by Will Durant
IX. AFTER BACH
Germany was blessed and excited with music beyond any other nation but Italy. A family without musical instruments was an abnormality. Schools taught music almost on a par with religion and reading. Church music was in decline because science and philosophy, cities and industry, were secularizing minds; the great Lutheran hymns still resounded, but song was passing from church choirs to lieder, Singspiele, and opera. Johann Peter Schulz opened a new era in song with his Lieder im Volkston (1782); henceforth Germany enjoyed an unquestioned leadership in this application of music to lyric poetry.
The mechanical improvement of the piano stimulated the spread of concerts and the rise of instrumental virtuosi. Performers like Johann Schobert, Abt Vogler, and Johann Hummel conquered a dozen cities. On March 10, 1789, Hummel, then eleven years old, gave a piano recital at Dresden; he did not know that Mozart was to be in the audience; during the concert he saw and recognized his former teacher; as soon as his piece was finished he made his way through the applauding assemblage and embraced Mozart with warm expressions of homage and joy.106 Abt (i.e., Abbot) Vogler won his title by being ordained as a priest (1773); at Mannheim he was both court chaplain and music director. As a writer on music he was one of the most original and influential of the century; as a virtuoso on the organ he won the jealousy of Mozart; as a teacher he formed Weber and Meyerbeer; as a papal legate he made Mannheim laugh by wearing blue stockings, carrying his breviary with his music, and sometimes keeping his audience waiting while he finished his prayers.
Mannheim’s orchestra was now a group of seventy-six select musicians, ably led by Christian Cannabich as teacher, conductor, and solo violinist. Famous was Lord Fordyce’s remark that Germany stood at the head of the nations for two reasons: the Prussian army and the Mannheim orchestra. Only less renowned was the Gewandhaus orchestra in Leipzig. Concerts were gigantic—three or four, sometimes six, concertos on one program; and they were everywhere—in theaters, churches, universities, palaces, taverns, and parks. The symphony now competed with the concerto in the orchestral repertoire; by 1770—even before Haydn—it was accepted as the highest form of instrumental music.107
Half the famous composers of this period came from the strong heart and loins of Johann Sebastian Bach. By his first wife he had seven children, of whom two, Wilhelm Friedemann and Karl Philipp Emanuel, achieved international celebrity. By his second wife he had thirteen children, of whom two, Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, became prominent in music. Johann Christoph Friedrich begot a minor composer, Wilhelm Fried-rich Ernst Bach, so that Johann Sebastian gave the world five men who secured a place in music history. A distant relative, Johann Ernst Bach, studied with the master at Leipzig, became Kapellmeister at Weimar, and left several compositions to oblivion.
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was born at Weimar. The first part of his father’s Wohltemperirte Klavier was written for his instruction. He progressed rapidly, and was already a composer at sixteen. At twenty-three he was appointed organist at the Sophienkirche in Dresden; and as his duties there were light, he wrote several sonatas, concertos, and symphonies. He rose in stipend and fame by being chosen (1746) organist at the Liebfrauen-kirche in Halle. There he remained eighteen years; so he came to be called the “Halle Bach.” He loved drink only next to music; he resigned in 1764, and for twenty years he drifted from town to town, living literally from hand to mouth by giving recitals and taking pupils. In 1774 he settled in Berlin, where he died in poverty in 1784.
Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach was lefthanded, and so had to confine his musical performance to the organ and the piano. In 1734, aged twenty, he entered the University of Frankfurt; there he enjoyed the friendship of Georg Philipp Telemann, who had been one of his godfathers and had given him part of his name. In 1737 he played some of his compositions before an audience that included Frederick William I of Prussia. Knowing that Crown Prince Frederick loved music, he went to Rheinsberg and presented himself, with no immediate result; but in 1740 Frederick, now king, appointed him cembalist in the chapel orchestra at Potsdam. He found it irritating to accompany Frederick’s temperamental flute and to accept his royal authority in music. After sixteen years of service in the orchestra he retired to specialize in teaching. His Versuch über die wahre Art das Klavier zu spielen (1753 f.) marked the beginning of modern pianoforte technique; Haydn formed his piano artistry on this manual, and because of it Mozart said of this “Berlin Bach”: “He is the father, we are his boys (Buben); those of us who know anything correctly have learned from him, and any [student! who does not confess this is a rascal [Lump]”108 In his compositions Emanuel consciously diverged from his father’s contrapuntal style to a simpler homophonic treatment and melodic line. In 1767 he accepted the post of director of church music at Hamburg; there he spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life. In 1795 Haydn came to Hamburg to see him, only to find that the greatest of Johann Sebastian’s sons was seven years dead.
Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, after studying with his father and at the University of Leipzig, became at eighteen (1750) Kammermusikus at Bücke-burg to Wilhelm, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe; at twenty-six he was Kon-zertmeister. The great event in his twenty-eight years at this court was the coming of Herder (1771) as preacher; Herder provided him with inspiring texts for oratorios, cantatas, and songs. Johann Christoph followed his father’s methods and spirit, and was lost in the changefulness of time.
In contrast, the youngest son, Johann Christian Bach, gave his musical allegiance to Italy. Only fifteen when his father died, he was sent to Berlin, where his half-brother Wilhelm Friedemann gave him support and instruction. At nineteen he went to Bologna, where Conte Cavaliere Agostino Litta paid for his studies under Padre Martini. The youth was so charmed by Italian life and Catholic music that he became a convert, and for six years devoted his compositions chiefly to the Church. In 1760 he was made organist in the Milan cathedral, and became the “Milan Bach.” Meanwhile Italian opera had aroused his ambition to excel in secular as well as ecclesiastical music; he produced operas at Turin and Naples (1761), and his Milan employers complained that the galanterie of these compositions discorded with his position in the cathedral. Johann Christian changed his foot of earth to London (1762), where his operas had unusually long runs. Soon he was appointed music master to Queen Charlotte Sophia. He welcomed the seven-year-old Mozart to London in 1764, and frolicked with him at the piano. The boy loved the now fully accomplished musician, and took many hints from him in composing sonatas, operas, and symphonies. In 1778 Bach went to Paris to present his Amadis des Gaules; there he again met Mozart, and the youth of twenty-two was as delighted with him as he had been fifteen years before. “He is an honest man, and does people justice,” Wolfgang wrote to his father; “I love him from my heart.”109
All in all, this Bach dynasty, from the Veit Bach who died in 1619 to the Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach who died in 1845, is the most remarkable in cultural history. Of some sixty Bachs known by name among the relatives of Johann Sebastian, fifty-three were professional musicians; eight of his ancestors and five of his progeny were of sufficient caliber to warrant special articles in a dictionary of music.110 Several of the sons won greater fame and reputation in their lifetimes than Johann Sebastian had enjoyed. Not that they monopolized musical fame; the executants, as usual, received the greater acclaim when alive, and were sooner forgotten when dead; and composers like Karl Friedrich Fasch and Christian Friedrich Schubart rivaled Bach’s sons in renown.
Looking back upon this second half of the eighteenth century we perceive some special lines of musical evolution. The growing range and power of the piano freed music from subservience to words, and encouraged instrumental compositions. The widened audience for concerts, and the lessening of ecclesiastical dominance, led composers away from the polyphony of Johann Sebastian Bach to the more easily appreciated harmonies of his successors. The influence of Italian opera made for melody even in instrumental pieces, while, by a c
ontrasting movement, the lieder gave a new complexity to song. The revolt against Italian opera culminated in Gluck, who proposed to subordinate music to drama, but rather ennobled drama with music; by another avenue the revolt developed the Singspiel, which reached its peak in The Magic Flute. The concerto grosso passed into the concerto for one solo instrument and orchestra; the sonata, in Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Haydn, took its classic form, and the quartet evolved into the symphony. Everything was prepared for Beethoven.
X. DER ALTE FRITZ
Over all this varied life of politics, religion, industry, amusement, music, art, science, philosophy, philanthropy, and sin loomed the aging hero whom Germany called Der Alte Fritz—not loving him, but honoring him as the most amazing Teuton of his time. Not content with ruling his kingdom and his orchestra, he envied Voltaire’s pen, and longed to be lauded as a poet and historian. He bequeathed to posterity thirty volumes of writings: seven of history, six of poetry, three of military treatises, two of philosophy, twelve of correspondence; all in French. His poems were mostly of the “fugitive” kind, and have escaped remembrance. He was one of the leading historians of the age. Early in his reign he wrote the history of his ancestors—Mémoires pour servir à Phistoire de la maison de Brandebourg (1751). Like most historians, he claimed impartiality: “I have risen above all prejudice; I have regarded princes, kings, relatives, as ordinary men”;111 but he rose to rapture when describing Frederick William, the Great Elector.
His literary masterpiece was L’Histoire de mon temps, recording his own rule. He began it soon after the close of the First Silesian War (1740-42), and continued it at intervals till late in life. Probably under the influence of Voltaire—though writing much of this book before the appearance of Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV and L’Essai sur les moeurs— Frederick included the history of science, philosophy, literature, and art. He apologized for spending space on “imbeciles clothed in purple, charlatans crowned with a tiara. … But to follow the discovery of new truths, to grasp the causes of change in morals and manners, to study the processes by which the darkness of barbarism has been lifted from the minds of men—these, surely, are subjects worthy to occupy all thinking men.”112 He praised Hobbes, Locke, and the deists in England, Thomasius and Wolff in Germany, Fontenelle and Voltaire in France. “These great men and their disciples struck a mortal blow at religion. Men began to examine what they had stupidly adored; reason overthrew superstition. … Deism, the simple worship of the Supreme Being, gained many followers.”113 Despising the French government but loving French literature, Frederick rated Voltaire’s Henriade above the Iliad, and Racine above Sophocles; he equaled Boileau with Horace, and Bossuet with Demosthenes. He laughed at the language and literature, praised the architecture, of Germany. He labored to excuse his invasion of Silesia: a statesman, he felt, may violate the Ten Commandments if the vital interests of his state require it; “it is better that the sovereign should break his word than that the people should perish”114—which he hoped we would believe had been the danger to Prussia in 1740. He admitted making many mistakes as a general, but he thought it unnecessary to record his flight at Mollwitz. All in all, these two volumes rank with the best historical writing of modern Europe before Gibbon.
Hardly had the Seven Years’ War been concluded when Frederick set himself to writing his Histoire de la guerre de Sept Ans. Like Caesar he aspired to be the best historian of his own campaigns, and like Caesar he avoided embarrassment by speaking of himself in the third person. Again, and perhaps with better reason, he sought to justify the bold initiative with which he had opened hostilities. He lauded his great enemy, Maria Theresa, in all that concerned her domestic government, but in foreign relations he condemned her as “this proud woman” who, “devoured by ambition, wished to reach the goal of glory by every path.”115 Amid his fairly impartial record of the campaigns, he stopped to mourn the death of his mother in 1757 and of his sister in 1758; the page in which he described Wilhelmine is an oasis of love in a waste of war.
He concluded that history is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. “It is in the nature of man that no one learns from experience. The follies of the fathers are lost on their children; each generation has to commit its own.”116 “Whoever reads history with application will perceive that the same scenes are often repeated, and that one need only change the names of the actors.”117 And even if we could learn, we should still be subject to unpredictable chance. “These Memoirs convince me more and more that to write history is to compile the follies of men and the strokes of fortune. Everything turns on these two articles.”118
Twice (1752, 1768) in a Last Testament, he tried to convey some of the lessons of his own experience to his heirs. He urged them to study the aims and resources of the various states, and the methods available for protecting and developing Prussia. He followed his father in stressing the need of keeping the army in good order. He cautioned his successors against spending beyond revenue; he predicted political trouble for fiscally reckless France; and he advised that revenues be increased not by imposing new taxes but by stimulating the productivity of the economy. All religions should be protected if they kept the peace—though “all religions, when one looks into them, rest on a system of fable more or less absurd.”119 The royal power should be absolute, but the king should consider himself the first servant of the state. Since Prussia was endangered by her smallness amid large states like Russia, France, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the king should seize upon any opportunity to enlarge and unify Prussia—preferably by conquest of Saxony, Polish Prussia, and Swedish Pomerania. “The first concern of a prince is to maintain himself; the second is to extend his territory. This demands suppleness and resource. … The way to hide secret ambitions is to profess pacific sentiments till the favorable moment arrives. This has been the method of all great statesmen.”120
The king should prepare his successor for government; he should have him educated by enlightened men, not by ecclesiastics, for these will stuff him with superstitions calculated to make him a docile tool of the church.121 Such an education produces a mediocre mind soon crushed by the responsibilities of state. “That is what I have seen, and if I except the Queen of Hungary [Maria Theresa] and the King of Sardinia [Charles Emmanuel I], all the princes of Europe are merely illustrious imbeciles.”122 This was written when Elizabeth ruled Russia; the Testament of 1768 was more polite, for Catherine had already shown her mettle; now Frederick prophesied that Russia would be the most dangerous power in Europe.123
As he aged he began to wonder if his nephew and presumptive heir-Frederick William II—was fit to inherit the government. “I labor for you,” he wrote, “but one must think of keeping what I make; if you are idle and indolent, what I have accumulated with so much trouble will melt away in your hands.”124 And in 1782, still more pessimistic, he wrote: “If, after my death, my nephew goes soft, … within two years there will no longer be a Prussia.”125 The prediction was verified at Jena in 1806, not so much because Frederick William II was soft, but because Napoleon was hard.
Frederick himself, in his final decade, became unendurably hard. He curbed much of the freedom that he had allowed to the press before 1756. “Your Berlin freedom,” Lessing wrote to Nikolai in 1769, “reduces itself … to the freedom to bring to market as many absurdities against religion as you like. … But let someone … raise his voice on behalf of subjects, and against exploitation and despotism, … and you will soon discover which is the most servile land in Europe today.”126 Herder hated his native Prussia, and Winckelmann turned in “horror” from that “despotic land.”127 When Goethe visited Berlin in 1778 he was surprised by the unpopularity of the King. Yet the people reverenced Frederick as an old man who through forty-five years had not missed a day of service to the state.
War and peace alike had worn him out. His attacks of gout and asthma, of colic and hemorrhoids, had increased in frequency and severity, and his predilection for heavy meals and highly spiced
foods intensified his ailments. On August 22-25, 1778, near Breslau, he reviewed his Silesian army. On the twenty-fourth, dressed only in his usual uniform, he sat on his horse for six hours in a heavy rain; he returned to his quarters drenched and shivering; he was never well again. In June, 1786, he summoned Dr. Zimmermann from Hanover. He balked at the drugs prescribed for him, and preferred lively conversations about literature and history; to keep him quiet Zimmermann prescribed Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.128 Dropsy was added to his troubles, and incisions made to reduce the swellings developed gangrene. Pneumonia completed the siege, and on August 17, 1786, Frederick died, aged seventy-four. He had asked to be buried in the garden of Sanssouci near the graves of his dogs and his favorite horse; this parting edict on humanity was ignored, and he was interred beside his father in the Garrison Church at Potsdam. When Napoleon, after defeating the Prussians at Jena, came and stood before Frederick’s tomb, he said to his generals, “If he were alive we should not be here.”129
CHAPTER XXI
Kant
1724-1804
I. PROLEGOMENA
IF Frederick the Great had not lived we might never have had Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone were made possible by Frederick’s skepticism and toleration; within two years after Frederick’s death Kant was silenced by the Prussian government.
Like Frederick, Kant was a child of the Enlightenment, and—despite all his strategic wavering—held by reason to the end; but also, like Rousseau, he was part of the Romantic movement, laboring to reconcile reason with feeling, philosophy with religion, morality with revolt. He received an infusion of Pietism from his parents, and crossed it with the rationalism of Christian von Wolff; he absorbed the heresies of the philosophes, and crossed them with the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in Émile; he inherited the subtle psychology of Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and used it in an attempt to save science from Hume and religion from Voltaire. He ordered his life with bourgeois regularity, and hailed the French Revolution. Isolated in East Prussia, he felt and summed up all the mental currents of his time.