Praise through word and music is a sermon in sound.

Sebastian had Luther to thank that his youth had at least the light of music in it.

ALL OTHER LIGHT was shut off abruptly in his ninth year. In the spring, his mother died. In the fall, his father, having quickly remarried, died as well, leaving his second wife a widow and Sebastian, suddenly, an orphan. Though more common in those days, losing both parents was just as disorienting as it has ever been. Like all newly orphaned children, Sebastian would have felt abandoned, hurt, angry; and if he had had any wish to stay in Eisenach with Uncle Christoph or his new stepmother, it was not fulfilled. He was sent to Ohrdruf, a nearby town, to live with a brother he barely knew.

This brother, also named Christoph, the oldest child of Sebastian’s parents, had left home when Sebastian was an infant to apprentice himself to the composer and family friend Johann Pachelbel. Now he was the organist in Ohrdruf, a town much smaller than Eisenach but, in spiritual terms at least, a great deal more intense. While Eisenach was orthodox Lutheran to the core, Ohrdruf was riven, a center of the fierce rivalry between orthodoxy and a more ascetic, devotional form of Protestantism known as Pietism. Over the past century and a half of the Reformation, orthodox Lutheranism had gradually allowed itself to be ground into doctrinal minutiae by constant intersectarian brawling. Lutheran pastors were reduced to giving long-winded sermons on petty theological issues useful mainly for showing how important it was not to be Calvinist or Anabaptist. Pietism, drawing inspiration from such Christian mystics as Thomas à Kempis, Johannes Tauler, and Bernard of Clairvaux, set out to reclaim some of the spiritual energy of the early Reformation by stressing the inner, spiritual life, the daily struggle for meaning, and in doing so they drew sympathizers from all Protestant sects. The Calvinist king of Prussia, Frederick William I, father of Frederick the Great, was one. His Lutheran contemporary Sebastian Bach was another. Though he remained in the camp of the orthodox Lutheran church all his life, Sebastian’s sense of vocation as a church musician was rooted in the mystic spirituality of Pietism, an influence that took hold of him here, in Ohrdruf, and in the deepest grief of his childhood.

His commitment to religious studies at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, where the Pietist-orthodox struggle was played out every day, is plain to see in his class standing. When he left Eisenach he was twenty-third in his class at St. George’s (he had missed weeks of school during his parents’ illnesses, so he did well to keep his standing that high). Despite Ohrdruf’s more rigorous standards, he finished his first year of tertia in fourth place, and the next year, at age twelve the youngest in his class, he finished first.

There is something melancholy about this academic success, however, the suspicion that his redoubled focus on his work was more than anything else a distraction from his pain—that he was drawn to theology, as he would be drawn to the cold logic of counterpoint, out of a wish for order in his life. The death of both parents is not easily overcome in an adult, not to mention a small, unready adult. Maybe it is never overcome. In any case, from this time forward and for the rest of his life, Sebastian would pursue order, perfection, and spiritual meaning in his music, and never more movingly so than on the theme of triumph over death.

ONE OF THE MOST vivid stories of Sebastian’s years in his brother’s house in Ohrdruf concerns a collection of music Christoph had got from Pachelbel. He kept it locked in a cabinet, but one whose door was a grille through which ten-year-old Sebastian could just barely squeeze a hand. At night, when his brother was asleep, he would reach in, roll up the book of music, pull it out, and since he had no lamp, so the story goes, he would copy it by moonlight. Six months later, just about the time he had finished copying the manuscript, his brother discovered what he had done and took his copy of the book away. Sebastian himself had to have perpetuated this story, perhaps to demonstrate his youthful defiance, a quality that would have been healing for him at such a time. Increasingly that quality would come to the foreground of his character, and naturally so: Martin Luther was his model, after all, a man whose entire career was a heroic act of defiance.

The meaning taken from the story of the “moonlight manuscript” is usually the drive with which Sebastian undertook his own musical education, a drive sufficient to keep him up all night copying music, but the oddest part of the story is his brother’s role in it. Why would he have taken away the copy Sebastian had made, and why did he forbid its use in the first place? This part of the story would make no sense if there were not other stories like it. The organist and Bach scholar David Yearsley cites a letter from the composer and theorist J. G. Walther to the well-known cantor Heinrich Bokemeyer—both of whom were renowned for their knowledge of counterpoint—in which Walther complains that his teacher had made him pay to see a musical treatise, then stood over him as he read it and only allowed him to copy a little at any one time. Finally, Walther resorted to bribing his teacher’s son to smuggle the work to him at night, when he was able to copy it in one sitting.

Yearsley cited Walther’s letter to demonstrate the connection between the practice of learned counterpoint and that of alchemy, the then still-active search for the elusive “philosopher’s stone” that could mediate the transformation of base metal into gold, and the connections he found are indeed intriguing. Like alchemy, the roots of counterpoint were centuries old. Ever since the early Middle Ages, when the single chanted line of Gregorian plainsong gave way grudgingly to the presence of another voice, the rich acoustic medium of the medieval stone church had encouraged composers’ experiments writing note against note (punctus contra punctum) and eventually of braiding related vocal lines through one another to form increasingly rich weaves of melody. The most rigorous such part writing, such as canon and fugue, came to be known collectively as learned counterpoint, and its elaborated codes and principles were handed down as carefully and discreetly as the secrets of alchemy, from artifex to artifex (the Latin term for alchemist, which Bokemeyer used to describe the composer of counterpoint as well).

Just as the alchemist’s ambition was to discover God’s laws for “perfecting” iron into gold, the learned composer’s job was to attempt to replicate in earthly music the celestial harmony with which God had joined and imbued the universe, and so in a way to take part in the act of Creation itself. Understanding what possessed young Sebastian to spend his nights trying to steal his brother’s notebook (after very long days at school and more daily hours at his music practice) requires understanding how the practice of threading musical voices into the fabric of counterpoint could have been endowed with such metaphysical power.

The key is music’s relation to number, a connection that was as old as Plato and as new as Newton, dating from the mythic day in the sixth century B.C. when Pythagoras heard a hammer strike an anvil. In his Textbook of Harmony of the second century A.D., Nichomachus of Gerasa recorded the moment:

One day he was out walking, lost in his reflections [when he] happened by a providential coincidence to pass by a blacksmith’s workshop … and heard there quite clearly the iron hammers … giving forth confusedly intervals which, with the exception of one, were perfect consonances. He recognized among these sounds the consonances of the diapason (octave), diapente (fifth) and diatessaron (fourth) … Thrilled, he entered the shop as if a god were aiding his plans …

It is a lovely and dubious story that later gets a bit loopy, perhaps through centuries of retelling. As a historical figure, Pythagoras is irretrievably lost in myth, in part because he forbade his disciples to write down anything he said. There is little reason to believe he did not exist, but it may have been someone else, perhaps one of his followers, who figured out Euclid’s “Theorem of Pythagoras,” which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. That was one of the Pythagoreans’ more useful ideas. They also posited the existence of a “counter-earth” because they could make out only nine planetary bodies and there had to be ten because ten was the perfect number.

For Western music, the most important discovery attributed to Pythagoras was that halving a string doubles its frequency, creating an octave with the full string in the proportion of 1:2. A little further experimentation showed that the interval of a fifth was sounded when string lengths were in the proportion of 2:3, the fourth in that of 3:4, and so on. This congruence was taken to have great cosmic significance. As elaborated over a few centuries around the time B.C. became A.D., the thinking (much oversimplified) was that such a sign of order had to be reflective of a larger, universal design—and sure enough, the same musical proportions were found in the distances between the orbits of the planets. Further, since such enormous bodies could not possibly orbit in complete silence, they must be sounding out these intervals together, playing a constant celestial harmony. Certified by Plato’s Republic and Timaeus, where the celestial music is said to be sung by sirens seated aboard their respective planets, the mathematical-cosmic nature of music was transmitted to Baroque composers and their predecessors by the Roman scholar Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, whose sixth-century writings constituted the most widely read treatise on music theory for the next thousand years.

Of course such a perfectly ordered universe could only be the work of God, the all-encompassing One (represented by the unison in the proportion 1:1), and the unswerving reliability of this order was taken as proof of His continuing presence in the world. Despite that, the early church fathers continued to oppose anything but plainsong in the liturgy, hearing the work of the devil in more elaborate music. Saint Augustine finally resolved the question in favor of liberating music to glorify God, but not without torment.

I waver between the danger that lies in gratifying the senses and the benefits which, as I know from experience, can accrue from singing. Without committing myself to an irrevocable opinion, I am inclined to approve the custom of singing in church, in order that by indulging the ears weaker spirits may be inspired with feelings of devotion. Yet when I find the singing itself more moving than the truth which it conveys, I confess that this is a grievous sin, and at those times I would prefer not to hear the singer.

Of critical importance for Bach and his time, Martin Luther sided with the Platonic idea of music as evidence of divine order, and he set out to rehabilitate Pythagoras as a servant of God. In his commentary on Genesis he laments the fact that “we have become deaf toward what Pythagoras aptly terms this wonderful and most lovely music coming from the harmony of the spheres.” No less than the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler gave Luther’s position the stamp of scientific certainty in his great work, Harmonices Mundi, where he correlates the orbits of the planets to the intervals of the scale and finds them to be “nothing other than a continuous, many voiced music (grasped by the understanding, not the ear).” This last point was debated: Some thought the celestial music was abstract, an ephemeral spiritual object, but others insisted it was real, inaudible to us only because it had been sounding constantly in the background from the time of our birth. In either case music was a manifestation of the cosmic order. “Now one will no longer be surprised,” Kepler wrote, “that man has formed this most excellent order of notes or steps into the musical system or scale, since one can see that in this matter he acts as nothing but the ape of God the Creator, playing, as it were, a drama about the order of celestial motions.” One of his chapters is titled “There Are Universal Harmonies of All Six Planets, Similar to Common Four-Part Counterpoint.”

Never were allegories packed into music more enthusiastically than in Bach’s time. Andreas Werckmeister was far from alone in attaching specific integers, for example, to the Trinity: 1 stood for the Father, 2 for the Son, 3 for the Holy Spirit, the last being the sum and proportion of Father and Son (1:2, a unison at the octave). Elsewhere we find that 4 represented the four elements of matter and the four seasons, that 5 meant justice (because it stands at the center of the first ten numbers) and humanity (five senses and the five appendages of arms, legs, and head). Saint Augustine favored the number 6 (creation took six days, so God must have found 6 to be a perfect number), 7 stood for the planets, virtues, liberal arts, deadly sins, and ages of man (although sometimes it is said not to stand for anything, since on the seventh day God rested). Twelve covered apostles, months, prophets, etc. Then there were the combinations, for example: 7 being 3 (the Trinity) plus 4 (elements of matter), and 12 being 3 (ditto) times 4 (ditto), it followed (trust me) that 7 and 12 were perfect numbers. And so on. All this from Pythagoras, whose followers thought the best number was 10 because it was the sum of 1, 2, 3, and 4, elemental components of the “figured number” known as the Pythagorean Tetraktys:

It is easy to have fun with number theory, and some of the best such fun is in the distant reaches of the Bach literature, where one can read, for example, that he left a prophecy in musical code of the date of his death on the Rosicrucian calendar. On the other hand, it is only the extent to which Bach’s music contains meanings coded in numbers that is hotly debated. The fact that it contains such coded meanings is not.

Cosmological harmony was actually one of the few ideas on which the philosophers, scientists, and theologians of Bach’s time were agreed. Newton, for example, could not imagine that a world as orderly as this one could have occurred by “natural Cause alone.” A “powerful, ever-living Agent … governs all things,” he concluded, “not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.” Newton’s Agent was Luther’s Celestial Contrapuntist, whose woven voices were like so many planetary orbits.

We marvel when we hear music in which one voice sings a simple melody, while three, four, or five other voices play and trip lustily around … reminding us of a heavenly dance.

This heavenly dance was nowhere more sublime than in canon, the strictest form of contrapuntal writing, in which an entire piece of music is built from a single melodic phrase playing over itself at different intervals of time and key, in varying rhythms and tempi, sometimes appearing backward, inside out, or upside down, and sometimes continuing, at least theoretically, forever. Andreas Werckmeister drew the analogy of cosmos to counterpoint even more explicitly than Luther had done:

The heavens are now revolving and circulating steadily so that one [body] now goes up but in another time it changes again and comes down … We also have these mirrors of heaven and nature in musical harmony, because a certain voice can be the highest voice, but can become the lowest or middle voice, and the lowest and middle can again become the highest … [In the case of canon] one voice can become all the other voices and no other voice must be added …

Another of Bach’s contemporaries imagined the moment when the first contrapuntist, stumbling on a perpetual canon, found “the beginning and end bound together” and discovered “the eternal unending origins as well as the harmony of all eternity.”

From such a celestial height, perhaps it is possible to look again at a young boy copying music from his brother’s notebook on a moonlit night and see what he is doing a bit more clearly. The composers in the “moonlight manuscript”—Kerll, Froberger, Pachelbel—were the reigning masters of counterpoint, men who knew about the great design, who plied its strings and levers. To a boy so recently an orphan, simply the belief that there was such a design—that God was present in an orderly universe—must have been as comforting as it was elusive. His brother’s notebook was the closest Sebastian had ever come to such an idea of life and music, and the gesture of putting his hand through the grille of that cupboard was about more than the desire for a musical education: He was reaching for answers. Christoph had been Pachelbel’s (the sorcerer’s) apprentice, so the secrets in his notebook were worth any amount of lost sleep to Sebastian. But in this light, Christoph’s attitude is no less understandable: What gave his little brother, a schoolboy, the right to such precious and hard-won knowledge? Of course his brother took away Sebastian’s copy of the notebook, and of course he would have forbidden anyone to copy it in the first place.

Such a reading of this anecdote requires no great psychoanalytic reach. Sebastian’s worldview was profoundly allegorical, like that of his time and culture. The favored allegories at the time were Lutheran, of course, but not exclusively so. After all, Kepler had read horoscopes, and both Newton and Leibniz still had hopes for alchemy. Efforts to advance the education of Sebastian’s day could hardly be called enlightened, confounded as they still were by ignorance and superstition. The seventeenth-century educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius, for example, introduced physics into the curriculum, but it was a physics in which the world’s qualities were exactly three: “consistence, oleosity and aquasity,” the attributes of salt, sulfur, and mercury, a decidedly medieval stew. So Sebastian’s education was as thoroughly theological, or, more broadly, mythological, as his father’s and grandfather’s had been.

In tertia, where Sebastian began his Lyceum studies in Ohrdruf, there was some reading of classics and history, but it was carefully edited for religious content; most of his class time was spent on Scripture and the catechism. In secunda and the first part of prima, he got lots of Latin—especially rhetoric and oratory—as well as some Greek, math, history and science, but his hardest work was on Leonhard Hutter’s exhaustive and exhausting exegesis on Lutheran doctrine, the Compendium locorum theologicorum, hundreds and hundreds of pages in Latin, great chunks of which he was expected to memorize.

Given his class standing, he obviously mastered it, but it is difficult to see how, even for someone trying to throw himself into work. Outside of class, the lovely singing voice that got him his scholarship made him an anchor not only of the chorus musicus but also of a smaller group that did advanced works for the church as well as weddings and funerals. At the same time he must have been practicing the organ and harpsichord for long hours every day. He credited his brother Christoph with giving him his first keyboard lessons, but by the time he left Ohrdruf, after only five years, his technical mastery was already prodigious. The transformation of a novice into a budding virtuoso in five years would have been a remarkable feat even without all his other work, an accomplishment for which even the best teacher could not take credit.

TEN DAYS BEFORE his fifteenth birthday, Sebastian put his clothes in a bag, strung a violin over his shoulder, and set out, on foot, for a new school more than two hundred miles away. Nobody in his family had ventured so far from their Thuringian heartland, but of course Sebastian was not anybody else. The move was forced on him. Christoph’s home was becoming overcrowded as his family grew, and Sebastian could no longer pay for his keep because for unknown reasons he had lost his job as a tutor to the children of wealthy citizens. He may have felt he was being orphaned yet again, but in fact the offer of a choral scholarship to St. Michael’s Lyceum in Lüneburg, a town almost four times the size of Ohrdruf, was providential. His brother would probably have told him not to go there but to apprentice himself to a master as Christoph had done at this age. None of Sebastian’s siblings or ancestors had gone as far in school as he had gone already. But there was a wonderful library at St. Michael’s, with a famous collection of all the contrapuntal art of Europe; and Lüneburg was not far from Hamburg, the largest and most musical city in Germany.

For a boy who had known only Eisenach and Ohrdruf, Lüneburg was another country, with large open public squares, Renaissance architecture, and a distractingly robust musical life. We know that Sebastian graduated St. Michael’s, but there are no claims for his academic excellence there. When his voice changed soon after he arrived, he kept his music scholarship by singing bass and playing keyboards and violin, but apart from choral service the plainest trail he left in Lüneburg was extravagantly extracurricular.

While St. Michael’s tried to teach him yet more Latin, Sebastian taught himself French and Italian, which he needed to make his way through the music library. As Leo Schrade noted in his deceptively small book, Bach: The Conflict Between the Sacred and the Secular, the richness of the library at St. Michael’s must have been dazzling to Sebastian but also somewhat disorienting: There was a great deal of German church music in the collec-tion, but none of it was as German as it was the work of German composers writing in French or English or Italian or Dutch, the problem that sent Handel off to Italy and Telemann into the opera. After serving as a battleground for the great powers, Germany had not developed its own musical (or any other) traditions since the Thirty Years War so much as it absorbed them, a fact which Bach’s foremost predecessor, the great composer Heinrich Schütz, bemoaned in his late life even as he continued to write in the style of Monteverdi. German princes spoke French. The best music came to Germany from Venice or Amsterdam—by sea, to the port of Hamburg.

Hamburg thus became the seedbed of change for German music, and in search of Germany’s musical future and his own, Sebastian more than once made the arduous several days’ walk to Hamburg and back, taking on the role of journeyman musician. Hamburg had not only a robust, distinctly German school of organists but also an opera. Astride both was the octogenarian Johann Adam Reinken, organist at St. Catherine’s Church and one of the opera’s founders. Reinken’s magnificent organ, with its four keyboards, fifty-eight stops, and full pedal keyboard, had enormous range and power—from the great thirty-two-foot pipes and their thunderous bass to the tiniest whistles, for piccolo and flute. Reinken’s was the largest organ Bach had ever seen and became the measure by which he would judge all others. Perhaps first at Reinken’s Hamburg apartment, he came under the influence of the great Dietrich Buxtehude, organist at St. Mary’s in Lübeck and a composer of outsize ambition and ability who was working with all the styles and traditions of Europe. Buxtehude would have a more than musical influence on Sebastian in his first job, and it was in him perhaps more than anywhere else that Sebastian would find the inspiration for what was perhaps his greatest gift to Western culture: forging from a multinational babel a single language of European music.

SIXTY MILES OF very bad roads from St. Michael’s school in Lüneburg, in another direction entirely from the road to Hamburg, lay one of Germany’s many mini-Versailles, the very fashionable dukedom of Celle, where, according to his son Carl, Sebastian was exposed to the latest in French culture and music, including the works of Lebègue, Marais, Marchand, Couperin, and especially Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Sun King’s own composer and so the paragon of French music (himself however a Florentine, an embarrassment Louis was persuaded to overlook only by the richness of Lully’s sycophancy).

Though he learned and adopted a great deal from French music, Sebastian must have been mystified by the French attitude toward it. Like everything else at Versailles and in seventeenth-century France, music was a slave to the narcissism and power of Louis XIV. Its purpose was, simply, to serve the king: as background to his clavecin or lute playing, as accompaniment to the ballets he danced in, and to cover for the noise of the brilliant new machines that allowed whales to belch fireworks and permitted Louis himself to fly as Jupiter on the back of an eagle and as various other deities to float along on clouds in the ostentatious theatricals staged to reinforce his myth. Bach certainly would write flattering music to and for kings and princes, but his music always had a higher goal in mind, the glory of which royal power was but a pale shadow. In France, though, music had only one purpose more important than the glorification of Louis. The palace gossip sheet Mercure galant prattled on about how music mirrored the harmony of the universe and was therefore the king’s handmaiden as the arbiter and source of all good order, etc., but the fact was that Louis needed music and musical spectacles to keep his nobles occupied. Dukes with time on their hands had been no end of trouble to his father and Cardinal Richelieu, and Louis knew that a rich court life would keep them distracted and keep them where he could see them. He learned that from his own Cardinal Mazarin, who imported Italian singers, composers, and instrumentalists to distract Louis himself from the notion of meddling in state affairs as a boy king.

In time the Italian composers began to experiment with chromaticism and dissonance, to introduce passion into their music. This was controversial, and so the Italians were banished. Louis then put his imprimatur on Lully’s elaborately ornamented, courtly pleasantries, whose halting, ceremonial rhythms were difficult enough to walk much less dance to, a kind of musical Stump the Nobles. (There were other, similarly hobbling fashions; ladies were forced to kneel in their coaches, for example, to compete in that heyday of haute coiffure.) Lully’s Florentine background was inconvenient, but the Mercure galant, which commented frequently and with great assurance on matters of music theory, reported that Lully

knew perfectly well the necessity of renouncing the taste of his nation in order to accommodate himself to ours; he found that the French judged some things more sanely than the Italians; and he knew that music had no other end than to titillate the ear; it was unnecessary to charge it with affected dissonances.

One of Lully’s jobs was to rationalize, in just so many words, Louis’s various religious and territorial wars. In Amadis, as French armies marched on the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1683, Lully put this operatic encomium to Louis in the mouth of his heroine Urgande:

This hero triumphs so that everything will be peaceful. In vain, thousands of the envious arm themselves on all sides. With one word, with one of his glances he knows how to bend their useful fury to his will. It is for him to teach the great Art of war to the Masters of the Earth … The whole universe admires his exploits; let us go to live happily under his laws.

Pleased, Louis gave Lully a state monopoly on the staging of operas, and Lully became filthy rich. Scandal attached to him now and then. People were given to having sex in the upper galleries at the opera, Lully himself was upbraided by Louis more than once for outrageously gay behavior in public, and the nobles kept getting his singers pregnant. Fiercely disliked and openly opposed by many, including Molière and Boileau (who called Lully an “odious buffoon”), he hung on, getting richer and richer, until finally he made them all happy by impaling himself in the foot with his baton and dying of gangrene. In one of the many satires at his death, an Italian composer attempts to turn him back at the gates of Parnassus, arguing that he had played upon the French weakness for the merely fashionable in order to line his pockets. Lully replies loftily, “I declare quite frankly … that I have worked usefully for the corruption of my country, but they [the French] are no less deserving of the glory, because they have followed the composer’s intentions.”

It hardly needs to be said that nothing could be further from Bach’s exalted sense of purpose for music than Louis’s utilitarian or Lully’s mercenary one, but this early exposure to French music turns up in his earliest compositions and clearly left a deep impression on him.

Attached to St. Michael’s was a school for young nobles, called a Knights’ Academy, and probably through a friendly sponsor there he had access to the recently completed castle in Lüneburg of Duke Georg Wilhelm, where he also heard the latest music of France. The Knights’ Academy also exposed him to a less pleasant aspect of his future. The curriculum of these cadet princelings included not only the usual Latin, history, and science but also French, dancing, heraldry, and other prerequisites for the life of a francophone German noble. Bach and the other choral scholars slept every night in a dormitory just next to that of the Knights’ Academy, and some of them served the young princes as valets or tutors. Whether as valet, tutor, or just another invisible spectator among the scholarship boys, Sebastian would have witnessed every day the worst aspects of the petty nobles then living off Germany’s fractured territories, and he had every reason to be sobered by the thought that one of them might someday be his patron.

V.
GIANTS, SPIES, AND THE LASH: LIFE WITH “FATTY”

AT ABOUT THE SAME AGE BACH HAD BEEN WHEN HE walked the two hundred miles to Lüneburg, Crown Prince Frederick could be found in his favorite red-and-gold embroidered robe and slippers, his hair curled and puffed, playing flute-and-lute duets with his sister Wilhelmina. Usually a lookout was posted at the door because of the intensity with which his father despised this scene. Frederick William had set himself the task of eradicating Frederick’s “effeminate” (read: French) tastes, and in that entirely fruitless effort he employed a degree of violence perhaps unique in the annals of kings and their crown princes. What his son endured at his hands explains almost everything about the sort of man and king Frederick would become, but before getting into that we should give the father his due.

Unlike most of his aristocratic peers, Frederick William was a devoted (not devout) Protestant, a faithful husband, hardworking, plain in his tastes, and thrifty. For two years before taking the throne he had investigated the spending habits and ministers of his father, and upon his accession he got rid of both, slashing the royal budget by three quarters, sacking virtually the entire court (including the musicians), selling off most of his father’s horses, the royal silver, and the crown jewels. When he made the obligatory trip to Königsberg to receive Prussia’s homage to its new king, he took fifty horses and four days (to his father’s thirty thousand horses and two weeks), and instead of five million he spent exactly 2,547 thalers on the trip. From the first days of his reign, he made it plain that this would not be his father’s monarchy. The Saxon ambassador reported to Dresden:

Every day his majesty gives new proofs of his justice. Walking recently at Potsdam at 6 in the morning, he saw a post coach arrive with several passengers who knocked for a long time at the post house which was still closed. The King, seeing that no one opened the door, joined them in knocking and even knocked in some window-panes. The master of the post then opened the door and scolded the travelers, for no one recognized the King. But His Majesty let himself be known by giving the official some good blows of his cane and drove him from his house and his job after apologizing to the travelers for his laziness. Examples of this sort, of which I could relate several others, make everybody alert and exact.

Very much in contrast to the contemporary German princes Bach knew at the Knights’ Academy, a bunch of narcissistic, free-spending little Sun Kings, Frederick William built a model orphanage, provided for poor widows, recovered large tracts of wetlands for agriculture, and helped to elevate the craft of administration to the level of science, creating in his two universities the first chairs in cameralism, a theoretical approach to managing a centralized economy. In service to his almost obsessive attention to his kingdom’s finances—he was forever telling his son about the virtues of ein Plus machen, making a profit—he radically reorganized his administration with a remarkable “Instruction” to his ministers that covered everything from punctuality to trade policy. The structure he created became a fairly efficient bureaucracy, but the Instruction itself betrayed its autocratic (not to mention compulsive) author. For example, he was determined not to let Prussian goods get away by allowing his people to export wool, so he decreed that all of it would be used—and how:

The General Directory shall compare the total of the wool manufactured with the total of the wool produced. Let us suppose the first total to be inferior to the second, and that 2,000 pounds of the wool at first quality and 1,000 pounds of medium quality will not find buyers. The General Directory shall establish in a city nine drapers, each of which will use 300 pounds of good wool, and employ one hundred operatives in the stocking manufactories, each of which will work up at least 10 pounds of medium wool. The evil is remedied.

After he published this Instruction, the penalty for anyone caught exporting wool was strangulation.

“A king needs to be strong,” he said. “In order to be strong he must have a good army. In order to maintain a good army he must pay it. In order to pay it he must raise the money.” His ideas were few and those borrowed—this one was the advice of his grandfather, the Great Elector—but he lived by them. During his reign he would build up ein Plus of no less than eight million thalers, he would double the size of his army, and through drill, discipline, and innovation, he would make them the envy of the great powers of Europe. Powerful nations, he told his son, “will always be obliged to seek a prince who has a hundred thousand men ready for action and twenty-five million crowns to sustain them … All the most imposing powers seek me, and emulate each other in fondling me, as they would a bride.”

Really it was beyond fondling, they were all over him, but most of the time he had no clue they were taking advantage of him. His two closest ministers were employed as spies by the Hapsburgs. Their code name for the him was “Fatty.” “Have no fears,” one of them wrote in a dispatch. “Fatty’s heart is in my hands, I can do with him as I like …” Frederick William would have called this man one of his best friends.

The result was a foreign policy that could only be described as a mess. At a time when diplomacy was as shadowy and filled with intrigue as it would ever be, Prussia had a king who did not deal well with ambiguity, and no one was more aware of this weakness than himself, one of the reasons he was frequently in a rage. The French ambassador wrote to Versailles: “The variable moods of the King of Prussia and his profound dissimulation are infinitely above all that Your Majesty can imagine.” In fact, though, he was less deceitful than simply confused most of the time, acting on the advice of spies, always stumbling out of the trouble they made for him and that he made for himself. He had witnessed and resented how his father and grandfather had been undercut and cheated by a variety of powers, including the Hapsburgs, but he was powerless to avenge them. “Follow the example of your father in finance and military affairs,” he told Frederick one day. “Take care not to imitate him in what is called ministerial affairs, for he understands nothing about that.”

Frederick William’s chief consolations in life were getting drunk and kidnapping giants (not at the same time). He had stolen hundreds and thousands of very large, mostly moronic men for his ornamental guard, the Potsdam Grenadiers, from their homes and fields and from the armies of enemies and friends alike (another diplomatic blooper). At one point kidnapping the giants got a little expensive for him, so he tried breeding them instead, insisting that every large citizen of the realm marry an equally large person, but mixed results sent him back to kidnapping. His methods were varied and no-nonsense. A priest was taken from the altar of his church during mass. “Prussian recruiters hover about barracks, parade-grounds, in Foreign Countries,” Carlyle reports, adding that they “hunt with some vigor.”

For example, in the town of Jülich there lived and worked a tall young carpenter: one day a well-dressed, positive-looking gentleman … enters the shop; wants “a stout chest, with lock on it [and] … must be six feet six in length … an indispensable point,—in fact it will be longer than yourself, Herr Zimmerman.” … At the appointed day he reappears; the chest is ready … “Too short, as I dreaded!” says the positive gentleman. “Nay, your Honor,” says the carpenter … “Well, it is.”—“No, it isn’t!” The carpenter, to end the matter, gets into the chest [and] the positive gentleman, a Prussian recruiting officer in disguise, slams down the lid upon him; locks it; whistles in three stout fellows, who pick up the chest [and go].

In most cases these stories had unhappy endings, and this one was unhappier than most. When the coffin was opened the carpenter was found to have suffocated, and the positive gentleman, one Baron von Hompesch, spent the rest of his life in prison. Obviously, given the lengths to which the baron was willing to go, Frederick William’s gratitude for his giants was extreme. When he was in one of his melancholy moods, which were frequent, having a few hundred of them file past him was known to be a reliable pick-me-up.

The other was beer. At night, almost every night, he took his place with his fellows—one hesitates to call anyone in his life a friend—on a wooden bench around a wooden table set with clay pipes, tobacco, wine, and beer. Here in the so-called Tobacco College, he and his closest advisers, most of them senior military officers, consulted, at least briefly, until they muzzily transitioned into song, loud toasts, and curses at the French. (It was in the Tobacco College, later rather than earlier in the evening, that the spies did their best work.) The unwitting jester at these revels was a man named Gundling, a university-educated drunk who had been found near destitution in a tavern by one of the spies and brought into the court to read the newspaper to the family at meals. He was the master of a thousand odd facts of geography, history, and other subjects, about all of which, being credulous as well as besotted, he was easily persuaded to speak. He was the easiest and most appealing kind of target for the king, who loved nothing more than to humiliate the pompous, and Gundling bore the brunt of jokes that became more brutal the more they all drank. Frederick’s biographer Nancy Mitford reports that the group once set him on fire. He objected to their taunts (especially, one imagines, to being set ablaze), but he always came back. To reward his loyalty, to keep him around, and most of all to show how little the king thought of scholars and scholarship, Gundling was appointed to succeed Leibniz, the most profound philosopher of his generation, as head of the Berlin Academy of Sciences.

THE EGREGIOUS FLAWS of Frederick William would simply be of academic interest or entertainment value were it not for the remarkable fact that his son, a man so different from him in so many ways, would unconsciously incorporate so many of the qualities in his father that he most despised.

Of course, Frederick William carefully presided over his crown prince’s growth and education. Presided is in fact a small word for what he did. Frederick’s days and lessons were prescribed minutely by another obsessive-compulsive “Instruction” from the king to his tutors. This is Sunday:

[Frederick] is to rise at seven; and as soon as he has got his slippers on, shall kneel at his bedside, and pray to God so as all the room shall hear it … in these words: Lord God, blessed Father, I thank thee from my heart that thou hast so graciously preserved me through this night. Fit me for what thy holy will is; and grant that I do nothing this day, or all the days of my life, which can divide me from thee. For the Lord Jesus my Redeemer’s sake. Amen. After which the Lord’s prayer. Then rapidly and vigorously wash himself clean, dress and powder and comb himself … Prayer, with washing, breakfast, and the rest, to be done pointedly [by] a quarter-past seven.

That was the first fifteen minutes of a schedule that took him minute by minute up to early evening, and Sunday was his easy day.

What is most notable about the education his father set out for Frederick is what was not there: no reading in the classics, no history prior to the sixteenth century, no natural sciences or philosophy (Frederick William called it “wind-making”), no Latin. He was, however, steeped in Calvinist theology. His father instructed his pastors not to teach the boy to believe in predestination, since he was convinced it would lead to desertions by fatalist soldiers, but they taught it to Frederick anyway. In fact, years later, even when he seemed not to believe anything at all, Frederick still spoke well of predestination.

Other than religion and economics, there was only one lesson that Frederick William insisted Frederick’s tutors teach: They were charged to “infuse into my son a true love for the [life of a] Soldier … and impress on him that, as there is nothing in the world which can bring a Prince renown and honour like the sword, so he would be a despised creature before all men, if he did not love it, and seek his sole glory therein.” The same year he was submitted to the Instruction—that is to say, at the age of six—the crown prince was given his own corps of human toy soldiers, the “Crown Prince Royal Battalion of Cadets,” 131 luckless little boys whom he was to drill to Prussian standards. Two years later he was also given his own little arsenal, complete with miniature versions of the weapons in the Prussian armory, and a working cannon.

For a few years, Frederick appeared to be all his father could have hoped. Not long after he began working with his cadets, he wrote the king a letter in which he praised his troops for their precision in maneuvers and reported that he had shot his first partridge (Frederick William was an avid huntsman). The following year, at the age of seven, he sent his father an essay he had written, “How the Prince of a Great House Should Live” (“he must love his father and mother … he must love God with all his heart … he must never think evil,” etc.). At the same time his teacher was reading to him from Telemachus, a novel by Fénelon, pen name of the Archbishop of Cambrai, who wrote his novel about the son of Odysseus as a manual on monarchy for the education of Louis XIV’s grandson. Frederick William’s mother had read the book to him, and it was filled with the sort of advice to a monarch-in-waiting of which the king very much approved. “The Gods did not make him king for his own sake,” Mentor advises Telemachus. “He was intended to be the man of his people: he owes all his time to his people, all his care and all his affection, and he is worthy of royalty only in as much as he forgets his own self and sacrifices himself to the common weal.” In the age of Louis XIV, that sentiment could not have been popular at the French court, but both Frederick’s later characterization of himself as “first servant of the state” and Frederick William’s rebellion from the splendiferous court and self-image of his father have a root here.

As time went on, Frederick’s curiosity ranged further and further from the cramped curriculum his father had prescribed for him. Fortunately for his education, his tutor Jacques Duhan was a wise and intrepid teacher, who followed his student’s interests and even, over time, helped him to amass a secret library, hidden in the locked closets of a house he rented near the castle. The library eventually grew to almost four thousand volumes, ranging from pre-Socratic philosophers to the writers of the early Enlightenment. When his father ended Frederick’s formal education at the age of fifteen and pensioned off the tutor, Frederick wrote Duhan: “I promise that when I have my own money I will give you 2400 crown a year and I will always love you, even a little more than now if that is possible.”

FREDERICK WILLIAM’S PROGRAM for his son was subtly but relentlessly subverted by Frederick’s mother. For much of his childhood he lived at her palace, called Monbijou, with his sister Wilhelmina, his elder by three years. Queen Sophia Dorothea was a Hanover, the daughter of England’s King George I and sister of George II. (She was also the first cousin of her hus-band, whose mother was a Hanover.) In a replay of his par-ents’ relationship, Frederick William loved his wife (he called her his Fiechen, a diminutive of Sophia), and Sophia Dorothea felt greatly diminished by her marriage. She painted Potsdam as rough and provincial in comparison to Hanover, and she let her children know of her distaste for her egregiously fat husband, who dressed every day in his faded military uniform, got drunk every night with his silly smoking party, and was forever talking about ein Plus machen. She was more than free with her opinions with her children: She consciously deployed them as part of a strategy to win them over to her vision of a real court (Hanover), the majesty of a real royal life (certainly not this one), the beauty of elaborate balls at which the latest in courtly music was played by the finest musicians. In this way and more direct ones, she made it clear to the children that they had a choice to make between her and their father. At one point, Wilhelmina wrote, her mother fiercely upbraided her for going to her father about some minor matter. She “reminded me that she had ordered me to attach myself to her exclusively; and that if I ever applied to the King again, she would be fiercely angry …”

Their father placed no less claim on their affection, of course, so Frederick and Wilhelmina, caught between antagonistic parents and their separate, dueling courts, found shelter in each other. They giggled conspiratorially at both parents’ dinner tables, made faces at each other when forced by their father to listen to his pastor’s sermons, and delighted in their common passion for music, which was perhaps the only unalloyed delight of their young lives.

Both clearly came to favor their mother. In her memoir, Wilhelmina paints a distinctly (and justly) unfavorable portrait of both parents but reserves her faintest praise for the king. “His table was served with frugality,” she wrote. “It never exceeded necessities. His principal occupation was to drill a regiment.” As for Frederick, Wilhelmina (at least as a child) had only deep affection and loyalty. “He was the most amiable prince that could be seen,” she wrote of her younger brother, “handsome, well made, of an understanding superior to his years, and possessed of every quality that forms a perfect prince.”

What the queen wanted more than anything was that her children would marry Hanovers, who were now England’s royal family. Wilhelmina was to marry the prince of Wales and Frederick his sister, Princess Amalia. Sophia Dorothea, then, would someday be mother not only to the king of Prussia but also to the queen of England, a prospect which suited her. The spies, of course, had to make sure that never happened, since it would put Prussia in England’s camp rather than the empire’s. Until the “double-marriage” plan could be completely unraveled, therefore, the spies worked “Fatty” hard, and so did the queen. Both sides used the same carrot: the aggrandizement of Prussia. The empire dangled two provinces on the Rhine, Jülich and Berg, that both the Great Elector and Frederick William’s father felt, with justice, the empire had taken from them wrongly. (The empire had no intention of actually supporting the claim, and it was characteristic of their view of Prussia that they offered as a prize something they had blatantly appropriated.) England, in its alliance with France against the empire, held out a future for Prussia as a coequal, independent, sovereign state rather than the role of imperial lackey and also support for his claim to Jülich-Berg. In trying to gain advantage for that position, the queen played a very treacherous game. Among other things, she recruited the French ambassador to Berlin, Konrad Alexander von Rothenburg, to be the conduit for secret messages to the English court, essentially plotting with them against her husband and king.

Not surprisingly, Frederick William frequently had the feeling something was going on behind his back. Who would not have been confused and suspicious, caught between the pleading of an ambitious and deceitful wife whom he loved and the advice of spies whom he considered his best advisers and closest friends?

AS HE GREW older, Frederick seemed to be less and less his father’s son and more and more his mother’s. He had never really liked hunting, and now when they went to the hunting lodge at Wusterhausen, he hid. Once when he should have been stalking game, his father found him in a clump of bushes reading. He fell off his horse. He curled his hair. He slept late. He called his uniform “the shroud.” He and his sister were ever more faithfully part of their mother’s cabal, to the point that she was able to draw Frederick into her conspiracy with the French minister, at which point her little prince began to demonstrate a distinct taste for intrigue.

His mother’s ability to bring Frederick into her perilous orbit owed a great deal to the fact that he was being physically abused and humiliated by his father. The beatings began when Frederick was twelve, and on a fixed date. Father and son were at a dinner party given by one of the spies, Field Marshal von Grumbkow. (Grumbkow was Frederick William’s war minister, of all things. The other spy was the former imperial ordnance master Count von Seckendorff.) In his cups, the king wrapped his arm around the crown prince and began loudly to give him advice, the rest of the party his audience. According to a dispatch from the Saxon minister to Dresden after the party, as he spoke the king began patting his son’s cheek for emphasis. “Fritz, listen to what I am going to say to you. Keep always a good large army [light tap], you cannot have a better friend and without this friend you will not be able to sustain yourself [harder tap]. Our neighbors desire nothing better than to make us turn a somersault. I know their intentions; you will learn [very hard tap] to know them. Believe me, do not trust in vanity—attach thyself to the real [harder]. Have a good army and money [harder]. In these consist the glory [harder] of the king [harder].” Word of the incident made its way to the capitals of all nations represented at the Prussian court.

From that point on, the beatings became increasingly frequent, humiliating, and severe. He beat Frederick for wearing gloves on a cold day at the hunt. He beat him for eating with a silver fork instead of a steel one. He beat him in front of servants, officers, and diplomats. He threw the prince to the floor and kicked him, berating him at the top of his lungs and beating him with his cane.

Frederick was not his only victim; his fury seemed omnidirectional. For a while it was thought that the king was going completely mad. So violently hostile was he even to his beloved giants that forty of them plotted to roast him alive by burning down Potsdam (a plot that gives us some sense of their collective intelligence). The penalty for desertion was to have one’s skin pinched off with red-hot tongs and then have all of one’s bones broken on the wheel, but there were hundreds of desertions anyway, and suicides at the garrison ran two a month. “The people are greatly discontented,” Rothenburg wrote to Paris. “They hope and believe that this distress cannot endure always. There are all the appearances of a revolution. Everything is preparing for it.”

AT ONE POINT, in one of his most profound depressions, the king began talking of abdication. Grumbkow and Seckendorff (and more so of course their imperial paymasters) were horrified: Should Frederick William abdicate and the crown prince succeed him now, the English alliance would be assured. So the Hapsburg emperor called upon his good friend Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, king of Poland, and grandmaster of the revels at one of the most sumptuous pleasure domes of Europe. The king of Prussia needed a rest, the emperor told Augustus, who was more than happy to oblige by sending Frederick William an invitation to Dresden.

Augustus the Strong was no doubt the most debauched ruler in Europe, which for the early eighteenth century is no small claim. His mistresses were legion, his illegitimate children numbered exactly 354, and some of his many daughters had become his mistresses as well. Obviously Frederick William disapproved such goings-on and knew what awaited. He took Frederick with him only because Wilhelmina plotted with the Saxon ambassador to pry an urgent invitation out of Augustus for the crown prince to join him. Frederick, of course, was thrilled with Dresden. He saw his first opera, he held his own in interesting conversation with smart dinner companions, he went to concerts, he even played his flute with the king’s Kapelle. In a letter to Wilhelmina describing the scene (the first letter he signed in the French manner, “Fédéric”), he wrote grandly, “I have been heard as a musician.” In that way and others Frederick greatly upstaged his father, whose most notable accomplishment in Dresden was to split his pants at a ball.

Perhaps Augustus’s greatest gift to the young crown prince came as a result of a joke played on his father. Knowing Frederick William to be something of a prude, Augustus led him to a human diorama, covered at first by a red velvet curtain. When drawn, it disclosed, surrounded by hundreds of candles, the reclining naked figure of a startlingly attractive woman. Accounts differ as to Frederick William’s reaction—he said she was beautiful and blushed, he slapped his hat over Frederick’s face and pushed him out of the room, he huffed out and said he was going back to Potsdam immediately—but we have no trouble imagining Frederick’s reaction. He had already been flirting with a certain very sexy countess who was among Augustus’s illegitimate daughters and favorite mistresses. She was cheating on Augustus with one of her half brothers, but apparently she had time for a crown prince, because Augustus caught her looking. He took Frederick aside and told him the countess was unavailable but asked if he would like to get to know the lady behind the curtain. Frederick said he would. Credible speculation has it that he eventually got to know them both.

If Frederick left Dresden with a smile on his face, it was knocked off in short order. After Dresden, father and son made immediately for the king’s hunting lodge at Wusterhausen. It was a banner hunt that year—the party brought in a grand total of 3,600 wild boar, 450 in one day—and Frederick was miserable. Apparently the king had not changed his attitude toward his son, because during their time at Wusterhausen Frederick wrote a letter to his father, who was in the next room:

For a long time I have not ventured to present myself before my dear papa, partly because I was advised not to do so, but mainly because I … was afraid to disturb my dear papa further by the favor I shall now ask. So I prefer to put it in writing.

I beg my dear papa to be kindly disposed toward me. I assure him that, after a long examination of my conscience, I find not the smallest thing with which I should reproach myself. But if, contrary to my wishes, I have disturbed my dear papa, I herewith beg him humbly for forgiveness, and I hope that my dear papa will forget the fearful hate which appears so clearly in his whole behavior and to which I find it hard to accustom myself. Until now I have always thought that I had a kind father, but I now see quite the opposite. Nevertheless, I shall take courage and hope that my dear papa will think this over and restore me once again to his favor. In the meantime, I assure him that I will never in my life willingly fail him, and in spite of his disfavor, I shall remain with most dutiful and filial respect, my dear papa’s

Most obedient and faithful servant and son,

Friedrich

His father replied:

You know very well that I cannot abide an effeminate fellow who has no manly tastes, who cannot ride or shoot (let it be said—to his shame!), is untidy in his personal habits and wears his hair curled like a fool instead of cutting it … For the rest, you are haughty, as indifferent as a country lout; you converse with no one outside of a few favorites, instead of being friendly and sociable; you grimace like a fool; you never follow my wishes out of love for me but only when you are forced to do so. You care nothing but having your own way, and you think nothing else is of any importance. That is my answer.

Friedrich Wilhelm

There was a terrible amount of animus, posturing, and truth in both letters, and the exchange had the predictable effect, which was none. Frederick did not modify his behavior, and his father kept beating and humiliating him for it. The prince seemed to have brought some illness back from Dresden, speculatively identified as venereal disease. Whatever it was, it laid him low, and was no doubt made worse by the constant battles with his father.

He had revived by the time Augustus paid a visit to Potsdam a few months later, and along with his many mistresses (including Frederick’s favorite), he brought his Kapelle, for which he had recruited the best musicians in Europe. One of them was Johann Joachim Quantz, a flautist of formidable reputation with whom Frederick had played in Dresden. On this trip he agreed to become Frederick’s teacher on the instrument, which was no small commitment, since the lessons and expenses were to be paid by the queen and kept secret from the king.

This little plot had the predictable outcome as well. The king came unexpectedly to Frederick’s apartment in the middle of one of his musical evenings, where Frederick was decked out in the red-and-gold robe he wore when he played duets with Wilhelmina. His hair was curled and puffed, and everything was just so, very French. There was a mad scramble when the lookout spotted the king coming. Frederick tore off the robe and stuffed it in a corner, the others, including Quantz, grabbed their instruments and found a firewood closet to hide in, but Frederick’s hair gave the game away. Very quickly the king sized up what was happening and began casting around the room for proof and co-conspirators. Where are they? he wanted to know. Hardened in his rebellion and protecting what was closest to him, Frederick said nothing. The king grew angrier, too angry, apparently, to think of looking in the closet. Finally he found and confiscated a few French books. Otherwise all he found was the red-and-gold robe. He stuffed it into the fire.

Sometime after that the king took Frederick with him again (for reasons unknown and unfathomable) to see King Augustus, who was holding military maneuvers in Mühlberg as the excuse for a great raucous party. On the last day, Augustus gave a dinner for all thirty thousand of his soldiers at two long—apparently very long—lines of tables, at each end of which was the head of an ox, with the skin of oxen covering the roasted quarters on the tables. Between the two lines of tables rode the kings of Poland and Prussia and their two crown princes, receiving the hosannas of the crowd. Frederick, however, could not have been regarded with unmixed awe. A day or two before he had been forced to stand at parade with his hair and clothes badly askew. For one reason or another, the king had beat him hard that day, throwing him to the ground, kicking him, and dragging him around by the hair, in full view of the crowd. When he had finished with his son, Frederick William spat at him: “Had I been so treated by my father I would have blown my brains out, but this man has no honor.”

Not long after Frederick returned to Berlin, Rothenburg informed Paris: “I have reason to believe that he is thinking of making his escape.”

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