Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines
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Название: Evening in the Palace of Reason
Автор: James Gaines
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007369461
isbn:
Both parties appeared before the Consistory, and Anna Cunigunda confessed that she had promised to marry Bach, and he her … They had done no less than give each other rings in pledge of marriage, which they still had … and it was now on Bach’s conscience whether he thought he could withdraw from her under these circumstances without injuring her …
Christoph Bach confessed, indeed, that he had offered marriage to Anna Cunigunda, but they had merely considered the matter provisionally, and he had not in any way considered himself bound … He had given her a ring … but not in pledge of marriage … Besides, Anna Cunigunda has asked for her ring back again …
After Bach had withdrawn from her and his affection had died out, she had desired to have her ring back, on these conditions: she put it to his conscience that if she were not good enough for him, and if he only meant to make a fool of her, he should return her the ring and answer for it in his conscience before God … He, in answer, had sent her word that he had no fear of punishment from God on that account.
The dispute went on for more than a year, when finally the consistory ruled that Bach should marry the girl. That was predictable, given current practice. What was not predictable was that Christoph Bach promptly took the matter over the heads of officials in Arnstadt by appealing to the authorities in Weimar. At this point, according to the records, he “hated the Wieneren so that he could not bear the sight of her.” After more weeks and months of appeals, the officials of Weimar overruled Arnstadt and lifted his obligation to marry.
By the time it was over, the affair had lasted more than two years, Christoph Bach had made enemies of his hometown consistory, which comprised its most influential citizens, and he had indeed made a fool of Anna Cunigunda Wieneren, who had become the talk of Arnstadt. But he had done what it took to get his way, and when we try later to interpret some of the more intemperate behavior of his nephew Sebastian, including his own even more severe problems with the consistory of Arnstadt, this antecedent will be worth remembering.
IN THE FALL OF 1671, Ambrosius and Maria Elisabeth Bach moved their belongings out of their rooming house, “The Silver Pocket,” and hauled them twenty miles west to Eisenach, where he had rented an apartment in the home of the duke’s head forester. His position placed him among the town’s most visible and affluent figures. In a few years he became a citizen, bought a home on the market square, and joined the town council, an honorific body that met rarely and served mainly as the local duke’s rubber stamp but was at least a democratic bunch, including not only a doctor and the town organist, his cousin Christoph, but also a butcher, several keepers of the town clocks and watchtowers, a gravedigger, and three shepherds. The Bach household was large from the very beginning in Eisenach, including his three apprentices and a journeyman as well as his widowed mother-in-law and his nineteen-year-old sister, who was profoundly impaired both physically and psychologically. (When she died a few years later, the preacher at her graveside called her “a simple creature, not knowing her right hand from her left … like a child.”) Given the size of his household, Ambrosius must have been grateful for his generous starting salary and housing supplement of fifty florins, and with the promise he could double that with fees for weddings and funerals and for playing in the court Kapelle. By way of comparison, with that much money, roughly four times the town barber’s salary, he could have bought several harpsichords every year, or a dozen good lutes. Of course, he had more pressing uses for the money. Ambrosius and Maria Elisabeth brought their first baby Bach with them to Eisenach, and during the next fourteen years there they christened seven more, little imagining that the last of them, their one and only Sebastian, would someday make St. George’s baptismal font a music lovers’ site of pilgrimage.
THE HOHENZOLLERN REAL ESTATE COMPANY
THE CHRISTENING TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER OF the infant who would become Frederick the Great lacked nothing in pomp. The infant Frederick of Brandenburg-Hohenzollern, Prince de Prusse et d’Orange, Count of Hohenzollern, Lord of Ravenstein, and so on, was dressed in a baptismal gown made of silver cloth studded with diamonds, and he was carried to the fount of the Chapel Royal at Potsdam by two margraves and a margravine. No fewer than six countesses carried the train. The godmothers were all dowagers of this and duchesses of that, and among the five godfathers were Czar Peter the Great, and the elector of Hanover, soon to be King George I of England. We know there was music at this christening but only because the baby’s father was not yet king. When he took the throne a year later, one of his first acts was to fire the musicians.
The royal Kapelle of Prussia’s king at the time, baby Frederick’s grandfather, Frederick I, included some of the best musicians of their day, so although the program does not survive we can be sure the music was entirely equal to the grandeur of the occasion. All the bells of the city rang out to announce the baptism of the crown prince, and we know from Thomas Carlyle (who produced his eight-volume History of Frederick the Great after thirteen years that he grimly described to Ralph Waldo Emerson as “the valley of the shadow of Frederick”) that the christening “spared no cannon-volleyings [and] kettle-drummings.” Happily, they appear to have kept the cannons at a distance. According to Carlyle, one previous heir to the Prussian throne had been killed by the shock of a triumphal volley fired too close to his crib. Another had died shortly after his christening because the infant crown had been forced onto his head. Possibly more reliable, certainly more conventional accounts lay the cause of death of both previous crown princes to trouble with teething. In any case, the baby’s grandfather, Frederick I, had cause to be delighted when at six months the infant crown prince Frederick had six teeth and was still alive.
A year later, Frederick I died, the victim of a mad third wife, who somehow eluded her custodians one morning wearing only a white shift and petticoat. She made straight for the bedchamber of the king, who mistook her for the apparition that was said always to herald death in the Hohenzollern family—“the White Lady”—and the shock killed him. Every account holds this story to be true.
THE HOHENZOLLERNS were a funny bunch, but Brandenburg was lucky to get them, which says something about its earlier history. A hill fortress town, it was taken by siege in the twelfth century by a prince of the Ascanian family, whose name, like many in the Brandenburg line, was pointed: Albert the Bear. The emperor had given Albert the task of protecting Germany’s North Mark from the heathen hordes to the east, and in time Albert found himself with the means to expand his territories, which eventually came to be a scattered patchwork collectively known as the Mark of Brandenburg.
After the Ascanian family died out, Brandenburg changed hands several times, and for a couple of centuries things went from bad to worse. First it went to the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, whose contest with the Hapsburgs for primacy in the empire inspired in them exactly no interest in an unimportant sandy wasteland to the north except as a source of taxes and whatever else they could grab from a distance. Their complete negligence of Brandenburg would have been a gift, but in the event, having soaked it for what they could and being unwilling even to visit the territory, the Wittelsbach elector sold it to Luxembourg, whose monarch simply gave it to a man named Frederick. This Frederick had fought beside him against the Turks, had become his good friend, and Frederick’s family had already acquired a few lands scattered around Germany over the past two centuries by marriage, by purchase, and by force. These СКАЧАТЬ