The Margrave of Brandenburg

“Bach sent his Brandenburg concertos to the Margrave of Brandenburg.”

That’s how it is said. That is what most musicians, even many musicologists, still seem to think. I find it in scholarly publications. I find it on line. I hear it announced at concerts. I asked two respected musicologists at renowned universities, if they saw anything wrong with this statement, and they did not.

Is is it a nerdish thing to care about facts? People sometimes give me the impression that it is. The point is, the sentence is misleading. Doesn’t it suggest that the Margrave was the ruler of one of those little kingdoms in Germany, who attempted to distinguish himself, his House and his Princedom by sponsoring the arts, as a successful conductor once told me she believed? Because all three elements of that suggestion, the Margrave as ruler, the little princedom and the will to show off by sponsoring the arts, are all utterly wrong. In the Margraviate of Brandenburg of Bach’s time, this was almost the exact opposite of the truth.

Incidentally, I will never judge anybody for his or her ignorance. Knowledge is not a virtue, and ignorance not a vice. Rather, ignorance is an invitation to learning, and the will to learn, to extend one’s horizons, that is a virtue. Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen, the angels sing in Goethe’s magnificent Second Faust: whoever strives with all his might, that soul we can redeem.

Dear reader, if you were not from here, if you were German, or in love, or a violist, and you didn’t know the American states that well, and you heard about Illinois, wouldn’t it make a difference to you to know that Chicago is in that state? If you heard about the Hudson River, wouldn’t you want to know it went through New York?

Likewise, Americans might not really need to remember the names of towns in Brandenburg like Küstrin, Schwedt or Kolberg; but if, say, Frankfurt, or Berlin, were in Brandenburg, wouldn’t that define your view of Brandenburg? Well, both towns are in Brandenburg! Frankfurt, granted, is not the Frankfurt you know from the major airport, I am being facetious, it’s a different town. But Berlin definitely is the Berlin of the wall, the Brandenburg Gate (2) and Ich bin ein Berliner (3).

Let’s look at the map above —- Geography time! —- How I love maps! All those colors, shapes, it’s art made by politicians, kings, archbishops, and other such uppity scum. Maps are like Christian dogmas, seemingly dry and abstract, but a whole world of sunshine, forests, lakes, and roads (roads…!) condensed in them, the stories, ideals, ideologies, victories and defeats, murders, tragedies, marriages, love stories, perhaps. This map is of the Holy Roman Empire (imagine a German United Nations, and yeah, that dysfunctional!) in 1648, after the Westphalia Peace that ended the period of the Religious Wars. Feast your eyes on the hundreds of little fiefdoms with their erratic, convoluted borders, note how this inordinately complicated area lies like a blob on today’s Europe, not only covering Germany, Austria and most of the Czech Republic, but also usurping parts of eastern France, a little bit of northern Italy, and western Poland. If you want to know more about these regions (for instance, Holland, now called The Netherlands in US the post office, and Switzerland’s Confederacy were not part of it any more, they had just managed to secede), call me, I’ll gladly explain if I like the look of you: Apollo’s Fire has my number (God as well, but He is almost impossible to reach for this kind of trivial information). What’s relevant here is the blue blob in the northeast, the shape of a skunk raising its tale at Vladimir Putin (yess!!!) —- that’s Brandenburg. As you can see, it is the second largest area in the Empire, after the Archduchy of Austria (the area what’s now called Belgium was split in 10 provinces and subject to Spain). It would only grow in importance, gradually, but surely.

But what was the Holy Roman Empire, and how did it get divided into so many little parts? What has Rome to do with it? And why was it supposed to be holy? To answer those questions, we have to go farther back in time to really understand what was going on. Back to the original Roman Empire, the origin of it all. But what was the Roman Empire? In order to answer that, we have to go back even further back in time, to the Greek … but now I’m messing with you, the Roman Empire will do just fine.

Since 313, under Constantine, the Roman Empire had become Christian. That made the Emperor the Protector of the Church. Church and State had become the main political power centers of the empire, the Church becoming the successor of the traditional High Priest.

In 475, the entire western part of the Roman Empire was divided between the several conquering barbarian kingdoms, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, Burgundians, the Franks, and others (the Vandals were in Africa, then: now they reside inside and outside of Dutch and British soccer stadiums). The eastern part continued to live for another millennium in ever shrinking dimensions under the name Byzantine Empire. While the leaders of the church there, the bishops of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, continued to thrive under the protection of the Byzantine Emperor, the bishop of Rome, better known as the Pope, had to scramble, balancing amidst the power struggle between the barbarian kings.

By 800, the Frankish king, Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, had gathered himself quite a territory, consisting of Gaul, half of Italy, and central Europe including parts where the Romans had never been (see map below). In that year, by crowning Charlemagne as the new Roman Emperor, the Pope and the western, Latin Church had found a protector again. What follows I would have liked to print in small print, but this website doesn’t seem to have that, so instead I will write it with the vowels taken out. You can skip it, it is not important to the definition of the terms we are discussing here.

Th brbrn kngs wr nt pgn, thy hd ll cnvrtd t Chrstnty rly n. Thy hd hwvr vrtlly ll cnvrtd t frm of Chrstnty tht’s nw cnsdrd a hrsy, Arianism. Whl n th Bzntn Mpr th Arian cnflct n th Chrch hd bn rslvd n fvr f th Orthodox dctrns, th brbrn kngs hd hrdnd n thr Arian pstns. Th n xcptn wr th Frnks, whs kng Clvs hd cnvrtd n 500 … t th Orthodox frm (Rthdx hr mns “gnrll Cthlc” nd hs nthng t d wth wht w nw cll th Strn Rthdx Church s t cntnd t thrv nd dvlp ftr th 1054 schsm). S trnd t t b xtrml frtnt tht Chrlmgn ws n Orthodox kng, n ln wth th strn prt f te Church. T ddn’t stp th 1054 schsm frm hppnng thgh.

T dd m wn tw pnc: Arianism ds nt rcgnz Christ’s dvn ntr, t s mr lk th Slm n ts syng “Llh s Grt nd Mhmmd …” (n ths cs Christ) “… s hs Prpht”. Fr m, th pwr f Christianity s th d (=idea) f Gd ND Mn n hmn incrntn. But that’s just me.

On the map you will see the extent of Charlemagne’s empire, keeping in mind that most of the other colors, including the big pink blob were tribes, not a centralized empire. The only other empire on the map is the now strongly shrunken Byzantine Empire, which had lost 2/3 of its positions to the Big Bang of the rising Islam. It would soon lose more, and more, and more, to that new religion.

Two more things. At the southwest edge of the purple Frankish Empire, you can see Marcia Hiszpańska or Spanish March. Keep that in mind, it will be significant. More to the west of that, you see the battle at Roncesvalles, that’s where Roland died and his immortal story was born. Just saying.

I remember Charlemagne’s death every time I see a digital clock say 8:14, which is almost exclusively in the evening. The Franks had a devastating inheritance law that divided any inheritance between all sons. This led, after a decades long chaos of successive wars, to the Verdun Treaty in 843, where the realm was divided in a western, a middle and an eastern part.

A child can see on the map on the right that the middle part, Lotharingia or Lorraine, named after Lothar, the grandson who inherited it, was doomed. You can’t defend a place like that. The Late Medieval Duchy of Burgundy (here indicated with a rough and a fine type of shading) was a remnant of this middle part. Originally I had a dedicated a few lines to them, in which I used, and may have coined, the phrase “…until in 1477 a forest of swords and spears boldly reduced Charles the Bold or the Reckless into a Charles-less wreck…”, but that would have been too distracting. If you want to know more about this fascinating part of European history, find an ex girlfriend, tell her you want to get back at me for something, and she will give you my number.

The western part of the Charlemagne’s former empire became France and the east Germany. And with the east came something else.

The king ruled with the help of his generals, mostly chieftains in the early Middle Ages - Your honor, I promise I will go somewhere with this line of questioning! - These military aids were rewarded a piece of land to govern as loan for their services, in return for loyalty to the king. Throughout the Middle Ages, kings had to deal with those noblemen, counts, dukes, margraves, archbishops etc., who of course always wanted to seciure and expand their territories, or usurp the throne if they could. In Burgundy, the duke of Burgundy was a vassal of the French king, while in the Netherlands he was subject to the Holy Roman Emperor. In England, thanks to William Shakespeare (“Shakespeare’s works were actually written by another author whose name was also William Shakespeare”) we see the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York. In France, the kings at some point had little more than the immediate strip of land around Paris, Île-de-France as it is called. They managed however to regain their authority, perhaps not insignificantly aided by a nineteen-year-old girl who called herself Jehannette la Pucelle. "Jeannette the Virgin". One of history’s mysteries. Germany was less lucky. It never got its own ‘chick’ …

Now we finally get to the point. The imperial dignity, acquired by Charlemagne, as official protector of the church, went to the eastern, therefore the German part of the Empire. In 962, with Otto I, this dignity was officially reclaimed and renamed Holy Roman Empire, and somewhere in the 13th century, the title “of the German Nation” was added, because by now, the various Germanic tribes had fused into a true cultural German entity. This Holy Roman Empire, (which never had anything to do with Rome and didn’t turn out to be particularly holy either, though German it sure was) became a mosaic of little snippet states with an ever weaker “sovereign” vainly attempting to keep control. The fact that the emperor had to be elected may have been a material factor in this decentralization, as this may have bound the chosen emperor too strictly to the desires of the nobility. I don’t have time to go into why exactly this electorate system was instituted. It seems to be one of those instances in history where an impulse causes its exact opposite to materialize, like when the merciful Christian idea that a defendant could not be convicted without a confession led to the torture chambers of medi-evil times. Seven electorates were in charge to choose the new emperor: 3 church states, Mainz, Trier and Cologne, and 4 worldly powers, Bohemia, Rhine Palatinate, Saxony and, yes, there it is, Brandenburg. One - and in Bach’s time the largest - of the 4 major worldly electorates. You can find the three church electorates on the map below as three cities in the purple area in the west, close to Holland (Vereinigte Niederlände): they were relatively small in territory, even as church states go, but as a Czech chess master once said when he commentated a game of the petite Judith Polgár playing against a huge Slavic adversary: oxen is also five times heavier than Oxford professor. The worldly electorates are are the relative large blue (Brandenburg), salmon (Kurfürstentum Sachsen: Saxony), and (the northern part of the) mustard colored blobs (Bohemia); and the grass green, multi-shaped area in the central west on the Rhein called Kurpfalz, which is the Rhein Palatinate (a palatinate was an area directly under the ruler, in this case the Emperor). In the 17th century, Bavaria (Bayern, sky-blue blob in the south) and Hanover (in 1648 still called Lüneburg, sand colored west of Brandenburg), were added to the list of electorates.

The Holy Roman Empire expired in 1806 when Napoleon hastened the demise of a political structure that had long been defunct. Later in that century, in 1871, under the toils and efforts of the Prussian statesman genius Bismarck, the German nation was rallied into a Second “Reich,” this time largely centralized and very powerful, with the Prussian King (still wearing Margrave of Brandenburg as one of his titles) at its head as emperor, capital Berlin. After this second Empire was dissolved in 1918 (after WW1), the nazis (a word I never capitalize, so I never start a sentence with it) founded their monstrous Third Reich in 1933, this time under a “Führer” who looked somewhat like Charlie Chaplin.

And before we leave the 1648 map for good, please look at the blue outline in the outer north-east corner, around what is now Kaliningrad, then Köngisberg, where Immanuel Kant lived (Königsberg is not on the map, but Danzig, in the bay, kind of surrounded by this thin blue ‘packman’, is): that’s Prussia.

(The purple blueish areas throughout the map are the church possessions, bishoprics and archbishoprics. The southernmost of those church possessions is the ‘shoe' hanging on southern Bavaria, reaching deep into Austrian territories: that’s Salzburg and it was an archbishopric from the time between Dante and Chaucer right until 1805, when Austria annexed it in frustration of the losses sustained against Napoleon. It was not part of Austria before. When I want to make fun of the Austrians I call Mozart a German composer. Technically, he was a German immigrant in Vienna, no more Austrian than Beethoven or Brahms. David Popper and Dvorák were more Austrian then he…)

Brandenburg was a Margraviate, a Markgrafschaft. Back in the days of Charlemagne, certain generals were given the military governorship over a border province, a mark or ‘march’, as a buffer zone to hold against its neighbors: Danmark against the Danes; the Ostmark, the east march, later Oester-mark ==>Austria, against the Magyars (Hungarians, pronounced mud jars) who had invaded the Carpathian basin in 896; the Spanish March as we have already seen against the Saracens; and the Radetzky March against Field Marshall Radetzky von Radetz. Brandenburg was also called North March and it was created to defend the Holy Roman Empire against the Slavic peoples. Here below you see a more detailed look at Brandenburg, more in the style of the old European maps, where it includes the dukedom of Lower Pomerania, more often called Farther Pomerania, because everything, it seems, is measured from New York. You can see Berlin, Magdeburg in the west, Küstrin, and Frankfort - as said, that’s Frankfort at the Oder, not the bigger and more 3-dimensional Frankfurt am Main where we often fly into. This Frankfurt here is now on the border with Poland. A little over a century ago, it was probably still considered part of central Germany.

It should be pretty clear by now that Brandenburg has always been a rather important German princedom. First a Mark with the responsibility of defending the Reich against other barbarians, then one of the 7 electorates, with a vote to choose every new emperor. In Bach’s time it was the central part of a kingdom. This is how that happened. In the 17th century, Brandenburg had a margrave called Friedrich Wilhelm,, the Great Elector. Looking at his portrait by Frans Luyks, you immediately see a man to be reckoned with. He was a military commander of wide renown, as one of his descendants was going to be as well. He managed to have the Duchy of Prussia, since 1618 an inherited possession of his Hohenzollern family, declared sovereign, meaning that there the Margrave of Brandenburg did no longer have an overlord to take into account: the difference between renting (Brandenburg) and owning a place (Prussia). He managed to improve the economy with measures I don’t understand (do you understand economy?) and also established a standing army of 40.000. All this helped him increase his prestige such that his son, Frederick III would be raised to king in Prussia.

But what is Prussia? 

The Duchy of Prussia finds its origin in the Teutonic Order, one of the three major military orders founded by the Roman church during the crusades in order to safeguard the conquests in the Holy Land and to spread Christendom among *pagans, *heathens *infidels and *heretics (as I understand it, a pagan is someone who has never heard of God, a heathen has heard of God but doesn’t believe in Him, an infidel believes in God but not Christ and a heretic believes in Christ but in the wrong way). The others were of course the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. At its peak in 1410, the Teutonic Order, I believe mainly consisting of German speaking knights, contained basically the whole area east of the Baltic Sea. When secularized in 1525, its strongly shrunken remnants became the first ever Protestant state. The (equally Protestant) Hohenzollerns, Brandenburg’s royal family since “Australopithecus Germanicus,” or however you call “time immemorial”, became hereditary head of state of the duchy in 1618, and that is how this now Protestant and mostly rural area Prussia got connected to Brandenburg. In 1656 Prussia became a sovereign state under a Hohenzollern duke, which make the great elector duke of a now sovereign Prussia. Remember the “Packman”- shaped blue outline on the map of 1648? That’s Prussia. As you can see, it was well outside the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, so the Margrave of Brandenburg was not bound to the Holy Roman Emperor there.

Now pay attention, this is significant. The Great Elector’s eldest surviving son Frederick became of course his successor. But the Great Elector had a bunch of children after Frederick. Like Bach, he remarried after wife no. 1 died. His youngest son from that marriage, born in 1677, that was the Christian Ludwig to whom Bach sent his Brandenburg concertos. How this Christian Ludwig got the title Margrave of Brandenburg and how he, unknowingly, simply by being who he was, taught me the sometimes invaluable importance of the English article the , I will tell you in a moment.

Great men normally don’t have great successors. Frederick III was a typical politician, playing the playground game of public life. He supported the arts and music and all that sort of useless activities. Frederick the Great called him “the Mercenary King”, because he lent his soldiers to foreign causes that did not serve the interests of Brandenburg-Prussia. “He was great in small things,” Frederick said of him, “and small in great things.” It tells me something that his main achievement (aside from founding the Akademie der Künste and the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin) was his elevation to King in Prussia. That is an interesting little story that can tell you something about the situation in Europe at the time. Just like in the Cold War the USA and the USSR each attempted to increase their influence in the Third World (because Europe was a status quo of two solid blocks jammed shut), in Bach’s time, the European powers sought to increase their influence in the Reich, and one way to do that was literally playing a game of thrones. Whenever a kingdom was in want of a king, a German prince was sought, in alliance with whom the country could solidify its power in the Empire; while for the prince-elector in question, it would be a huge boost in prestige, as no one could become a king inside the Empire. Thus, the Habsburg Archduke of Austria had become King of Hungary, and the elector of Saxony had become king of Poland in 1697. The newly appointed duke-elector of Hanover became king of England in 1714, which caused Handel's famous embarrassment after having gone AWOL in Hanover in the reasonable expectation never to have to face his sovereign again. In this manner, Frederick III thus became king in Prussia. The in Prussia definition had to be put in because of a technicality we need not worry about now. Frederick the Great finally forced the European monarchs to approve of his changing that into king OF Prussia. It was the least of this troubled genius’ accomplishments.

Frederick William I with his colleague Frederick August, Duke of Saxony and King of Poland, called August the Strong because of his physical, not political strength. Our Prussian guy is literally dwarfed by his ‘august' colleague (Louis de Sylvestre was Saxony’s court painter though). But although August’s famous strength reached well into September, October, November and December of many years to come, his political vision was inferior at least to his weird looking gnomified companion, who provided Brandenburg/Prussia with a treasure and a military unprecedented in the history of the Empire. He loved his soldiers too much to wage war (what a great reason for pacifism!). But his son saw the far-reaching potential of his unbelievably rich inheritance … If it were not for this little man, Berlin might never have become the capital of Germany …

”Normal” run-of-the mill people sometimes have weird children. Frederick I King in Prussia, as he now was called (not losing any of his gazillion other titles), was a normal prince in all respects, “respectable”, as we call it. His son … not so much. Frederick William I was one of the most interesting rulers in history. He even looked weird, as the picture shows. This “little man” is the Soldier King, known for his regiment of Tall Guys, whom he drafted all over Europe, sometimes embarrassing and infuriating his ruling colleagues by drafting on their territories. He almost ordered the execution of his son Frederick after the boy tried to escape his inhuman authority (performed by the crown prince, such act was considered high treason). To save money, he closed the cultural academies his father had founded, and got rid of all his musicians and artists. He became the laughing stock of the ruling community. But he did stick out his neck for the Salzburg protestants in 1732 when they were threatened with death, and organized a path for them into Prussia, threatening anyone who wanted to stop them with war; while his “stronger” and infinitely more sophisticated Saxon colleague had thrown his religious convictions (if he had any) overboard and converted to Catholicism so he could become king of Poland. And Fred Will did something else: through a series of socio-economic measures I don’t understand but which seem to have come down to holding every worker responsible for his work, he dramatically improved the Brandenburg economy. The consequence was that he left his son with a treasure filled to the rim and a well trained army of 100,000 when he died in 1740. And that would change history…

Because that son was Frederick the Great.

Do you now begin to see what’s wrong with the statement at the beginning of this chapter? Frederick William, king in Prussia, was of course the Margrave of Brandenburg when Bach sent his concertos to Brandenburg in order to get a possible job there (they are not called Brandenburg concertos because of “the Margrave of Brandenburg”, but because they were discovered in the Brandenburg Archive in Berlin in the 19th century). Why did Bach send his Brandenburg concertos to an elector who didn’t have an orchestra because he had fired all his musicians? He didn’t. As stated above, Bach didn’t send these pieces to Frederick William but to Christian Ludwig, youngest son of the Great Elector by his second wife, who, just like all other fathers and sons and daughters and lovers, had no political power whatsoever, especially since Frederick William, just like his son, was a my way or the highway kind of guy. I tell my audiences that an American citizen has more influence in America than Christian Ludwig had in Brandenburg, because he or she can vote a president out of office. But what then was Christian Ludwig’s title? It was of course Margrave of Brandenburg.

If my plumber’s name is Tom Brady* and he sends me a bill, does that give me a signature from the most successful quarterback in NFL history? If I were to send some of my music to Barack Obama, I might address it to President Obama**. Yet, he is not now the president. Ever since Frederick III became King in Prussia, the other sons of the Great Elector and their offspring were officially allowed to carry the title Margrave of Brandenburg, with which this title became a shared name, for instance like NBA Champion 2016, or, for the Cleveland Browns, Winner of a Game (it can happen). This is why the article the can become so crucial. The difference between Bach sent his Brandenburg concerts to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg and Bach sent his Brandenburg concertos to the Margrave of Brandenburg is basically as crucial as between Columbus is a capital in the United States and Columbus is the capital of the United States. Yet, that’s exactly what you find in most articles, books, and program notes. In historical performance, we learn a lot of details about the continuo group in Bach’s time, but of the political situation in Germany, not so much. Even the Wikipedia article about the concertos, though factually correct - it calls this Christian Ludwig Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt, which is one way we now distinguish that younger branch from the premier line - still gives the wrong idea. “Because King Frederick William of Prussia was not a significant patron of the arts…” - that’s of course a gross understatement - “…Christian Ludwig seems to have lacked the musicians in his Berlin ensemble to perform the concertos.” Aside from the question whether this is actually known or just an assumption on the part of the author - maybe his secret boyfriend didn’t like Bach and we’ll never know - this sentence suggests that the Margraviate of Brandenburg, of which Christian Ludwig was the ruler, was dependent upon the Kingdom of Prussia. NO, NO, NO! Friedrich Wilhelm WAS the Margrave of Brandenburg, the ruler of Berlin, Potsdam and all other towns, and of far-away Prussia, in which he was King as well, and Christian Ludwig was the ruler of nothing; he was just allowed to use Margrave as a title, somewhat like Joey Tribbiani calls himself Dr. Drake Ramoray even though he is a famous surgeon only in Days of Our Lives.

Here is another way to look at it. Libraries have been written on Frederick the Great. Bookshelves have been written about Frederick William, the Margrave in Bach’s time. It is only because of Bach, that Christian Ludwig’s name isn’t buried in some some stuffy, obscure Berlin castle archive…

Would it change our appreciation for the Brandenburg concertos? Of course not. Perhaps the thing that saddens me most is that even our most successful intellectuals prove unaware that the real Margrave of Brandenburg was quite an important figure in his time, and his son was colossal - that these historical figures, some of whom were intensely admired even by Napoleon - “If HE were alive, I would not be standing here now,” Napoleon spoke at Frederick’s grave in Potsdam - will one day be completely forgotten. It also saddens me that I apparently was the only one paying attention. I guess there are two kinds of secrets in the world: one where information is accessible only to some; and another where the information is open to everyone, but only some care to look.

Here is a summary in the form of a little family tree: it is so much easier to remember when multiple faculties of the brain are engaged: maps for places, clothing for time periods, family lineages for relations. And chocolate.

Notes:

*  Actually, my plumber in Toledo in 2008 was named Joe Wurzelbacher.. Also called Joe the Plumber. Yes, THAT Joe the Plumber..

**  The Emily Post Institute tells me that the right way to officially address this former president is Mr. Obama, but in a more informal situation one could and often does address him by his former title.