Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines

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      TEN DAYS BEFORE his fifteenth birthday, Sebastian put his clothes in a bag, strung a violin over his shoulder, and set out, on foot, for a new school more than two hundred miles away. Nobody in his family had ventured so far from their Thuringian heartland, but of course Sebastian was not anybody else. The move was forced on him. Christoph’s home was becoming overcrowded as his family grew, and Sebastian could no longer pay for his keep because for unknown reasons he had lost his job as a tutor to the children of wealthy citizens. He may have felt he was being orphaned yet again, but in fact the offer of a choral scholarship to St. Michael’s Lyceum in Lüneburg, a town almost four times the size of Ohrdruf, was providential. His brother would probably have told him not to go there but to apprentice himself to a master as Christoph had done at this age. None of Sebastian’s siblings or ancestors had gone as far in school as he had gone already. But there was a wonderful library at St. Michael’s, with a famous collection of all the contrapuntal art of Europe; and Lüneburg was not far from Hamburg, the largest and most musical city in Germany.

      For a boy who had known only Eisenach and Ohrdruf, Lüneburg was another country, with large open public squares, Renaissance architecture, and a distractingly robust musical life. We know that Sebastian graduated St. Michael’s, but there are no claims for his academic excellence there. When his voice changed soon after he arrived, he kept his music scholarship by singing bass and playing keyboards and violin, but apart from choral service the plainest trail he left in Lüneburg was extravagantly extracurricular.

      While St. Michael’s tried to teach him yet more Latin, Sebastian taught himself French and Italian, which he needed to make his way through the music library. As Leo Schrade noted in his deceptively small book, Bach: The Conflict Between the Sacred and the Secular, the richness of the library at St. Michael’s must have been dazzling to Sebastian but also somewhat disorienting: There was a great deal of German church music in the collec-tion, but none of it was as German as it was the work of German composers writing in French or English or Italian or Dutch, the problem that sent Handel off to Italy and Telemann into the opera. After serving as a battleground for the great powers, Germany had not developed its own musical (or any other) traditions since the Thirty Years War so much as it absorbed them, a fact which Bach’s foremost predecessor, the great composer Heinrich Schütz, bemoaned in his late life even as he continued to write in the style of Monteverdi. German princes spoke French. The best music came to Germany from Venice or Amsterdam—by sea, to the port of Hamburg.

      Hamburg thus became the seedbed of change for German music, and in search of Germany’s musical future and his own, Sebastian more than once made the arduous several days’ walk to Hamburg and back, taking on the role of journeyman musician. Hamburg had not only a robust, distinctly German school of organists but also an opera. Astride both was the octogenarian Johann Adam Reinken, organist at St. Catherine’s Church and one of the opera’s founders. Reinken’s magnificent organ, with its four keyboards, fifty-eight stops, and full pedal keyboard, had enormous range and power—from the great thirty-two-foot pipes and their thunderous bass to the tiniest whistles, for piccolo and flute. Reinken’s was the largest organ Bach had ever seen and became the measure by which he would judge all others. Perhaps first at Reinken’s Hamburg apartment, he came under the influence of the great Dietrich Buxtehude, organist at St. Mary’s in Lübeck and a composer of outsize ambition and ability who was working with all the styles and traditions of Europe. Buxtehude would have a more than musical influence on Sebastian in his first job, and it was in him perhaps more than anywhere else that Sebastian would find the inspiration for what was perhaps his greatest gift to Western culture: forging from a multinational babel a single language of European music.