"Evening in the Palace of Reason"

James Gaines was also a highly successful magazine editor, and it shows in his approach to his topics and the way he organized and presented his material.

• 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.
• *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.
• 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.…
• 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.
• *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.
• * 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.
• 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
• 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;
• 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:
• *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.
• 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.
• 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.
• *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.
• 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.
• 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,
• “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.
• 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),
• * 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”)
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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 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.
• 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.
• Though [the elector] cannot be held responsible for all the misfortunes which befell his territories, his … weakness only left him a choice of errors.
• *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.
• *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.”
• * 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.
• 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.
• * 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.
• 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.
• 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). .. how the practice of threading musical voices into the fabric of counterpoint could have been endowed with such metaphysical power.
• 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).”.. Cosmological harmony was actually one of the few ideas on which the philosophers, scientists, and theologians of Bach’s time were agreed.
• 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,
• 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
• 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.
• 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…the penalty for anyone caught exporting wool was strangulation.
• 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,…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.
• 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
• 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.)
• 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.
• 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.”
• and, oddly, a bonus of thirty-four florins from St. George’s Hospital. Not coincidentally, the inspector of hospitals was none other than Martin Feldhaus, the amount of the hospital bonus was exactly what Bach needed for room and board, and Feldhaus was the owner of the house where he ended up living. .. Still, his entrepreneurial flourish of 1703 launched one of world’s great composers—and made Bach’s hagiographic memory a little more human. Even at eighteen, fresh out of livery, he was working the system.
• Luther’s idea of music as the faithful servant of theology inspired every Baroque composer’s defining challenge: to devise melodies and harmonies that could carry and dramatize meaning, or, to put it a bit oversimply, to make music speak in words… this concept of music as an oratorical craft inspired a vast compositional vocabulary of passages, rhythms, key changes, and other devices that could telegraph in music the meaning of a text, the language of what came to be known as “musical-rhetorical” figures.
• Another negative figure is a saltus duriusculus, a dissonant leap downward, literally “hard leap,” used to point out, often didactically, something harshly negative. A saltus duriusculus of a falling diminished seventh, for example, signifies “false.”
• (This, remember, was from a patron saint of rationalism, albeit at a time when rationalism could still have saints.) Descartes’s
• will be enough to remember that Baroque composers, very much including Bach, practiced a craft of somewhat mysterious and arcane causes and effects, that they used rhetorical figures consciously to invoke specific emotional and moral messages, and that these messages, whether or not they are felt or heard, can be found on the pages of the score.
• In the end, the same problem that had put others off the idea of becoming Buxtehude’s successor would have put off Bach as well. Like many such important posts, this one came with the stipulation that the candidate marry his predecessor’s daughter, who in this case was ten years older and a great deal larger than both Bach and Handel.
• The Actus tragicus begins in human time. The opening lament for recorders and strings, set to a steady heartbeat rhythm in the bass, starts in the innocent key of E-flat major and refuses to leave it, as if to say we may mourn but we may not despair, because death is the door to eternal life. Just in case we missed the point, the first chorus is a sweet, happy work of Renaissance-pure polyphony: “God’s time is the very best time…
• drops out just before the sopranos emerge again into the sunlight of E-flat major for the line wie Gott mir verheissen hat (“as God has promised me”), which after a chorale of thanks becomes the subject for a four-voiced fugue. Here Bach gives us music in its divine aspect, where time disappears into simultaneity. Only in music—and nowhere better than in counterpoint—can two complementary or contrasting thoughts combine in the same moment, in this case “as God has promised me” (in the fugue subject) and “through Jesus Christ”
• The way his music follows text the way roses follow a trellis, in perfect fidelity and submission but at not the slightest sacrifice of beauty.
• The fury of the king’s assaults seemed to increase with the pressure of diplomacy over the “double marriage,” the queen’s longed-for scenario in which Frederick and Wilhelmina both married into Britain’s royal family, securing not only a Prussian-English alliance but a glamorous (meaning: Hanoverian) court for herself.
• sufficiently so to keep at least one diplomat awake at night, thinking about the foam at the king’s mouth as he spoke of his son. “If the King of Prussia persists in these sentiments,” the Dutch ambassador wrote, “we will see the most dreadful, bloody scenes that have ever happened since the creation of the world.”
• When Frederick fully realized his best friend was about to be executed, he began to plead frantically with his guards to do something to stop it: He offered to renounce the throne, to accept life imprisonment, to give his own life, to do whatever the king required, anything to spare Katte’s life, but the guards were impassive;
• The most compressed, rigorous, and esoteric form of counterpoint, canon is to fugue as haiku is to blank verse,
• Leibniz, who started in on most great metaphysical problems with his motto, “Let us calculate.” For Leibniz and in the Baroque worldview, harmony was both an ideal and a fact. Leibniz believed that everything in the universe was composed of “monads,” the smallest, indivisible units of matter, whose forms and flow in the physical world were regulated by God in accordance with the “pre-established harmony” with which He created and imbued the universe.
• Music was now at the intersection of what could be thought of as a horizontal-vertical crossroads: the point at which the idea of music as a spiritual weave of independent voices moving roughly equally and together through time (polyphony) was giving way to the ideal of a sensuously beautiful and all-important melody hoisted aloft and borne forward by an undergirding of chords (homophony).
• Unlike his contemporaries Handel and Telemann, whose ambition was directed toward creating the epitome of a particular style, Bach deconstructed styles and put them back together again combined with his strengths in invention, orchestration, and counterpoint. The result especially of his encounter with the structural and melodic strength of Vivaldi was not only a sum greater than its parts but something utterly new: a burlier, grander, ever more confident Bach, who was now fully armed and ready for glory.
• Bach seems intentionally to confront and subvert both musical and social conventions. In the first Brandenburg, for the first time in any concerto, he uses flashy, aristocratic hunting horns, only to devalue them by making them an equal contrapuntal partner with the lowly oboe, which was associated with downscale, town-piper music.
• One of Bach’s most dramatic contributions to this mind-vs.feeling and order-vs.-freedom debate was the fifth Brandenburg concerto, in which, very oddly for his time, he seems to come down strongly on the side of the passionate, self-asserting, singular human being.
• were told on their installation to remember that life is short. At least one doge’s life was shortened for him when he forgot he had no power. In other words, Vivaldi composed in a relatively free aesthetic environment, and in part for this reason his solo parts could be dazzling, virtuosic statements that unapologetically upstaged the orchestra.
• One such place was the absolutist court of Louis XIV, whose resistance to Italian passion we have confronted before (page 57). To say individualism was not tolerated at Versailles is to understate the matter considerably.
• The first movement of the fifth Brandenburg concerto: It would have been a masterpiece if that is how it ended as well, but three-quarters of the way through this movement Bach does something that had no precedent in the history of music: He gives the cadenza not to the flute or violin but to the harpsichord, an instrument that had never had a solo in front of an orchestra.
• Bach was a man of his time, and so, as Luther did, he respected the hierarchy for what it was—certainly to be observed in most things, even when it hurt—but he also saw it for what, on the theological plane, it more truly was, just another flawed necessity of a fallen world, a side effect of human weakness. He would of course obey, but he would not be bowed. In music, where hierarchy was simply a matter of conventional expectation, Bach delighted in defiance.
• among the Enlightenment’s least explicit legacies to us is a common understanding that there is a gulf, a space that defines a substantial difference, between spiritual and secular life. For Bach there was no such place, no realm of neutrality or middle ground for action that was not a commitment to one side or the other in the great battle between God and Satan. .. Bach had an untroubled sense of the central Lutheran paradox that to be human is to be simul justus et peccator, sinful and righteous at the same time,
• Metaphorically, psychologically, and perhaps even strategically, this very strange gift seems to have been a gesture of surrender: Far from clinging to his friend’s memory, he wanted to deliver himself of Katte and join with the forces that killed him.
• It was far from the last time that Frederick would do and say things that seemed completely inimical to his affections and ideals. In the crucible of this ordeal, the graceful dissembling he had always employed to further his interests hardened into a reflexive survival instinct for deceit, and his character was fractured. After that, he never felt more secure than he did when he was successfully deceiving others about his own thoughts and intentions. In international diplomacy, he once said, “the great art is to conceal one’s designs.” The split in his character made for a very lonely man and for a very great practitioner of power politics
• One was the Count Francesco (Swan of Padua) Algarotti, author of the recent Newton for Ladies. Frederick fell in love with him, according to his biographer Nancy Mitford.
• In the mid-eighteenth century they knew also what they were against; the cry was to écraser l’infamel!, and while the infamy to be smashed was mainly Christianity, it was more broadly the great muddle of philosophical and theological speculation.
• What the Aufklärung had that the Enlightenment did not was a Lutheran upbringing. German thinkers did not have the liberty claimed elsewhere of writing off Christianity as a weedy blight of superstition choking off the flower of right reason. In Germany, the spirit of Martin Luther insisted that faith and reason be reconciled. This was, of course, quite the job.
• Frederick was not much bothered even by the ideas he embraced most passionately. To be charitable, perhaps he was gifted with what Keats called the poet’s “negative capability,” the capacity to entertain contradictory feelings and ideas without attempting to resolve them.
• With more than a dozen people at a time living in the 800-square-foot apartment (which apparently had only one unheated bathroom),
• YOU WILL NOT MAKE IT DIFFERENT ;IT WILL NOT DIRECT ITSELF ACCORDING TO YOU ; ABOVE ALL OTHER THINGS LEARN AND KNOW THAT THE WORLD IS UNGRATEFUL .
    Plainly and understandably discouraged, Bach began to move away from the church in that fall of 1729.
• THIS EARTH IS THE DEVIL’S KINGDOM .
    By the time he actually got his Calov, in 1733, he had a lot of pent-up underlining and marginal exclaiming to do. Given what was going on with him and against him at the time, it is easy to see him with his Calov open, a brandy at his elbow, jowls quivering, wig shaking, the quill in his thick fingers hacking at the page
• The Enlightenment’s way of knowing a thing was to identify, separate, and classify it, the encyclopedic impulse. Bach’s way of understanding something was to get his hands on it, turn it upside down and backward, and wrestle with it until he found a way to make something new.
• Though perhaps not so categorically as Scheibe, Friedemann and Carl also saw that the “natural” in music was an easier pleasure than the “forced labor” of counterpoint; they too understood the value of feeling over rationality, sensus over ratio, simplicity over complexity. Perhaps his sons’ departure freed Bach to pursue his own path without their unspoken doubts in mind.
• Euler and the French scientist Maupertuis, who became head of the academy. The one he really wanted as a jewel in his crown, though—or as featured attraction in his celebrity zoo—was Voltaire. Frederick would not have dared bring him to Prussia when his father was alive; he was, after all, French.
• Her  army was not battle-ready, her generals were old and tired, and all the powers of Europe had aims for her territories, not just him; if he waited he would lose the advantage of surprise. Beyond that, Silesia’s border with Brandenburg was completely undefended. The weakness of Prussia’s claim to the territory hardly entered the discussion. When the legal argument for it was presented to him in a brief, he wrote in the margin, “Bravo! The work of an excellent charlatan.”
• Frederick’s beloved old tutor Kalkstein asked him one day if the march was to Silesia. “Can you keep a secret?” Frederick asked. Of course, he said. “So can I.”
    Frederick, a lover of deception in all its forms, scheduled a masquerade party for the night he set for the beginning of the war—December 13, in the first year of his reign. When the party was over he rode to a rendezvous with his main force of twenty-four thousand men for the march on Silesia.
• Frederick pursued them with the same avidity his father had shown for giants.
• This time Voltaire was given cover: His new play La Mort de Caesar was “banned” in Paris to demonstrate a rupture with the court and so to make Frederick think he might actually move to Prussia. Voltaire wrote to Frederick inviting himself to Potsdam in a letter whose oozy deceit bears reading at length:
   … You, Sire, are my grande passion. I have much to tell Your Majesty. I will lay my heart at your feet, and you will decide if it is possible for me to pass my life at your side. You will be the arbiter of my destiny … Do not forget me, my adorable sovereign.
• Frederick knew exactly why he had suddenly decided to come to Berlin and refused to discuss politics with him, which he said would be like a man “offering a glass of medicine to his mistress.”
• This would not be like the First Silesian War. Maria Theresa’s now battle-hardened troops had been reinforced by twenty thousand Saxon and sixty thousand Hungarian soldiers and a bankroll from Frederick’s not-very-avuncular uncle George.
• when it makes wonderful sense to stop reading, to find an LP or CD of what would later become the B-minor Mass, and try to imagine what hearing Bach’s “Gloria in excelsis Deo” and even more his “Et in terra pax” would have been like on that particular Christmas Day at St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig.
• As one cannot know the need for valor except in danger, one cannot know the consolation of religion except in suffering.… <>  But Frederick was beyond redemption.
• He seemed to be growing more and more like his father, who came to him in recurrent dreams, always accompanied by a phalanx of soldiers.
• Goldberg Variations: Among the loveliest pieces in the set are canons. Every third variation is a canon—the first a canon at the unison (meaning that the second voice enters on the same note as the first), the second a canon at the second (the second voice is one whole interval higher than the first), the third a canon at the third, and so on. In place of the tenth canon, however, just before the final movement, which is a note-for-note repeat of the opening aria, he wrote a quodlibet, like the ones the Bach family used to sing at their reunions,
• The second song goes “Cabbage and beets have driven me away / Had my mother cooked meat I might longer have stayed.” Bach was not above making a plain joke about flatulence, but given the character of the previous reference, it is just possible he was making self-effacing fun of his own contrapuntal extravagance: Having forsworn the “meat” of simpler composition, he would spare his audience any further complexity (the sort of thing Frederick William might have called “wind-making”) and simply say a merciful good-bye. Whatever the literal joke may be, the winding together of these two folk tunes—over the same bass line as all the other variations, at the very end of this long, bravura display of every sort of counterpoint—is both a whimsical retort to those who denigrate canon as self-serious and itself a dazzling contrapuntal act.
• For Carl and his generation, the expression of feeling in music was all, and the affection that mattered was not a text or other object for depiction but the feeling state of the performer and composer. Carl was almost theatrically demonstrative when he played.
• The new “enlightened” composer wrote for one reason and one only: to please the audience.
• For one thing, Bach was a contemporary of Frederick’s father, and he represented the backward, boorish, superstitious world on which Frederick had turned his back but which still haunted him in his sleep.
• By every account and by the evidence of the transcription Bach eventually published of that night’s improvisation, which is the first movement of his Musical Offering, the result was dazzling, a fugue that surpassed all reasonable expectations… Given this achievement, it must have come as something of a shock when Frederick asked for more: He wanted Bach to do it all over again, this time improvising a fugue on the same theme for six voices.
• The image that comes to mind of Bach as he played for Frederick that evening—after two sleepless days bouncing around in a carriage for the pleasure of this moment—is of reddened face and burning anger, of a man who is only too aware that he has been shown up by a man not only decades younger, not only by far the lesser musician (understatement of understatements), not only the enemy of his Saxon elector and king, not only the not-very-appreciative employer of his son,
• a suite of sixteen movements that was one of the great masterpieces of Western music—a work that, taken together, is at once sublimely graceful, brilliantly expressive, a bracing blast of learned counterpoint, and an intriguing set of mysteries. The first three attributes are relatively simple to explain, the last somewhat less so…As for the sonata, the most generous superlatives seem only to scatter dust on it. On the most superficial level the trio for flute, violin, and keyboard is loveliness itself. Look deeper and every level drops away until its beauty seems bottomless, as perhaps it is.
• The inscription reads: “As the notes increase, so may the fortunes of the king.” The fifth canon is the one that Douglas Hofstadter, in his Gödel, Escher, Bach, appropriately nicknamed the “Endlessly Rising Canon” because each time it is played it leads to a higher key, one whole note above the last. Hofstadter likens this canon to the lithographs of M. C. Escher, like Waterfall, in which a stream of water seems to make a “Strange Loop,”… As the musicologist Eric Chafe was first to point out, both inscriptions sort oddly with their respective works—in the fourth because this canon about the king’s fortune is so relentlessly melancholy, in the fifth because despite the fact that the canon is supposed to reflect the king’s ascendant glory, the magic of it is that it does not seem to rise at all. Chafe’s conclusion is that Bach is commenting on the distinction between the apparent glory of the king and the fact of his humble human estate, bound to a world of flaw and sin just like the rest of us.  <> All sorts of the loveliest ripe fruit seem to drop and shrivel in the fallen world of the Musical Offering.
• Putting these onion peelings, bread crumbs, and dried fruit together brings us to the musical-rhetorical stuffing that Bach cooked into his Musical Offering. All of the oddities contained in the work—the harrowing descent in galant passages, the melancholy fate of the king’s fortune, the song to glory that goes nowhere, the German dedication, the Scriptural invocation to “seek and find” God’s mercy rather than the harsh, eternal judgment of God’s own canon law, the setting of a church sonata—all of these were of a piece, ..Beware the appearance of good fortune, Frederick, stand in awe of a fate more fearful than any this world has to give, seek the glory that is beyond the glory of this fallen world, and know that there is a law higher than any king’s which is never changing and by which you and every one of us will be judged.
• we come once more to the speed bump of the unspeakable. The reason so much of the Bach literature, like this book, focuses on “extra-musical” issues—the frame rather than the painting, …But in the case of works which are profound, the more I say the more remains to be said. <>  We can find the words Bach was speaking, the “point” he was trying to make in his works, but in doing so we can only discover something less than what he did. His way of writing had indeed stressed the figurative expression of words at first, Luther’s words and the Bible’s,
• In a way, Bach was the first “genius,” if by that we mean the Romantic notion of an individual seized by and expressing his own singular creative power. Having the core of his musical thinking entirely in himself rather than in his audience or his peers, not to mention in Enlightenment theory, is precisely what allowed Bach to deconstruct and dominate rather than simply use or be influenced by what he studied, to make his music the sum and pinnacle of all the music of his time.
• As the distinguished biographer Reinhold Koser put it, Frederick returned from the Seven Years War “gloomy, cold, hard, like a sunless winter day,” an old man of fifty-one.
• Frederick was, in fact, an enlightened leader by the standards of his day, especially in his domestic policies, …. At the same time, Frederick’s cynical and bellicose diplomacy cost untold misery, and his inability to trust anyone—…. led to a world of pain for himself, for most of the people around him, and ultimately for his country. His obsessive control of every aspect of government created a system that could not survive without him, and his autocracy was responsible for how easily Prussia adjusted to Napoleon’s rule twenty years later, one dictator being very like another.
• I am obliged to go round like the wheel of a water mill, because one is dragged by one’s fate.” He lived for another twenty years after he wrote that.
• One evening at dinner, when Lafayette spoke glowingly of elected government, constitutions, the rights of man, Frederick cut him off


• Handel survived an operation by Taylor to improve his vision and lived for seven more years in almost total blindness. Bach was less lucky.
• Vor deinen Thron. The result was one of the most beautiful chorales he ever wrote (BWV 668). Set to the medieval integer valor—the tempo that of the human heart, each bar the length of one deep breath in and out—it is also in every other way a work of human scale and sympathy. Bach manages the remarkable feat of making each of the melody’s four sections into its own fugue, each time using the inverse of the subject as his countersubject, and as the work proceeds the counterpoint becomes ever more complex, “moving ever farther from the body into the domain of the spirit,” as David Yearsley puts it. “It is in this way a representation of the act of dying.”
• If reason could not be trusted and faith was discredited, how could the world be understood? How could we understand ourselves? All over Europe, in pamphlets and books about Lisbon that expressed a desperate, rising pessimism, the question arose, as if for the first time: What if the order of nature is not perfect after all, what if it is chaotic and indifferent, likely as not to kill us all? Suddenly the reliability of reason—part of nature, after all, since it was a product of the human mind—was itself in doubt. .. Voltaire suggested that, lacking any better option than skepticism, we should “cultivate our garden,” work for the betterment of individuals and society. But that was not much of an answer, and a better one did not come along.
• THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT  was conceived and spent its prenatal period in Frederick’s East Prussia, home to two exceedingly smart, well-educated, and socially oppressed young men named Johann Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant, the sons of Pietists and the men largely responsible for dynamiting what was left of the Enlightenment’s optimistic trust in reason. Herder’s contribution was to undermine the certainty that all questions are in theory answerable by reason and that truth is singular, that one truth could never contradict another. Herder did not set out to refute this fundamental notion, but his powerful assertion of the fact that different cultures have very different “truths,” all of them valid in their different contexts, inevitably had that effect. Kant likewise was in no way trying to prepare the way for a movement with his Critique of Pure Reason, but the notion that order was a quality of the mind rather than the universe, that the mind was capable of many different metaphysical conceptions of the world, dashed any hope of cosmic certainty,
• Beethoven devised a new job for music: exploring and expressing the newly emergent creative self, the life of the mind. There were no words for this world yet, no talk about frustration and gratification, tension and relaxation, conflict and resolution, not to mention neurosis and psychosis
• Still, even among cognoscenti, he was more admired than heard until the now nineteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn got his teacher to agree to let him perform the St. Matthew Passion with Zelter’s Singakademie in Berlin. By the time of the performance, on March 11,1829, exactly a hundred and two years after its first performance (though they thought it was the centenary), word had got out that it was to be an extraordinary concert, and Berlin turned out for it in force
• Look then upon this head, disguised in its absurd French full-bottomed wig, this master—a wretched cantor and organist wandering from one little Thuringian village to another, hardly known even by name, dragging out his existence in miserably paid posts, remaining so unknown that it took a whole century for his works to be retrieved from oblivion.
    As a Romantic figure, Bach was in every way perfect.
• The Romantics, who came to the rescue when trust in reason failed, suggest that we embrace the world, imperfect as it may be, that we listen to the stirrings of the unconscious and remember that, whether we wish to be or not, we are the creators of our lives and our world. Yet these two postures stand opposed, one warning of the danger that the light of reason can blind us to a deeper kind of illumination, the other pointing out what can happen, what has happened, when we entrust ourselves to myth.