The brief historic encounter of two very different men

EVENING IN THE PALACE OF REASON: BACH MEETS FREDERICK THE

GREAT IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

By James R. Gaines

Fourth Estate, $23.95, 336 pages

REVIEWED BY KELLY JANE TORRANCE

“A good way to break up any dinner party is to claim Bach’s superiority to Mozart, but there it is,” writes James

R. Gaines in his new book on the Baroque composer. “Spend any serious amount of time listening to Bach, and most of Mozart’s work, however wantonly gorgeous, will seem to be … missing something.”

That is a rather audacious claim. No one composer could be anointed the greatest, after all. There is too much competition — add Beethoven to the mix — each with his own special strengths. And while many of Mozart’s best-known works are light, he can be deep, too. Just listen to his final masterwork, the Requiem.

That’s not to say that Mr. Gaines does not have a point. There is something in Bach’s music that isn’t found in Mozart’s, or any other composer’s, for that matter. In his challenging new historical narrative, “Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment,” the former editor of Time and People magazines argues that this is no accident. Bach’s masterworks, he believes, are musical statements of the composer’s deep faith.

Ostensibly about the creation of one of Bach’s masterpieces, “Evening in the Palace of Reason” is a biography of two larger than life figures and the rival values they represented.

The 300-plus-page book revolves around the single meeting, in 1747, between Bach and the Prussian King Frederick the Great. The result of this encounter was “A Musical Offering.” Bach was 62, three years from death, Frederick only 35. Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel was working as a keyboardist in Frederick’s court and the king had invited (although an invitation from Frederick was more of a demand) the elder composer to visit.

Frederick challenged Bach to improvise a three-part fugue on a 21-note melody, now known as the Royal Theme. This was no ordinary game — Frederick’s (or maybe it was written by Carl — the king wasn’t that musically gifted) theme was particularly resistant to the rules of counterpoint, the multivoice music that Bach excelled at creating.

But Bach was no ordinary composer. To the court’s surprise, he readily met the challenge, even after a two-day journey with little sleep. Frederick immediately issued a new one — a six-part fugue. Bach had never even written a six-part fugue before, although he had composed some in five parts. He had no choice but to demur. He left Potsdam and returned to Leipzig, but remained haunted by the Royal Theme. A mere two weeks later, he sent to the king the 16-movement suite “A Musical Offering,” which included the desired six-part fugue.

In this very brief conflict between a monarch and a composer, Mr. Gaines astutely recognizes a momentous clash between the Enlightenment and the old ideals it sought to obliterate. As Mr. Gaines writes, “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.”

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