The German Genius

the theme into a fugue for six voices. This was a hoop Bach wouldn’t jump through, not there and then anyway. He insisted he would work out the arrangement on paper and send it to Friedrich later on.
    In July, two months after the evening at Potsdam, the proud Bach completed the six-part fugue and dispatched it. There is no evidence that Friedrich ever had the piece played but had he done so, the king—a subtle, astute man—would have been more than a little affronted. For this composition contained what one historian described as a “devastating attack on everything that Frederick stood for.” 6 In the first place, the music was deeply religious. Elsewhere it contained a subtle form of sarcasm, where the score was annotated with references to the king’s rising fortunes—though in practice the music descended into melancholy. 7 Counterpoint and other forms of music that smelled of the church were interspersed throughout, all of which has allowed musicologists to conclude that, in the “Musical Offering,” Bach was having the last word—defying, chiding, even satirizing the king, reminding him that “there is a law higher than any king’s which is never changing and by which you and every one of us will be judged.” 8
    This entire exchange—subtle, clever, but pointed—epitomized the clash between two very different worlds, a clash that, in 1747, was sharper than ever. Three years later Bach was dead. The last great achievement of his life, completed during his final months, was the Mass in B Minor, one of the great masterpieces of Western music (“titanic” in the words of the critic Harold Schonberg), and one that Bach himself would never hear. With the Mass in B Minor and Bach’s death, a whole artistic, spiritual, cultural, and intellectual world was at an end. The baroque had essentially been the style of the Counter-Reformation church, and its aim, in the visual arts, as summed up by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti in Rome, one of the great reformers of the Catholic Church, was “to set on fire the soul of her sons,” to place “a sumptuous spectacle before the eyes of the faithful,” and to make the church “the image of heaven on earth.” Bach’s aim in his music—although it was Protestant music—was much the same. Such an understanding, such an aesthetic, died with him.
     
     
    But if the baroque fire was cooling, new beliefs, new tempers, new ways of thinking were taking its place. Some of these innovations were fundamental, reconfigurations in thought that were as profound and as revolutionary as anything expressed for a thousand or even two thousand years. Many of the new ideas transformed Europe in its entirety, and North America too. Several, however, were specific to Germany or applied there more than anywhere else.
    Until the middle of the eighteenth century—1763—the German-speaking lands were, in the words of the Harvard historian Steven Ozment, “Europe’s stomping ground.” Their location, at the geographical heart of Europe, had made them a crossroads of international trade since the Middle Ages, a circumstance not entirely without its beneficial effects. In the early sixteenth century, for example, the imperial free cities of Germany—Augsburg, Ulm, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck—boasted a civic culture second only to their Italian and Swiss counterparts. At that time, Nuremberg, as Tim Blanning has pointed out, was home to Albrecht Dürer, Veit Stoss, Adam Krafft, Peter Vischer, and Hans Sachs. In the seventeenth century, however, that same geographical centrality conspired to make the German lands, as Ozment’s phrase implies, a battlefield for Europe’s great powers—France, Russia, Sweden, the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary, and Britain. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), a bitter conflict between Catholics and Protestants, was fought largely on German territory, and was so vicious that atrocity stories became commonplace—see, for example, Philip Vincent’s contemporaneous The Lamentations of Germany , which featured plates showing “Croats eating children,” “Noses and Eares cut off to make Hatbandes,” and other delicacies. At the end of that time, the Treaty of Westphalia—a peace of exhaustion as much as anything else—hammered out a new political reality, a loose confederation of states of very unequal size and importance: 7 (later 9) electors (a reference to the office, largely ceremonial, of electing the emperor and his heir apparent,