Evening in the Palace of Reason, pt. II

Last December, I posted about what I then predicted would be a fascinating book, "Evening in the Palace of Reason:  Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment," by James Gaines.  Well, I just got home from a week's trip to Alaska, during which I (finally) finished the book.  I was right!  Few books are perfect (I think Gaines is not precise enough when pushing the "faith v. reason" thing), but I still give it two thumbs up.  Here's a bit, from the last chapter:

The modern world is a creature of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism but completely the offspring of neither. . . .  [T]he tension continues between reason and faith, ratio and sensus, Frederick and Bach.  In this struggle, Frederick usually seems to have the upper hand.   The world of the early twenty-first century has no trouble knowing Frederick:  that mocking, not-really-self-effacing skepticism, the head-fake toward principle during the headlong rush toward the glamour of deeds.  His mask and his loneliness are all too familiar.  Bach is more of a stranger, a refugee from "God's time" displaced to a world where religion can be limited to a building and a day of the week, or dispensed with altogether. . . .

The beauty of music, of course, what sets is apart from virtually every other human endeavor, is that it does not need the language of ideas; it requires no explanation and offers none, as much as it may say.  Perhaps that is why music coming from a world where the invisible was palpable, where great cosmic forces played their part everywhere and every day, could so deeply move audiences so far from Bach's time. . . .  Bach's music makes no argument that the world is more than a ticking clock, yet leaves no doubt of it.