Evening in the Palace of Reason by James R. Gaines

One night in 1747, by way of an invitation with mockery as its intent, Prussian king Frederick the Great invited composer Johann Sebastian Bach to his palace for a cruel practical joke. Frederick had planned to ask Bach, the king of counterpoint, to improvise a six-part fugue on a musical theme so difficult that many believe only Bach's son could have devised it (ironic, as one of Bach's sons was the court musician for Frederick).

Bach, not exactly your mild-mannered musician, took on the challenge by composing "A Musical Offering," an elaborate and coded composition that, as longtime journalist James R. Gaines writes, was "as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and worldview as an absolute monarch has ever received." Gaines goes on to use this meeting of Bach and Frederick as argument for this Evening in the Palace of Reason being "the tipping point between the ancient and modern world," with Bach and Frederick the respective representatives.

"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."

While Gaines's research was fair and balanced for both men and their backgrounds, probably for reasons of shared ideology, I enjoyed reading more about Bach than about Frederick. This passage (and surrounding chapter) was especially interesting:

"As with Luther, God and Satan were vividly alive for Bach, and his own life was their battleground. It is difficult to listen to his music ­ by turns gruesome and angelic, tormented and enraptured, mournful and exuberant ­ without hearing the warfare raging inside him, just as it had raged in Martin Luther; and in that respect his sacred and secular music were the same. Bach did not separate them even in his filing system, and both alike bore the epigram S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria, 'All Glory to God')."

Regarding Frederick, one of the more interesting quotes Gaines includes is from William Reddaway's biography of the man in 1904, in which Reddaway concludes that, "Through all his life ­ in his councils, in his despair, in his triumph, and in his death ­ Frederick, almost beyond parallel in the record of human history, was alone." This observation serves as a powerful illustration of the difference between the warm belief of Bach and the cold reason of Frederick.

I confess that to some degree I buy Gaines's thesis that ancient and modern were in the same room that night in 1747; that is, I'm not sure I could come up with two better representatives of each who were once in the same room together. An interesting look at history, especially if you were to break out those old Bach albums as a soundtrack (Gaines provides a "recommended listens" list at the back of the book).