Toward the end of Johann Sebastian Bach’s life, he met Frederick the Great of Prussia. This book looks at the history of the early eighteenth century through the lives of these two men and the events that led up to their historic meeting in 1747. Bach, an honored and devout musician, was sixty-two years old at the time and only three years away from his death. Fredeick was thirty-five, in the seventh year of his reign as king of Prussia, a lover of whatever was new and fashionable and avante garde. Bach was a product of the (Lutheran) Reformation and a conservative Christian. Frederick the Great was Voltaire’s “philosopher-king”, an adept, if deceitful, diplomat and a military genius.

I found this story of how the two men’s lives intertwined and contrasted to be illuminating in its picture of the individuals and in its portrayal of the competing philosophies of the age, Reformation versus Enlightenment, Christian versus free-thinker, Baroque musical forms versus the emerging Classical style of Bach’s son Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach. Some of the musicological details went over my head, but the basic contrast between two very different men and two very different world views was clear.

“The Enlightenment’s way of knowing a thing was to identify, separate, and classify it, the encyclopedic impulse. Bach’s way of understanding something was to get his hands on it, turn it upside down and backward, and wrestle with it until he found a way to make something new.” (p. 185)

Of the Musical Offering written by Bach for Frederick after their meeting: “All of the oddities contained in the work . . . were of a piece, and this is what they say: Beware the appearance of good fortune, Frederick, stand in awe of a fate more fearful than nay this world has to give, seek the glory that is beyond the glory of this fallen world, and know that there is a law higher than any king’s which is never changing, and by which you and every one of us will be judged. Of course that is what he (Bach) said. He had been saying it all his life.” (p. 237)

“He could thank the writings and example of the notoriously, triumphantly intemperate Martin Luther for in spiring in him not only a love of God but, perhaps more important to his music, a sense of certainty rooted in something deeper than approval or respect.” (p.241)

“A poll conducted during the controversy over his reburial (1991) found that most Germans could not say when Frederick had lived or what he had ever done.” (p.268)

Gaines ends his book by saying that the tension between faith and reason, personified in the life and work of these two men, Bach and Frederick the Great, continues unresolved to this day. I think it’s a false dichotomy. Bach wins. His music proves that we cannot, do not, live in a closed materialistic system. “Bach’s music makes no argument that the world is more than ticking clock, yet leaves no doubt of it.” (p. 273)