and bellicose martial history that his motive was “to enjoy the helplessness of the victim of his … well-prepared trap.”
“Johann Sebastian must have recognized the bad trick,” Schoenberg continued. “That he calls his ‘Offering’ a Musikalisches Opfer is very peculiar, because the German word Opfer has a double meaning: ‘offering,’ or rather ‘sacrifice,’ and ‘victim’—Johann Sebastian knew that he had become the victim of a grand seigneur’s ‘joke.’ ”
Schoenberg’s theory that Frederick wished to embarrass Bach cannot be proved or disproved, but some unfortunate facts support it. The Prussian king was infamous for mean-spiritedly baiting even (or perhaps especially) those for whom he had the greatest respect. As Voltaire put it at one of the many low points in their relationship, when Frederick said you were his friend, “he means ‘my slave.’ My dear friend means ‘you mean less than nothing to me.’ … Come to dinner means, ‘I feel like making fun of you tonight.’ ” Schoenberg’s theory that the author of the theme was actually Bach’s son Carl, though equally impossible to prove, is also at least plausible. More than once Carl seemed to feel that his respect and affection for his father was in some measure unrequited, a sense of filial injury that often afflicts second sons. There would have been an Oedipal aspect to such a “victory” over Bach for Frederick as well. When they met, Bach was roughly the age Frederick’s father would have been, a father at whose hands Frederick had suffered the worst kind of abuse, including the greatest trauma of his young life.
Whoever the author of the Royal Theme may have been, the nature of it leaves no doubt that Frederick meant to give history’s greatest master of counterpoint the most taxing possible challenge to his art, and it is easy to imagine that, as his carriage rattled over the rutted roads from Potsdam back to Leipzig, Bach was already working out the puzzle Frederick had presented to him. Certainly he lost no time working on it once he was back in Leipzig. At his composing desk in the southwest corner of the second floor of the St. Thomas School—the noise of the student dormitory barely muffled by a thin wall and the ad hoc insulation of bookshelves heaped with music—he finished his Musical Offering to Frederick within a fortnight, turning the king’s “joke,” if that is what it was, back upon him with all the force at his command.
At the end of a long life spent practicing the art of conveying words in music, this was a great deal of force indeed, and the very quickness of Bach’s work suggests how urgent the project was to him. In the end, it implicated the most dissonant themes in his life and in the king’s as well: among others, the proper relations between art and power, and the competition between fathers and sons. Perhaps most important, the work addresses the point of greatest conflict between these two men and one of the thorniest of all the issues raised by the Enlightenment, for the eighteenth century and for its latter-day descendants: 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; and that the music sounding forth from such a world might be very pretty, but it can never be beautiful.
We may be grateful that Bach had spent a lifetime developing a musical language in which to say all that without fear of discovery or retribution, because his Musical Offering to Frederick represents as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and worldview as an absolute monarch has ever received. Not incidentally, it is also one of the great works of art in the history of music.
J. S. BACH WAS THE FIFTEENTH PERSON TO BE NAMED Johann in his family. Seven of his uncles were Johanns, his father was Johann, and his great-grandfather was Johann. Four of his five brothers were Johanns, the other was for some reason named Johannes, and there was a sister Johanna. As his parents must have done, if only for their sanity, we will call him Sebastian.
There had never been a Sebastian in the Bach family. The name belonged to one of his godfathers, who was the town piper of Gotha. On March 23, 1685, Sebastian Nagel had the honor of holding his two-day-old namesake at the baptismal font of St. George’s Church on the market square in Eisenach, a walled, many-spired town that like Gotha was tucked away in the thick forest of Thuringia. The rector of St. George’s Latin School, a friend of the family, performed the rite.
Nagel had a professional as well as personal relationship with Sebastian’s father, Ambrosius Bach, who was the town piper here in Eisenach: They helped each other musically on occasion, and they had common roots in nearby Gotha. The Bachs had been there for as long as any of them knew. The first Bach to make music his profession had learned his trade from the town piper of Gotha a hundred years before this (though he had kept his day job running his father’s bakery as well). Since then there had been Bachs in nearly all the courts, organ lofts, and town bands of Thuringia.
We do not know whether or not there was music at Sebastian’s christening, but given that it took place on a Saturday, when church musicians were off, it could have been supplied by all sorts of people: His “uncle” Christoph (actually a second cousin) was the organist at St. George’s; his father had not only the members of his band to choose from but even closer to hand all the assistants and journeymen who lived under his roof; and Sebastian Nagel might even have brought some of his musicians from Gotha. Professional musicians were brethren in the late seventeenth century, banded together in part by their campaign against the “beer-fiddlers” (i.e., “will play for beer”) who were forever trying to undercut their prices for playing funerals and weddings, fees that were more than incidental to their salaries. The guild worked as well to protect its members’ ability to bring sons into the business, as Ambrosius Bach managed to do with all of his Johanns, eventually including Sebastian. Even at St. George’s baptismal fount, Johann Sebastian Bach was being held in the arms of his future.
HE GREW UP also in the embrace of the Wartburg, a dark, imposing castle on a hill that had already been looming over Eisenach and St. George’s for five hundred years. Monument to an earlier, glorious era of German knighthood, it was more recently, like Eisenach itself, at the core of Lutheran myth and history. In the year that Sebastian Bach was born, the citizens of Eisenach did not care, if they knew, about Newton’s discovery of gravity, not to mention Brahe’s new star or Boyle’s air pump, which were right now turning the orderly, Aristotelian world of the past few thousand years on its ear. 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:
He has sullied marriage, disparaged confession and denied the body and blood of Our Lord. He makes the sacraments depend on the faith of the recipient. He is pagan in his denial of free will. This devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle … Luther is to be regarded as a convicted heretic … No one is to harbor him. His followers also are to be condemned. His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man … Where you can get him, seize him and overpower him [and] send him to us under tightest security.
It was widely believed that Luther had been murdered on his way back to Thuringia from Worms, but fortunately for Luther, by this time the power of the emperor was not what it used to be. The Holy Roman Empire was a remnant, theoretically comprising the greater part of Europe but actually confined largely to modern-day Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the former Yugoslavia, and Germany—except that there was no Germany; there were just hundreds of independent princedoms,