It’s Black Friday! The beginning of the Christmas shopping season!
OK, I don’t approve of the shopping mobs associated with this day, and I can decry the commercialization of Christmas with the best of them.
But gift-giving, properly understood and explained, really does tie into the true meaning of Christmas. It isn’t just that Christ was born. He was born for you. Christ is a gift. Salvation is a gift. We don’t earn it, any more than a child earns everything under the Christmas tree. Receiving and giving gifts can teach us about receiving and giving grace, a connection to the Gospel.
So our discussion topic for this weekend is as follows:
What suggestions would you have for your fellow Cranachers trying to think of a good present to give someone? What was a Christmas gift to you that you really appreciated and that other people might appreciate also? What books, games, or gadgets do you know of that would make a good gift?
I’ll start. Some years ago, my boss gave me a book that has become one of my favorites, and this year I am going to give copies to several people in my extended family. (Don’t tell them!) The book is Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James R. Gaines.
In 1747, King Frederick the Great, the patron of the Enlightenment and the father of Prussian militarism, invited the elderly, out-of-fashion Johann Sebastian Bach for an audience. The two talked, Bach played some music, and then Frederick, who fancied himself a musician, gave the composer a melody line that he had written and challenged Bach to write a fugue around them.
Frederick was probably trying to humiliate his guest, as was his wont, because the series of notes didn’t harmonize with each other, which you really need if you are writing a round or canon, let alone a fugue. The task was impossible. Whereupon, Bach did it. Not only that, Bach made it part of a larger composition, The Musical Offering, dedicated to the King. Gaines reads the piece, which is crammed with Biblical texts and has sections referring to the King’s glory that are actually melancholy, as a rebuke to the rationalist, unbelieving monarch, even an attempt to convert him.
The book becomes a dual biography of the two figures, with a chapter on Bach followed by a chapter on Frederick. It becomes a book about the clash of worldviews, of Bach’s Lutheran Christianity vs. Frederick’s trust in reason alone. And Bach’s worldview wins.
The book is highly enjoyable to read, not some dull scholarly tome, but the reader learns a huge amount about history, modernity, Christianity and the arts, and how music conveys ideas.
To give you an idea of the response it can evoke, consider this 5-star reader review from Amazon by LuelCanyon:
One of the great books of a lifetime, a masterpiece of soaring imagination, history, and invigorating writing. 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 is Frederick’s challenge to ‘old Bach’ that resulted in his composing ‘A Musical Offering’, Gaines’ exploration of Bach’s mind, life, faith, and music is so attuned, and wondrously rendered in such engaging prose that any plot artifice is subsumed in a dire, burning truth that never falters. It’s a book of such pleasure and vision one ends recharged with love for ‘old Bach’. One example – chapter 6 (The Sharp Edges of Genius) details Bach’s funeral cantata ‘Actus tragicus’ (BVW 106) and offers a cogent summation of its musical parts, but ultimately provides an unforgettable rumination on the godly essence of Bach’s music, indeed of those divine dimensions of human experience we hunger for. I’ve gifted it to many friends, each in turn confirmed my trust with their own experience of wonder. Everything’s here – Bach’s music, his towering mastery, orneriness and orderliness, his divine business, and a profound look into our common spiritual history. Evening in the Palace of Reason will change your life. No other recommendation truly suffices.
A good gift for adults, teenagers, or yourself, if you get an Amazon gift card.
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