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.”

They disagreed not only about the goal of music, but ultimately that of life. Bach was a stubborn man with a temper that flared whenever he was prevented from acting on his beliefs, whether in his own talent or about music’s purpose. The latter, Bach wrote, “can be nothing else but the glory of God and the restoration of the heart. Where this is not the case there is no real music but only a demonic noise.” Even his secular music bore the epigram “S.D.G.” (Soli Deo Gloria, All Glory to God). Bach, Mr. Gaines argues, followed “Luther’s mandate for music to deliver ’sermons in sound.’”

Frederick, on the other hand, had no time for religion, and even less for music that, as he said, reeked of the church. He did share with Bach, however, a love of music forged early in life. Frederick was a composer himself and an accomplished flautist who played his instrument despite the beatings of his maniacal father, who saw music as an effeminate pastime good only for the French. (Frederick’s grandfather was different — “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.”)

Mr. Gaines winningly weaves together the stories of these two very different men. Going back and forth between the two biographies can be frustrating, particularly since the usually shorter chapters on Frederick can feel like a digression. (Also distracting is how the author begins by referring to the composer as “Sebastian” and then switches to “Bach.”) But Mr. Gaines always manages to keep the focus on the central dichotomy between the two.

Nowhere was this split more apparent than in their shared love. Frederick, like Bach’s own son Carl and most others of his generation, rejected the complicated, serious music of his parents. As Mr. Gaines writes, “the critics of counterpoint were renouncing music’s allegorical and cosmic nature, its claim to be a manifestation of the divine. To this generation, music was not to be written according to any higher theory of objective than that of sensual, aural pleasure.”

For the young, pleasing the listener was the goal. Unfortunately, that attitude rarely produces great art. All artistic geniuses, whether composer, author, or painter, work to produce on paper or canvas some vision from their own mind. Working the other way around almost always means an appeal to the lowest common denominator, and without the animating spirit that comes from an obsession to one’s own purpose.

Mr. Gaines writes that Bach’s sons, representative of the new generation, “understood the value of feeling over rationality, sensus over ratio, simplicity over complexity.” But this conflict is ultimately a false one. Bach’s music is much more than religious message music. The composer may well have been “drawn to the cold logic of counterpoint, out of a wish for order in his life,” as Mr. Gaines conjectures. But there is nothing cold about the music he created with it.

Far from making his music unenjoyable, Bach’s belief in a mysterious, unknowable world gives his work more passion than any light dinner music created by one of Frederick’s more favored composers. So it is not surprising that “In all the very good records and written memoirs of people around Frederick, there is no suggestion that he ever played the Musical Offering or that he ever heard it,” writes Mr. Gaines. “He gave his copy of it away.”

There is no need for us to ignore this “feast of inexpressibly delicious delights,” as Mr. Gaines describes Bach’s masterpiece, however. He writes that “what is greatest about Bach’s work is literally impossible to talk about.” This is an odd thing to say about a composer who is said to have put so many verbal ideas into his music. In his moving speculation on the source of genius, Mr. Gaines does a more than admirable job of helping even the least educated music lover better understand what he is listening to. But as he says himself, “we would be best served to put down this book, get out the score, put on the music.”

Kelly Jane Torrance is fiction editor of Doublethink, arts and culture editor of Brainwash, and a books columnist for The American Enterprise Online.