Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment FROM THE PUBLISHER
"James R. Gaines's Evening in the Palace of Reason sets up what seems to be the ultimate mismatch: a young, glamorously triumphant warrior-king, heralded by Voltaire as the very It Boy of the Enlightenment, pitted against a devout, bad-tempered composer of "outdated" music, a scorned genius in his last years, symbol of a bygone world. The sparks from their brief conflict illuminate a pivotal moment in history." "Behind the pomp and flash, Prussia's Frederick the Great was a tormented man. His father, Frederick William I, was most likely mad; he had been known to chase frightened subjects down the street, brandishing a cane and roaring, "Love me, scum!" Frederick adored playing his flute as much as his father despised him for it, and he was beaten mercilessly for this and other perceived flaws. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape, Frederick was forced to watch as his best friend and coconspirator was brutally executed." "Twenty years later, Frederick's personality having congealed into a love of war and a taste for manhandling the great and near-great, he worked hard and long to draw "old Bach" into his celebrity menagerie. He was aided by the composer's own son, C. P. E. Bach, chief keyboardist in the king's private chamber music group. The king had prepared a cruel practical joke for his honored guest, asking him to improvise a six-part fugue on a theme so fiendishly difficult some believe only Bach's son could have devised it. Bach left the court fuming. In a fever of composition, he used the coded, alchemical language of counterpoint to write A Musical Offering in response. A stirring declaration of everything Bach had stood for all his life, it represented "as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and worldview as an absolute monarch has ever received." It is also one of the great works of art in the history of music." Set at the tipping point between the ancient and the modern world, the triumphant story of Bach's victory expands to take in the tumult of the e
FROM THE CRITICS
Edmund Morris - The New York Times
While Gaines is no match for Hofstadter as a thinker or stylist (he tends to be chatty), he writes with admirable erudition. The story he tells is a reminder that there was once a time when heads of state valued high culture as much as high finance, and when artists won fame through mastery rather than media manipulation.
Publishers Weekly
Like contrapuntal voices in a Bach fugue, the lives of an aging composer and a young dictator are intertwined and interlocked in this absorbing cultural history. Gaines (The Lives of the Piano), former managing editor of Time, Life and People magazines, begins by recounting Frederick's abrupt summons of Bach to his court at Potsdam. Here, in an apparent effort to humiliate the old-style composer, Frederick, enamored of the new in philosophy and art, sets Bach a succession of seemingly impossible musical challenges: to each, the composer responds with unthinkable genius, culminating in his Musical Offering. But beneath the biographical counterpoint traced by Gaines is a longer, unfinished duel between two visions of humankind-one that the sensitive and musically inclined Frederick was also fighting within himself. He had been brutally abused by his father and was increasingly committed to the cynical pursuit of military expansion; the sun gradually sets on the Prussian king, who is consumed by disillusionment, inflicting pain on himself and countless others. As night falls on the (un)enlightened despot, Bach's star begins to rise, and later, he will acquire the veneration his genius merits, his music a perennial reminder that "the light of reason can blind us to a deeper kind of illumination." Illus. not seen by PW. Agent, Liz Darhansoff. (Mar. 4) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
The best-documented event in the life of J.S. Bach was his meeting, three years before his death, with Frederick the Great of Prussia. The two were polar opposites: Bach, the learned contrapuntalist, was the devout composer of ornate, "old-fashioned" liturgical music, while Frederick the enlightened philosopher-king favored the lighter secular music of the era. At their meeting, in front of a distinguished audience of court musicians, Bach improvised a three-voiced fugue on a theme presented to him-and ostensibly composed by-the king himself. A few months later, Bach completed one of his greatest works-the Musical Offering-a collection of ten canons, two fugues, and a trio sonata based on the same theme and dedicated to the king. In this highly entertaining book, Gaines masterfully weaves parallel narratives of the lives of Bach and Frederick leading up to their momentous meeting. Gaines is not a musicologist but has drawn extensively on numerous up-to-date sources, and his journalistic background is evident in the stylish, often humorous prose, which never bogs down in dry musical or historical minutiae. There is some needless speculation, but lovers of music, European history, and Western philosophy will find this book an enormous pleasure. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/04.]-Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An ambitious, if not entirely successful, synthesis of the old-fashioned, pious ideals of Sebastian Bach and the newfangled values of the enlightened monarch Frederick the Great. Gaines's history of the dawning Enlightenment in the German states is dazzling but somewhat fractured, since Frederick was twenty-seven years older than Bach and the two didn't actually meet until Bach was 62, three years before his death in 1750. That meeting, in Potsdam, between the foremost adherent of the esoteric theory of counterpoint and the fashionable, not-easily-impressed philosopher king proved "the tipping point," Gaines asserts, "between ancient and modern culture in the West" and resulted in Bach's magisterial closing statement, The Musical Offering. American journalist Gaines (Wit's End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table, 1977), now Paris-based, ranges across the century in order to capture the backgrounds of the men: first, we have Bach's Baroque roots in a long line of church musicians from Thuringia, culminating in his post as Royal Composer to the Leipzig court; then we have Frederick's ascension to the Hohenzollern throne at twenty-eight, after a childhood under the abusive treatment of his autocratic father. The education of the crown prince makes the more compelling story, as he hides his love of music and all things French and eventually is imprisoned for plotting to flee his father's violent treatment. But chapters on Bach-however mesmerizing to the musician-tend to mire down in notions of making "sermons in sound" and theories of composition. Bach's work wasn't published or played outside of Leipzig until long after his death, while the world considered his son Carl (C.P.E.Bach), Frederick the Great's keyboard composer for thirty years, the greater musician. In the end, Frederick steals the show here as Gaines offers up a twin-faceted treatment of the ideas of the age-in a work that's not easily classifiable as music or history but is composed with a refreshingly nonscholarly flourish. A bit of a stretch, but it's a light-pedaling, virtuosic work of epistemology. Agent: Liz Darhansoff/Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman
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