Book Review
Courtly
Culture War
Evening In The Palace Of Reason
by James R. Gaines
HarperCollins, 2005
(336 pages, $23.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Timothy A. Smith
In a later, more liberated age, Frederick (1712–1786) might have been sympathetically known as ‘Frederick the Gay’,” wrote the New York Times reviewer of Evening in the Palace of Reason, implying that Prussia’s Philosopher King and apostle of Enlightenment was, by the standards of our own liberated and enlightened age, repressed. The truth is that Fédéric (as he preferred) was in the modern sense both liberated and enlightened—more than most moderns could imagine.
Which makes of Frederick the Great’s 1747 meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach, pious Lutheran, church musician, faithful husband, and father of twenty, perhaps the opening salvo in the culture wars. If not a clash of worldviews , the author spins it in that direction, his plot predicated upon the assumption that the elderly Bach was, to Frederick, a “subject” for experimentation and humiliation.
Evening in the Palace of Reason contrasts the dawn of the Enlightenment with the dusk of Christian influence in Europe, a rise and fall exemplified in the persons of Frederick and Bach, who met briefly in 1747. To make sense of this encounter, James R. Gaines, former managing editor of Time, Life, and People, escorts his readers through a spellbinding double biography.
Reeking Religion
To Frederick, contrapuntal music “reeked of religion.” With their sacred symbols, allegories, and commitment to composition as a type of universal truth, Bach’s fugues exemplified l’infame that Frederick sought to crush.
Whereas for Bach music must conform to God’s laws because its purpose is to glorify him, to Frederick, writes Gaines, “there were no immutable, divine laws, only those which arose from human experience.” Accordingly, he forbade his court musicians to write fugues, preferring instead the stile galant (precursor style to Haydn), which, according to his confidant Voltaire, existed for no more reason than to entertain.
But the king closeted another pretext for humiliating Bach. The aging composer was of the same generation as Frederick’s too-religious father, Frederick William, now seven years deceased. To the young king, Bach must have represented, writes Gaines, “the backward, boorish, superstitious world on which Frederick had turned his back, but which still haunted his sleep.”
Truth be told, Frederick had reason to be haunted. Within recent memory his father had instructed his clergy to sharpen the crown prince’s sense of guilt while the memory of Lieutenant Hans Hermann Katte’s beheading was “right fresh.” Gaines’s inference, that Frederick was forced to watch Katte’s execution not because they were co-conspirators but because they were lovers, is based on the historian Thomas Carlyle’s assertion that the young prince had a proclivity for “ways not pleasant to his Father and not conformable to the Laws of the Universe.”
Or as the father wrote to his son: “I cannot abide an effeminate fellow who has no manly tastes, who cannot ride or shoot . . . and wears his hair curled like a fool.” It was a tendency that Frederick William determined to eradicate, writes Gaines, “by a degree of violence perhaps unique in the annals of kings and their crown princes.”
Timothy A. Smith is a professor of music theory at Northern Arizona University and the author of the Canons and Fugues of J. S. Bach website. He lives with his wife and the youngest of their three daughters in Flagstaff, where they are members of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.1—January/February 2020
Speaking Truth About the Sexes Is Not Optional by Anthony Esolen
32.1—January/February 2019
The Diabolical Failure of Leaders in the Present Crises by James M. Kushiner
27.5—Sept/Oct 2014
on Growing Vegetables as a Primer in Moral Philosophy by Rachel Lu
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
