Product Description

Johann Sebastian Bach created what may be the most celestial and profound body of music in history; Frederick the Great built the colossus we now know as Germany, and along with it a template for modern warfare. Their fleeting encounter in 1757 signals a unique moment in history where belief collided with the cold certainty of reason. Set at the tipping point between the ancient and modern world, Evening in the Palace of Reason captures the tumult of the eighteenth century, the legacy of the Reformation, and the birth of the Enlightenment in this extraordinary tale of two men.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28287 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-01
• Released on: 2006-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780007156610
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
In his lively history, Evening in the Palace of Reason, James R. Gaines sets two remarkable--and remarkably different--historical figures on a collision course toward a single night in Potsdam in 1747: the composer Johann Sebastian Bach--"old Bach," as he was called then at the age of 62--and the still-young Prussian king, Frederick II, already known as Frederick the Great after less than a decade on the throne. Having long employed old Bach's son Carl--a more celebrated composer at the time--Frederick summoned the father from Leipzig and challenged him, with an offhanded cruelty, to a public compositional puzzle designed to humiliate the great wizard of the waning art of counterpoint.

Gaines is a pleasant guide through the incestuous patchwork monarchies of middle Europe, with a breezy tone fitting for a former editor of People. ("The Hohenzollerns were a funny bunch," he writes at one point.) But he is also a passionately learned student of the intricacies of the era's musical theories and the secret languages of its coded compositions. (One is thankful that he and his publisher resisted calling the book The Bach Code.) Gaines leads up to his pivotal encounter with a double biography of his two principals, told in alternating chapters. Bach's mostly homebound life, which left few documents for historians, is often no match for the grotesque dramas of Frederick's parallel story, which climaxes when his father the king forces Frederick to witness the execution of his best friend (and perhaps lover). The weight that keeps the two stories in balance is the genius of Bach's work, particularly the masterful Musical Offering that he composes in response to the king's challenge. The encounter itself may not bear the full burden that Gaines wants to give it, as a clash between two epochal worldviews, the faith of the Reformation versus the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but the two life stories he so vividly describes make the journey there more than worthwhile. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
Like contrapuntal voices in a Bach fugue, the lives of an aging composer and a young dictator are intertwined and interlocked in this absorbing cultural history. Gaines (The Lives of the Piano), former managing editor of Time, Life and People magazines, begins by recounting Frederick's abrupt summons of Bach to his court at Potsdam. Here, in an apparent effort to humiliate the old-style composer, Frederick, enamored of the new in philosophy and art, sets Bach a succession of seemingly impossible musical challenges: to each, the composer responds with unthinkable genius, culminating in his Musical Offering. But beneath the biographical counterpoint traced by Gaines is a longer, unfinished duel between two visions of humankind--one that the sensitive and musically inclined Frederick was also fighting within himself. He had been brutally abused by his father and was increasingly committed to the cynical pursuit of military expansion; the sun gradually sets on the Prussian king, who is consumed by disillusionment, inflicting pain on himself and countless others. As night falls on the (un)enlightened despot, Bach's star begins to rise, and later, he will acquire the veneration his genius merits, his music a perennial reminder that "the light of reason can blind us to a deeper kind of illumination." Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In 1747, Bach met Frederick the Great; it was not a meeting of the minds. Gaines searches for the reasons behind the encounter in this book, which is part musicology, part dual biography. His exploration is clever without being frivolous, and explanatory without being effete. Formerly a magazine editor in the Time-Warner empire, Gaines writes very accessibly about classical music. He doesn't smother his topic in scholasticism, communicating his main idea that Bach's music is emphatically "message" music, that is, aural expressions of Lutheran theology. By contrast, Frederick, 27 years younger than Bach, regarded music as entertainment. Indeed, Frederick's choleric royal father thought music was effeminate and expressed his disapproval by beating Frederick and executing one of his friends. Thus Frederick brought a misanthropic cynicism to his night with Bach and thought it would be fun to embarrass the kapellmeister. In Gaines' rendition, Bach turned the tables and defied earthly power with one of his great works, Musical Offering. A marvelous story that will captivate the classical-music audience. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Wonderful, wonderful book
I have been playing Bach all my life, I have read everything about him, and I have never come across a book that brought him so vividly alive. I honestly never knew who he was before this book. I never quite understood the forces that motivated him, how and why his music could be as moving as it is, how he could have maintained such integrity in such adverse circumstances (his own sons were against him!), why he was so dismissed during his life. Now I understand that, and a great deal more. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It changed my view of Bach and in a way my view of why the world we live in is the way it is.

The Revenge of Genius
"Evening in the Palace of Reason" explores Bach's Musical Offering in incredible depth. What brought forth Bach's "Offering" of such unimaginable complexity? An annoyed genius--you just have to love that. For years I have read biography after biography (with one sterling exception--see my early reviews) that portray Bach as a kind of small town savant who was later and fortunately "discovered." Oh, so far from the truth...

Mr. Gaines reminds us that Bach was at the very center of his world--that Bach embodied the ideals of the Baroque. For this reason the juxtaposition of Bach and Frederick the Great is an excellent vehicle for demonstrating the ideas that were the power behind Bach's transcendent music. The reader is shown that Bach was no less a King in his own fashion than was Frederick--instead of armies to project power, Bach had an absolute mastery of musical art that despite the passage of 250 years still speaks to billions of people. What this book convincingly argues is that Bach was quite aware of his power and the supremacy of his beliefs and that he used the Offering to send a message.

In visiting Frederick's palace, Bach not only accepted the challenge he knew was coming but he so conquered the rigged game that the other side figuratively left and went home. I had no idea how messed up King Frederick really was, even if he could play a passable flute--this is the kind of "x-files" history that puts the great ideas of history in context and is fun to read.

In reviewing the aged Bach's life, Mr. Gaines leads one to consider the loneliness of a man who knew that he could speak a language of eternal beauty that few people had the patience to hear. We all know that Bach had a temper and demanded excellence from students and justice from his employers; however, in reading this book we are introduced to the mature Bach so confident in his power that he delivered a clear rebuke to a King.

Mr. Gaines makes a compelling argument that perhaps our culture could stand to return to those absolute truths that so moved Bach. That constraint and limitations can bring forth sublime creations denied to those who throw off the perceived shackles of convention. Highly recommended and a must-read for any disciple of Bach.

Delightful and vivid, but questionable
Gaines uses a historical curiosity - the encounter between Fredrick the Great and JS Bach - as a launching point into a wonder filled voyage of discovery into the world of the Enlightenment. Bach and Fredrick represent two opposing philosophical currents in the Enlightenment whose positions are now reversed as Post Modernism marches relentlessly against the remains of scientific certainty.

The breadth of material is staggering, ranging from music to politics to philosophy to religion. Those (like myself) who thought this era to be a stilted period of polite powdered wigs will forever have their prejudices reversed by the passions that govern these very accessible pages. As an introduction to the period and as an incentive to learn more, one could not ask for a better book.

However, I must caution that this book should not be used as anything more than a way to stir interest in the period, for this is a history that does not seem to be seasoned by discipline. Following in the mold of books like "1421: The Year China Discovered America", Gaines seems to sacrifice professionalism and objectivity in favor of accessibility and passion. As little as I know about the period, it is hard to miss claims he makes that seem quite biased. When he amplifies the emptiness of the Enlightenment by claiming that Fredrick the Great's greatest years were BEHIND him before the Seven Years War even started, even a neophyte like me cringes. When he laments that Mozart's music is "missing something" when compared to Bach's, surely he must be aware that there's a substantial musical population that would say just the opposite (especially if you imagine Bach dying in his 30's). This book has many suspiciously categorical statements and unsubstantiated theories that fire off all sorts of warning signs in my head, but my grounding in this period simply isn't strong enough to bring any of them to justice. Suffice to say that any person that covers subjects ranging from Luther to Descartes to Hapsburgs to harmony is going to be an amateur in SOMETHING, and yet Gaines rarely predicates any of his assertions with academic caution or humility.

So the history may be questionable, but with that caveat in mind, he does succeed in his most important challenge: to make accessible a world that is far more colorful and wonderous than most of us could have imagined.