Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Evening in the Palace of Reason - James Gaines страница 11

Название: Evening in the Palace of Reason

Автор: James Gaines

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Историческая литература

Серия:

isbn: 9780007369461

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ was shut off abruptly in his ninth year. In the spring, his mother died. In the fall, his father, having quickly remarried, died as well, leaving his second wife a widow and Sebastian, suddenly, an orphan. Though more common in those days, losing both parents was just as disorienting as it has ever been. Like all newly orphaned children, Sebastian would have felt abandoned, hurt, angry; and if he had had any wish to stay in Eisenach with Uncle Christoph or his new stepmother, it was not fulfilled. He was sent to Ohrdruf, a nearby town, to live with a brother he barely knew.

      This brother, also named Christoph, the oldest child of Sebastian’s parents, had left home when Sebastian was an infant to apprentice himself to the composer and family friend Johann Pachelbel. Now he was the organist in Ohrdruf, a town much smaller than Eisenach but, in spiritual terms at least, a great deal more intense. While Eisenach was orthodox Lutheran to the core, Ohrdruf was riven, a center of the fierce rivalry between orthodoxy and a more ascetic, devotional form of Protestantism known as Pietism. Over the past century and a half of the Reformation, orthodox Lutheranism had gradually allowed itself to be ground into doctrinal minutiae by constant intersectarian brawling. Lutheran pastors were reduced to giving long-winded sermons on petty theological issues useful mainly for showing how important it was not to be Calvinist or Anabaptist. Pietism, drawing inspiration from such Christian mystics as Thomas à Kempis, Johannes Tauler, and Bernard of Clairvaux, set out to reclaim some of the spiritual energy of the early Reformation by stressing the inner, spiritual life, the daily struggle for meaning, and in doing so they drew sympathizers from all Protestant sects. The Calvinist king of Prussia, Frederick William I, father of Frederick the Great, was one. His Lutheran contemporary Sebastian Bach was another. Though he remained in the camp of the orthodox Lutheran church all his life, Sebastian’s sense of vocation as a church musician was rooted in the mystic spirituality of Pietism, an influence that took hold of him here, in Ohrdruf, and in the deepest grief of his childhood.

      His commitment to religious studies at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, where the Pietist-orthodox struggle was played out every day, is plain to see in his class standing. When he left Eisenach he was twenty-third in his class at St. George’s (he had missed weeks of school during his parents’ illnesses, so he did well to keep his standing that high). Despite Ohrdruf’s more rigorous standards, he finished his first year of tertia in fourth place, and the next year, at age twelve the youngest in his class, he finished first.

      There is something melancholy about this academic success, however, the suspicion that his redoubled focus on his work was more than anything else a distraction from his pain—that he was drawn to theology, as he would be drawn to the cold logic of counterpoint, out of a wish for order in his life. The death of both parents is not easily overcome in an adult, not to mention a small, unready adult. Maybe it is never overcome. In any case, from this time forward and for the rest of his life, Sebastian would pursue order, perfection, and spiritual meaning in his music, and never more movingly so than on the theme of triumph over death.

Image Missing

      ONE OF THE MOST vivid stories of Sebastian’s years in his brother’s house in Ohrdruf concerns a collection of music Christoph had got from Pachelbel. He kept it locked in a cabinet, but one whose door was a grille through which ten-year-old Sebastian could just barely squeeze a hand. At night, when his brother was asleep, he would reach in, roll up the book of music, pull it out, and since he had no lamp, so the story goes, he would copy it by moonlight. Six months later, just about the time he had finished copying the manuscript, his brother discovered what he had done and took his copy of the book away. Sebastian himself had to have perpetuated this story, perhaps to demonstrate his youthful defiance, a quality that would have been healing for him at such a time. Increasingly that quality would come to the foreground of his character, and naturally so: Martin Luther was his model, after all, a man whose entire career was a heroic act of defiance.

      The meaning taken from the story of the “moonlight manuscript” is usually the drive with which Sebastian undertook his own musical education, a drive sufficient to keep him up all night copying music, but the oddest part of the story is his brother’s role in it. Why would he have taken away the copy Sebastian had made, and why did he forbid its use in the first place? This part of the story would make no sense if there were not other stories like it. The organist and Bach scholar David Yearsley cites a letter from the composer and theorist J. G. Walther to the well-known cantor Heinrich Bokemeyer—both of whom were renowned for their knowledge of counterpoint—in which Walther complains that his teacher had made him pay to see a musical treatise, then stood over him as he read it and only allowed him to copy a little at any one time. Finally, Walther resorted to bribing his teacher’s son to smuggle the work to him at night, when he was able to copy it in one sitting.

      Yearsley cited Walther’s letter to demonstrate the connection between the practice of learned counterpoint and that of alchemy, the then still-active search for the elusive “philosopher’s stone” that could mediate the transformation of base metal into gold, and the connections he found are indeed intriguing. Like alchemy, the roots of counterpoint were centuries old. Ever since the early Middle Ages, when the single chanted line of Gregorian plainsong gave way grudgingly to the presence of another voice, the rich acoustic medium of the medieval stone church had encouraged composers’ experiments writing note against note (punctus contra punctum) and eventually of braiding related vocal lines through one another to form increasingly rich weaves of melody. The most rigorous such part writing, such as canon and fugue, came to be known collectively as learned counterpoint, and its elaborated codes and principles were handed down as carefully and discreetly as the secrets of alchemy, from artifex to artifex (the Latin term for alchemist, which Bokemeyer used to describe the composer of counterpoint as well).

      Just as the alchemist’s ambition was to discover God’s laws for “perfecting” iron into gold, the learned composer’s job was to attempt to replicate in earthly music the celestial harmony with which God had joined and imbued the universe, and so in a way to take part in the act of Creation itself. Understanding what possessed young Sebastian to spend his nights trying to steal his brother’s notebook (after very long days at school and more daily hours at his music practice) requires understanding how the practice of threading musical voices into the fabric of counterpoint could have been endowed with such metaphysical power.

      The key is music’s relation to number, a connection that was as old as Plato and as new as Newton, dating from the mythic day in the sixth century B.C. when Pythagoras heard a hammer strike an anvil. In his Textbook of Harmony of the second century A.D., Nichomachus of Gerasa recorded the moment:

      One day he was out walking, lost in his reflections [when he] happened by a providential coincidence to pass by a blacksmith’s workshop … and heard there quite clearly the iron hammers … giving forth confusedly intervals which, with the exception of one, were perfect consonances. He recognized among these sounds the consonances of the diapason (octave), diapente (fifth) and diatessaron (fourth) … Thrilled, he entered the shop as if a god were aiding his plans …

      It is a lovely and dubious story that later gets a bit loopy, perhaps through centuries of retelling. As a historical figure, Pythagoras is irretrievably lost in myth, in part because he forbade his disciples to write down anything he said. There is little reason to believe he did not exist, but it may have been someone else, perhaps one of his followers, who figured out Euclid’s “Theorem of Pythagoras,” which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. That was one of the Pythagoreans’ more useful ideas. They also posited the existence of a “counter-earth” because they could make out only nine planetary bodies and there had to be ten because ten was the perfect number.

      For Western music, the most important discovery attributed to Pythagoras was that halving a string doubles its frequency, creating an octave with the full string in the proportion of 1:2. A little further experimentation showed that the interval of a fifth was sounded when string lengths were in the proportion of 2:3, СКАЧАТЬ