Customer Reviews

Evening in the Palace of Reason

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

"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.

This is one of the great books of a lifetime, a book of soaring imagination, history, and some of the finest writing I've ever encountered. More Bach comes through in these luminous pages of a one-night encounter with Frederick the Great than is found in a dozen books of Bach 'scholarship'. While the book's 'premise' concerns Frederick's challenge to 'old Bach' that resulted in his composing 'A Musical Offering', James Gaines' exploration of Bach's mind and life and faith, and, indeed, his music, is so attuned, so wondrously rendered in the most engaging prose imaginable that any plot artifice is right away overwhelmed with a dire, burning truth, and never leaves it. It really is a book too rich to be 'reviewed'. Impossible? Check it for yourself. There are pages and pages of such fineness, such pleasure that one can only experience it, and be changed and renewed in love for 'old Bach'. One example - chapter 6 (The Sharp Edges of Genius), detailing Bach's famous funeral cantata 'Actus tragicus' (BVW 106), offers not only a brilliant summation of its musical parts, but is, immediately and ultimately, a moving, unforgettable rumination on the great meaning of Bach and his music, indeed, of the human experience in its divine dimensions unlike any I've come across. I'm a man lost for superlatives to express the importance, the resonating beauty of an amazing book. I've given this book to many friends, each in turn has confirmed my trust that this is one of the great books of a lifetime. You'll want for nothing within these pages - Bach's music, his towering mastery, his orneriness and orderliness, his divine business, and an unshakable look deep into our common human history. It's a book of discovery and confirmation. Evening in the Palace of Reason will change your life. No other 'recommendation' suffices.

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.

In 1747 there was a famous meeting between Frederick the Great and Bach, at which the king, in a spirit of malice, challenged the composer to write first a three-part and then a six-part a fugue on a theme that seemed an impossible basis for such an exercise. Gaines presents this meeting as a confrontation between the shallow Age of Reason and the profound Age of Faith. It is a promising subject, and there are some fine pages contrasting the philosophies and techniques of the "old-fashioned" music to which Bach was heir with the new galant style which Frederick enjoyed and in which he composed himself. There is also a concluding chapter which discusses the collapse of the faith in Reason and the rise of Romanticism, and how, after many decades of neglect, Bach came into his own again.

It is, however, only in fits and starts that this philosophical theme is pursued. For the rest, the book consists of two separate narrative biographies with little contact between them, chapters on Frederick alternating with chapters on Bach. Both men had strong and interesting personalities; and the accounts of their lives are very readable. Readers who have some technical knowledge of music will find the analysis of Bach's work most illuminating; those who have no such knowledge will find those pages heavy going - but even they will come away with the realization that Bach set down his notes not only to make brilliantly complex pattern but that they were a remarkably "literal" rendering of the philosophical and theological ideas they expressed. Anyone who can follow this analysis will share Gaines' worship of Bach. As for Frederick, he is hardly someone whom any sane person can worship; but Gaines brings out very well the devastating effect which a terrible childhood had on crippling Frederick as a human being.

Although, with its three separate parts (philosophy and two biographies), the book lacks real unity, anyone who is interested in the 18th century will find it very rewarding.

Any music student who has studied the life of Johann Sebastian Bach knows the basic tale of how the Musical Offering was created--how Bach traveled to the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia in 1747, how he tried the newfangled Silbermann pianofortes, how the monarch gave him a theme on which to improvise, and how Bach after his return home used the theme as a basis for one of his most intricate collections of contrapuntal compositions.

In this well-crafted and smoothly written popular history, James Gaines fleshes out the personages involved, contrasting the eventful, troubled life of Frederick with Bach's workaday existence as music director of St. Thomas' School in Leipzig. Gaines portrays the meeting of these two men as a symbolic collision between the rising ideas of the Enlightenment and the last gasp of the old Lutheran faith and high Baroque musical language. Though there is little original research, and some necessary speculation about states of minds of people who left scanty personal records (including Bach himself), Gaines by and large succeeds not only at bringing history to life, but also in elucidating, in a clear and non-technical manner, the greatness of Bach's music. He has written a book that appeals to music lovers and history buffs alike.

This book begins and ends with the challenge issued by Frederick the Great of Prussia to Johann Sebastian Bach: a 21-note theme designed to resist having the rules of counterpoint applied to it. Bach was to improvise a three-part fugue on the theme. When he accomplished this to the astonishment of all gathered, Frederick upped the ante: make it six-part. Well, that took a little longer -- two weeks -- and became the Musical Offering, a thirteen-movement rebuke-in-music to the king.

The book probes deeply into the events leading to the challenge. Bach, to the author Gaines, represents the Age of Faith, while Frederick represents the Age of Reason. We learn all about the history behind these two ways of thinking about the world as well as each man's individual history.

Besides being a book about Bach and about Frederick, this book delves into the structure of Bach's music and what he was trying to say with it. It also explores the history of the Germanic states around the time of Frederick. Toss in the influence of the church, philosophers of the time, scientists, thinkers, and musicians (including Bach's sons), and you have a rich story that goes beyond music, or rather, one that infuses music into every aspect of the universe (indeed, one of the theories of Bach's time was that the universe resonated with a perfect harmony).

It's a book about the clash between two men who represented two different worlds, but it's so much more than that. It's easy to read, impeccably researched, and even witty, and touched on so many topics -- religious, geopolitical, philosophical, as well as musical -- that I couldn't imagine just one book covering.

I'm a musician myself (though somewhat of a hack). I've played some of Bach's pieces, but never really appreciated what he was trying to say in them. I'm looking forward to approaching them again with this new information. My personal recording collection doesn't currently contain much Bach, but with the selective discography at the back of this book, you can bet that'll be changing!

I've also visited Sanssouci (Frederick's palace in Potsdam, which is just as over-the-top as the book describes). Should I ever find myself back there, I'll certainly see it from a more "enlightened" viewpoint.

You can go to Peter Gay's two volumes on 'The Enlightenment' for a more exhaustive study, or you can try Norman Hampson's slimmer though comprehensive volume (also, simply, 'The Enlightenment'), and while both shine brightly from sheer size and scope, neither sparkle as much as Gaines' little gem, 'Evening in the Palace of Reason.' Little need be added to the more extensive reviews by others who have posted them here, but perhaps one overlooked point bears mentioning.

To whit, Gaines' excellent demonstration of the contradiction, by way of juxtaposition, of the standard views of the "traditionalist" J.S. Bach and the "progressive" Frederick the Great. Of course, classic interpretations of both men (the conservative composer vs. the first-ever 'enlightened' ruler) break down under the demonstrable complexity of their respective characters, and in the end Gaines clearly and cleverly reveals the counterpoints apparent in each: the avant garde, even radically political elements in Bach's music and the traditional, tried-and-true despotism employed by Frederick. Bach and Frederick, in other words, each contained aspects of traditional and the modern, as well as 'ratio' and 'sensus' (reason and faith, for Gaines)--but in differing proportions according to their station and their art. They were each of them perfect examples, and living contradictions, of the age they helped to define, and has since defined them.

To hinge, if only for a few hundred pages, essential elements of the Enlightenment on one musical composition (Bach's Musical Offering), is to reveal a jewel hidden in the historically messy pile that is the "age of reason." Bravo.

I felt like I wanted this to be a kids' book, with the play-along CD to go with it. I wanted to hear and compare the types of music being discussed, to clearly understand the distinction between fugue and canon, counterpoint and the newfangled 'sensory' music of the Enlightenment! I suppose just my admission that this book made me want to keep learning about music and history means maybe I should have given it five stars?? All in all, a very enjoyable read. It's going to be the book of the month for our community book club as well, so we'll see how it's received there.

Evening in the Palace of Reason is a joint biography of J. S. Bach and Frederick the Great-two prominent, and very different, historical figures. Gaines begins his tale with their first and only meeting. Frederick, the Enlightenment's poster child, scorns Bach and his music as old fashioned, unsightly and-worst of all- religious. He presents Bach with two musical challenges, which Bach responds to in his typical fashion.

After this initial introduction, Gaines begins the biographies of these two great men, recording their extreme dissimilarities and showing how these would culminate into Fredrick's difficult test, and Bach's equally difficult rejoinder. Into their stories, Gaines weaves many different threads-musical history, musical theory, theology, religious history, philosophy and the basic history of their time and place-to create a complex background on which to place the two, making for a detailed and fascinating story.

There were few "dull" places, though I did find some of the music theory hard-going, due to my lack of pre-knowledge. However, I came away from reading Evening in the Palace of Reason with a firmer grasp of not only Bach and Frederick, but counterpoint, Lutheranism, the 18th century, Prussian history and many more things I knew nothing about before I picked up the book!Though this is a scholarly work, Gaines did not target a purely scholarly audience, and as a result it can be enjoyed by layperson or historian alike.

I did find a few faults with this work, the most aggrieving being the lack of dates. Though I am a history enthusiast myself, I still need solid, concrete dates to place an incident within the framework of what was occurring in other parts of the world. Despite knowing when the Enlightenment "occurred", I would have preferred dates on the essential issues, such as the year of their births, the year in which they met, the year in which anything occurred. I found this lack of dates to be a continual frustration.

Otherwise, except for a few passages that were simply not well written, Gaines has done an admirable job with Evening in the Palace of Reason. This is a great read for amateur social or music historians, or biography aficionados. I thoroughly enjoyed it and rate it a solid four out of five.