Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. James Gaines

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СКАЧАТЬ dinner tables, made faces at each other when forced by their father to listen to his pastor’s sermons, and delighted in their common passion for music, which was perhaps the only unalloyed delight of their young lives.

      Both clearly came to favor their mother. In her memoir, Wilhelmina paints a distinctly (and justly) unfavorable portrait of both parents but reserves her faintest praise for the king. “His table was served with frugality,” she wrote. “It never exceeded necessities. His principal occupation was to drill a regiment.” As for Frederick, Wilhelmina (at least as a child) had only deep affection and loyalty. “He was the most amiable prince that could be seen,” she wrote of her younger brother, “handsome, well made, of an understanding superior to his years, and possessed of every quality that forms a perfect prince.”

      What the queen wanted more than anything was that her children would marry Hanovers, who were now England’s royal family. Wilhelmina was to marry the prince of Wales and Frederick his sister, Princess Amalia. Sophia Dorothea, then, would someday be mother not only to the king of Prussia but also to the queen of England, a prospect which suited her. The spies, of course, had to make sure that never happened, since it would put Prussia in England’s camp rather than the empire’s. Until the “double-marriage” plan could be completely unraveled, therefore, the spies worked “Fatty” hard, and so did the queen. Both sides used the same carrot: the aggrandizement of Prussia. The empire dangled two provinces on the Rhine, Jülich and Berg, that both the Great Elector and Frederick William’s father felt, with justice, the empire had taken from them wrongly. (The empire had no intention of actually supporting the claim, and it was characteristic of their view of Prussia that they offered as a prize something they had blatantly appropriated.) England, in its alliance with France against the empire, held out a future for Prussia as a coequal, independent, sovereign state rather than the role of imperial lackey and also support for his claim to Jülich-Berg. In trying to gain advantage for that position, the queen played a very treacherous game. Among other things, she recruited the French ambassador to Berlin, Konrad Alexander von Rothenburg, to be the conduit for secret messages to the English court, essentially plotting with them against her husband and king.

      Not surprisingly, Frederick William frequently had the feeling something was going on behind his back. Who would not have been confused and suspicious, caught between the pleading of an ambitious and deceitful wife whom he loved and the advice of spies whom he considered his best advisers and closest friends?

      AS HE GREW older, Frederick seemed to be less and less his father’s son and more and more his mother’s. He had never really liked hunting, and now when they went to the hunting lodge at Wusterhausen, he hid. Once when he should have been stalking game, his father found him in a clump of bushes reading. He fell off his horse. He curled his hair. He slept late. He called his uniform “the shroud.” He and his sister were ever more faithfully part of their mother’s cabal, to the point that she was able to draw Frederick into her conspiracy with the French minister, at which point her little prince began to demonstrate a distinct taste for intrigue.

      His mother’s ability to bring Frederick into her perilous orbit owed a great deal to the fact that he was being physically abused and humiliated by his father. The beatings began when Frederick was twelve, and on a fixed date. Father and son were at a dinner party given by one of the spies, Field Marshal von Grumbkow. (Grumbkow was Frederick William’s war minister, of all things. The other spy was the former imperial ordnance master Count von Seckendorff.) In his cups, the king wrapped his arm around the crown prince and began loudly to give him advice, the rest of the party his audience. According to a dispatch from the Saxon minister to Dresden after the party, as he spoke the king began patting his son’s cheek for emphasis. “Fritz, listen to what I am going to say to you. Keep always a good large army [light tap], you cannot have a better friend and without this friend you will not be able to sustain yourself [harder tap]. Our neighbors desire nothing better than to make us turn a somersault. I know their intentions; you will learn [very hard tap] to know them. Believe me, do not trust in vanity—attach thyself to the real [harder]. Have a good army and money [harder]. In these consist the glory [harder] of the king [harder].” Word of the incident made its way to the capitals of all nations represented at the Prussian court.

      From that point on, the beatings became increasingly frequent, humiliating, and severe. He beat Frederick for wearing gloves on a cold day at the hunt. He beat him for eating with a silver fork instead of a steel one. He beat him in front of servants, officers, and diplomats. He threw the prince to the floor and kicked him, berating him at the top of his lungs and beating him with his cane.

      Frederick was not his only victim; his fury seemed omnidirectional. For a while it was thought that the king was going completely mad. So violently hostile was he even to his beloved giants that forty of them plotted to roast him alive by burning down Potsdam (a plot that gives us some sense of their collective intelligence). The penalty for desertion was to have one’s skin pinched off with red-hot tongs and then have all of one’s bones broken on the wheel, but there were hundreds of desertions anyway, and suicides at the garrison ran two a month. “The people are greatly discontented,” Rothenburg wrote to Paris. “They hope and believe that this distress cannot endure always. There are all the appearances of a revolution. Everything is preparing for it.”

      AT ONE POINT, in one of his most profound depressions, the king began talking of abdication. Grumbkow and Seckendorff (and more so of course their imperial paymasters) were horrified: Should Frederick William abdicate and the crown prince succeed him now, the English alliance would be assured. So the Hapsburg emperor called upon his good friend Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, king of Poland, and grandmaster of the revels at one of the most sumptuous pleasure domes of Europe. The king of Prussia needed a rest, the emperor told Augustus, who was more than happy to oblige by sending Frederick William an invitation to Dresden.

      Augustus the Strong was no doubt the most debauched ruler in Europe, which for the early eighteenth century is no small claim. His mistresses were legion, his illegitimate children numbered exactly 354, and some of his many daughters had become his mistresses as well. Obviously Frederick William disapproved such goings-on and knew what awaited. He took Frederick with him only because Wilhelmina plotted with the Saxon ambassador to pry an urgent invitation out of Augustus for the crown prince to join him. Frederick, of course, was thrilled with Dresden. He saw his first opera, he held his own in interesting conversation with smart dinner companions, he went to concerts, he even played his flute with the king’s Kapelle. In a letter to Wilhelmina describing the scene (the first letter he signed in the French manner, “Fédéric”), he wrote grandly, “I have been heard as a musician.” In that way and others Frederick greatly upstaged his father, whose most notable accomplishment in Dresden was to split his pants at a ball.

      Perhaps Augustus’s greatest gift to the young crown prince came as a result of a joke played on his father. Knowing Frederick William to be something of a prude, Augustus led him to a human diorama, covered at first by a red velvet curtain. When drawn, it disclosed, surrounded by hundreds of candles, the reclining naked figure of a startlingly attractive woman. Accounts differ as to Frederick William’s reaction—he said she was beautiful and blushed, he slapped his hat over Frederick’s face and pushed him out of the room, he huffed out and said he was going back to Potsdam immediately—but we have no trouble imagining Frederick’s reaction. He had already been flirting with a certain very sexy countess who was among Augustus’s illegitimate daughters and favorite mistresses. She was cheating on Augustus with one of her half brothers, but apparently she had time for a crown prince, because Augustus caught her looking. He took Frederick aside and told him the countess was unavailable but asked if he would like to get to know the lady behind the curtain. Frederick said he would. Credible speculation has it that he eventually got to know them both.

      If Frederick left Dresden with a smile on his face, it was knocked off in short order. After Dresden, father and son made immediately for the king’s hunting lodge at Wusterhausen. It was a banner hunt that year—the party brought in a grand total of 3,600 wild boar, 450 in one day—and Frederick was miserable. СКАЧАТЬ