Duel at the Tipping Point

By Christopher Porterfield

Caesar and Cleopatra. Galileo and Pope Paul V. Thomas `a Becket and Henry II. Encounters between great figures, especially when their world views clash, can create historical watersheds. Such an encounter, writes James R. Gaines, took place on a spring evening in 1747, when an aged Johann Sebastian Bach arrived at the court of Frederick the Great, ruler of Prussia. Frederick, a music lover with as deep a passion for the arts as for waging war, had summoned Bach in order to set him a musical challenge--one that Bach triumphantly met two weeks later when he presented Frederick with one of his greatest works, Musical Offering. But, as Gaines argues in Evening in the Palace of Reason (Fourth Estate; 336 pages), much more was at stake than music.

Bach was a father of the Baroque, the waning age of myth and mysticism; Frederick was a son of the Enlightenment, the dawning epoch of empiricism and reason. Their musical duel took place at "the tipping point between ancient and modern culture," writes Gaines, the moment at which "the intuitions, attitudes, and ideas of a thousand years were being exchanged for principles and habits of thought that are still evolving and in question three centuries later."

To support this sweeping thesis, Gaines, a former managing editor of TIME, PEOPLE and LIFE, braids the biographies of Bach and Frederick through alternating chapters, weaving in thick strands of musical analysis, German politics and cultural history. The result is an eloquent and fascinating study, highly debatable at points yet all the more stimulating for that.

Much of the material is dauntingly complex, but Gaines works hard to keep his prose accessible and entertaining--sometimes too hard, as when he writes of Prussia's ruling family, "The Hohenzollerns were a funny bunch," or when, in the midst of explaining Pythagorean numbers and the theory of affections in music, he assures the reader defensively, "This will be over soon." Even the most abstract passages, though, are warmed by his obvious reverence for Bach, whose music he has been playing on the piano since he was a child.

In fact, Gaines' enthusiastic explications of such Bach masterworks as the Offering, the St. Matthew Passion and the B Minor Mass are what counterbalance his portrait of the brilliant, troubled, contradictory Frederick, whose commanding presence might otherwise have taken over the book. Bach's hardheaded, self-sufficient genius, Gaines asserts, enabled him "to make his music the sum and pinnacle of all the music of his time and so to prepare the way not just for a distinctively German musical language but for all of Western music."

When the two men met, history was going Frederick's way and Bach already seemed old-fashioned. One of the ironies Gaines points out is that great music transcends history. In the 21st century, Frederick has become a remote figure, whereas for us--to use Frederick's words on that fateful evening--old Bach is here. --By Christopher Porterfield