to Germany from Venice or Amsterdam—by sea, to the port of Hamburg.
Hamburg thus became the seedbed of change for German music, and in search of Germany’s musical future and his own, Sebastian more than once made the arduous several days’ walk to Hamburg and back, taking on the role of journeyman musician. Hamburg had not only a robust, distinctly German school of organists but also an opera. Astride both was the octogenarian Johann Adam Reinken, organist at St. Catherine’s Church and one of the opera’s founders. Reinken’s magnificent organ, with its four keyboards, fifty-eight stops, and full pedal keyboard, had enormous range and power—from the great thirty-two-foot pipes and their thunderous bass to the tiniest whistles, for piccolo and flute. Reinken’s was the largest organ Bach had ever seen and became the measure by which he would judge all others. Perhaps first at Reinken’s Hamburg apartment, he came under the influence of the great Dietrich Buxtehude, organist at St. Mary’s in Lübeck and a composer of outsize ambition and ability who was working with all the styles and traditions of Europe. Buxtehude would have a more than musical influence on Sebastian in his first job, and it was in him perhaps more than anywhere else that Sebastian would find the inspiration for what was perhaps his greatest gift to Western culture: forging from a multinational babel a single language of European music.
SIXTY MILES OF very bad roads from St. Michael’s school in Lüneburg, in another direction entirely from the road to Hamburg, lay one of Germany’s many mini-Versailles, the very fashionable dukedom of Celle, where, according to his son Carl, Sebastian was exposed to the latest in French culture and music, including the works of Lebègue, Marais, Marchand, Couperin, and especially Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Sun King’s own composer and so the paragon of French music (himself however a Florentine, an embarrassment Louis was persuaded to overlook only by the richness of Lully’s sycophancy).
Though he learned and adopted a great deal from French music, Sebastian must have been mystified by the French attitude toward it. 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 to his clavecin or lute playing, as accompaniment to the ballets he danced in, and to cover for the noise of the brilliant new machines that allowed whales to belch fireworks and permitted Louis himself to fly as Jupiter on the back of an eagle and as various other deities to float along on clouds in the ostentatious theatricals staged to reinforce his myth. Bach certainly would write flattering music to and for kings and princes, but his music always had a higher goal in mind, the glory of which royal power was but a pale shadow. In France, though, music had only one purpose more important than the glorification of Louis. The palace gossip sheet Mercure galant prattled on about how music mirrored the harmony of the universe and was therefore the king’s handmaiden as the arbiter and source of all good order, etc., but the fact was that Louis needed music and musical spectacles to keep his nobles occupied. Dukes with time on their hands had been no end of trouble to his father and Cardinal Richelieu, and Louis knew that a rich court life would keep them distracted and keep them where he could see them. He learned that from his own Cardinal Mazarin, who imported Italian singers, composers, and instrumentalists to distract Louis himself from the notion of meddling in state affairs as a boy king.
In time the Italian composers began to experiment with chromaticism and dissonance, to introduce passion into their music. This was controversial, and so the Italians were banished. Louis then put his imprimatur on Lully’s elaborately ornamented, courtly pleasantries, whose halting, ceremonial rhythms were difficult enough to walk much less dance to, a kind of musical Stump the Nobles. (There were other, similarly hobbling fashions; ladies were forced to kneel in their coaches, for example, to compete in that heyday of haute coiffure.) Lully’s Florentine background was inconvenient, but the Mercure galant, which commented frequently and with great assurance on matters of music theory, reported that Lully
knew perfectly well the necessity of renouncing the taste of his nation in order to accommodate himself to ours; he found that the French judged some things more sanely than the Italians; and he knew that music had no other end than to titillate the ear; it was unnecessary to charge it with affected dissonances.
One of Lully’s jobs was to rationalize, in just so many words, Louis’s various religious and territorial wars. In Amadis, as French armies marched on the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1683, Lully put this operatic encomium to Louis in the mouth of his heroine Urgande:
This hero triumphs so that everything will be peaceful. In vain, thousands of the envious arm themselves on all sides. With one word, with one of his glances he knows how to bend their useful fury to his will. It is for him to teach the great Art of war to the Masters of the Earth … The whole universe admires his exploits; let us go to live happily under his laws.
Pleased, Louis gave Lully a state monopoly on the staging of operas, and Lully became filthy rich. Scandal attached to him now and then. People were given to having sex in the upper galleries at the opera, Lully himself was upbraided by Louis more than once for outrageously gay behavior in public, and the nobles kept getting his singers pregnant. 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. In one of the many satires at his death, an Italian composer attempts to turn him back at the gates of Parnassus, arguing that he had played upon the French weakness for the merely fashionable in order to line his pockets. Lully replies loftily, “I declare quite frankly … that I have worked usefully for the corruption of my country, but they [the French] are no less deserving of the glory, because they have followed the composer’s intentions.”
It hardly needs to be said that nothing could be further from Bach’s exalted sense of purpose for music than Louis’s utilitarian or Lully’s mercenary one, but this early exposure to French music turns up in his earliest compositions and clearly left a deep impression on him.
Attached to St. Michael’s was a school for young nobles, called a Knights’ Academy, and probably through a friendly sponsor there he had access to the recently completed castle in Lüneburg of Duke Georg Wilhelm, where he also heard the latest music of France. The Knights’ Academy also exposed him to a less pleasant aspect of his future. The curriculum of these cadet princelings included not only the usual Latin, history, and science but also French, dancing, heraldry, and other prerequisites for the life of a francophone German noble. Bach and the other choral scholars slept every night in a dormitory just next to that of the Knights’ Academy, and some of them served the young princes as valets or tutors. Whether as valet, tutor, or just another invisible spectator among the scholarship boys, Sebastian would have witnessed every day the worst aspects of the petty nobles then living off Germany’s fractured territories, and he had every reason to be sobered by the thought that one of them might someday be his patron.
GIANTS, SPIES, AND THE LASH: LIFE WITH “FATTY”
AT ABOUT THE SAME AGE BACH HAD BEEN WHEN HE walked the two hundred miles to Lüneburg, Crown Prince Frederick could be found in his favorite red-and-gold embroidered robe and slippers, his hair curled and puffed, playing flute-and-lute duets with his sister Wilhelmina. Usually a lookout was posted at the door because of the intensity with which his father despised this scene. Frederick William had set himself the task of eradicating Frederick’s “effeminate” (read: French) tastes, and in that entirely fruitless effort he employed a degree of violence perhaps unique in the annals of kings and their crown princes. What his son endured at his hands explains almost everything about the sort of man and king Frederick would become, but before getting into that we should give the father his due.
Unlike most of his aristocratic peers, Frederick William was a devoted (not devout) Protestant, a faithful husband, hardworking, plain in his