A musical rebuke and witness

In a good favorable review of a book that would otherwise have passed my notice, Gene Edward Veith made Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment, by James A. Gaines, sound so interesting that I have already ordered it. From the review:

.... In 1747, Frederick the Great—the king of Prussia, patron of Enlightenment rationalism, and military strongman—invited Johann Sebastian Bach, now an old man three years from his death, for an audience. Frederick fancied himself a musician and scorned the old-fashioned polyphony that Bach was known for in favor of music with a single pleasant melody. Frederick, who enjoyed humiliating his guests, had composed a long melody line full of chromatic scales that was impossible to turn into a multi-voiced canon (that is, a “round”: think “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” with different groups starting at different times) and told Bach to turn it into a fugue (an even more complicated “round”). Whereupon Bach, on the spot, sat down at one of the new piano fortes and turned it into a three-part fugue. The flummoxed King said, in effect, OK, turn it into a 6-part fugue. A few days later, Bach sent him a 6-part fugue and more than a fugue, “A Musical Offering” that rebuked Frederick and all of his Enlightenment notions with the Christian faith. ....

Gaines shows how Bach’s view of music goes right back to Luther. For them and other Christians of their time, music was quite literally a sign and measure of God’s created order in the universe. Bach and Luther favored polyphony—many voices going on at the same time, whether in the multiple but unified melodies of canons and fugues, or in the phenomenon of harmony—because it imaged forth the unity-in-diversity that is everywhere in creation; indeed, in existence itself; not only that, but in the Godhead Himself.

Gaines also draws on the Bach scholarship that demonstrates how music in this tradition encoded specific meanings. In Bach’s final “Musical Offering” to Frederick, he includes 10 canons, which are emblematic of the Ten Commandments (”canons,” laws, get it?). He includes a caption in one section that refers to how the notes ascend like the King’s glory, except that the notes go nowhere and turn into the most melancholy of melodies. He thus says through his music that Frederick may think himself “Great,” but his glory goes nowhere, that he will end only in death, that he doesn’t stand up very well to those Ten Commandments. Bach works in chorale motifs and church music—which Frederick hated—but which give this king his only hope. Yes, Bach was using his music to witness to this august secularist King in his palace of reason. .... [more]

Bach’s smackdown of Frederick the Great — Cranach: The Blog of Veith