Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (P.S.) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This is one of the great books of a lifetime, a book of soaring imagination, history, and some of the finest writing I've ever encountered. More Bach comes through in these luminous pages of a one-night encounter with Frederick the Great than is found in a dozen books of Bach 'scholarship'. While the book's 'premise' concerns Frederick's challenge to 'old Bach' that resulted in his composing 'A Musical Offering', James Gaines' exploration of Bach's mind and life and faith, and, indeed, his music, is so attuned, so wondrously rendered in the most engaging prose imaginable that any plot artifice is right away overwhelmed with a dire, burning truth, and never leaves it. It really is a book too rich to be 'reviewed'. Impossible? Check it for yourself. There are pages and pages of such fineness, such pleasure that one can only experience it, and be changed and renewed in love for 'old Bach'. One example - chapter 6 (The Sharp Edges of Genius), detailing Bach's famous funeral cantata 'Actus tragicus' (BVW 106), offers not only a brilliant summation of its musical parts, but is, immediately and ultimately, a moving, unforgettable rumination on the great meaning of Bach and his music, indeed, of the human experience in its divine dimensions unlike any I've come across. I'm a man lost for superlatives to express the importance, the resonating beauty of an amazing book. I've given this book to many friends, each in turn has confirmed my trust that this is one of the great books of a lifetime. You'll want for nothing within these pages - Bach's music, his towering mastery, his orneriness and orderliness, his divine business, and an unshakable look deep into our common human history. It's a book of discovery and confirmation. Evening in the Palace of Reason will change your life. No other 'recommendation' suffices.

Gaines uses a historical curiosity - the encounter between Fredrick the Great and JS Bach - as a launching point into a wonder filled voyage of discovery into the world of the Enlightenment. Bach and Fredrick represent two opposing philosophical currents in the Enlightenment whose positions are now reversed as Post Modernism marches relentlessly against the remains of scientific certainty.

The breadth of material is staggering, ranging from music to politics to philosophy to religion. Those (like myself) who thought this era to be a stilted period of polite powdered wigs will forever have their prejudices reversed by the passions that govern these very accessible pages. As an introduction to the period and as an incentive to learn more, one could not ask for a better book.

However, I must caution that this book should not be used as anything more than a way to stir interest in the period, for this is a history that does not seem to be seasoned by discipline. Following in the mold of books like "1421: The Year China Discovered America", Gaines seems to sacrifice professionalism and objectivity in favor of accessibility and passion. As little as I know about the period, it is hard to miss claims he makes that seem quite biased. When he amplifies the emptiness of the Enlightenment by claiming that Fredrick the Great's greatest years were BEHIND him before the Seven Years War even started, even a neophyte like me cringes. When he laments that Mozart's music is "missing something" when compared to Bach's, surely he must be aware that there's a substantial musical population that would say just the opposite (especially if you imagine Bach dying in his 30's). This book has many suspiciously categorical statements and unsubstantiated theories that fire off all sorts of warning signs in my head, but my grounding in this period simply isn't strong enough to bring any of them to justice. Suffice to say that any person that covers subjects ranging from Luther to Descartes to Hapsburgs to harmony is going to be an amateur in SOMETHING, and yet Gaines rarely predicates any of his assertions with academic caution or humility.

So the history may be questionable, but with that caveat in mind, he does succeed in his most important challenge: to make accessible a world that is far more colorful and wonderous than most of us could have imagined.

You can go to Peter Gay's two volumes on 'The Enlightenment' for a more exhaustive study, or you can try Norman Hampson's slimmer though comprehensive volume (also, simply, 'The Enlightenment'), and while both shine brightly from sheer size and scope, neither sparkle as much as Gaines' little gem, 'Evening in the Palace of Reason.' Little need be added to the more extensive reviews by others who have posted them here, but perhaps one overlooked point bears mentioning.

To whit, Gaines' excellent demonstration of the contradiction, by way of juxtaposition, of the standard views of the "traditionalist" J.S. Bach and the "progressive" Frederick the Great. Of course, classic interpretations of both men (the conservative composer vs. the first-ever 'enlightened' ruler) break down under the demonstrable complexity of their respective characters, and in the end Gaines clearly and cleverly reveals the counterpoints apparent in each: the avant garde, even radically political elements in Bach's music and the traditional, tried-and-true despotism employed by Frederick. Bach and Frederick, in other words, each contained aspects of traditional and the modern, as well as 'ratio' and 'sensus' (reason and faith, for Gaines)--but in differing proportions according to their station and their art. They were each of them perfect examples, and living contradictions, of the age they helped to define, and has since defined them.

To hinge, if only for a few hundred pages, essential elements of the Enlightenment on one musical composition (Bach's Musical Offering), is to reveal a jewel hidden in the historically messy pile that is the "age of reason." Bravo.