1. Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, 1771

Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim was published in 1771 anonymously; however, the prefatory pages name Christoph Martin Wieland as the editor (Herausgeber). Anonymous publication was commonplace and the practice has been much discussed by literary critics, including those attuned to the gender-specific ramifications. As the full title of the first publication makes clear, it makes use of the epistolary ruse that claims not to be fiction but a fact-based personal history: Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim: Von einer Freundin derselben aus Original-Papieren und zuverläßigen Quellen gezogen (The Story of Lady de Sternheim. Assembled by a Friend from Original Papers and Reliable Sources). The novel makes use of a device popular at the time: it pretends the story is not fiction (not written, or written by “nobody”), but rather genuine personal correspondence to pique the interest of a wider reading public. The first printing spanned multiple volumes and years: 1771 and 1772. It has been translated into many languages, including nearly concomitant French and English translations: in French, it appeared in 1773 as “Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Sternheim” and in English in 1775, with a subtitle that misidentified the editor as the author: “Attempted from the German of M. Wieland.” The most recent English translation appeared in 1991 by Christa Baguss Britt. There are two twentieth-century printings that suggest that the novel had some traction among literary canon-makers. First, Kuno Ridderhoff in 1907 (Berlin: B. Behr) reprinted it in the enormous collection of arguably great literature titled: Deutsche Literaturdenkmäler des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Monuments of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century German Literature). Second, the publishing house of Reclam, which first published the novel in 1938, has offered it since 1986 as one of its well-known, small yellow paperbacks. While some critical attention has been paid to the introduction's mention of the fright that the amateur writer will experience at seeing a printed copy of her story, it also mentions the text's poignancy, its capturing of the true and the beautiful, which are achievements more often expected of an experienced author. The introductory text however stands outside of the narrative; it does not claim to know Fräulein von Sternheim personally, which is one technique used by epistolary authors to add an air of authenticity to their fiction.

A final strand in the counterpoint of Straube's “treadmill” concerns the nexus of loosely coordinated, quasi-antiquarian initiatives commonly called Orgelbewegung (organ reform movement). The dominant image has been the one offered in Wolgast's seminal 1928 biography, published so to speak in medias res, where an “ever young” Straube was intent on embracing new knowledge with open arms. “It is wonderful,” enthused Wolgast, “with what energy and elasticity Karl Straube promotes the new Orgelbewegung not only as an organizer, but also as an artist. This is all the more so in that it amounts to a renunciation [Abkehr] of the ideal that had informed the entire glorious era of his virtuoso years.” The problem with this view is not that it shows its subject as keeping up with trends in the organ world, or even that it affirms the cantor's robust ethical nature, spawning advocacy for new aesthetic impulses where they appeared worthwhile. Rather, the flaw lodges with the fact that Straube was not good at constructing his world as a series of mutually exclusive options, as a zero-sum game in which the striking of one path meant the all-out disavowal of another. The drawn-out hesitancy with which he had embraced the cantorate itself is but the most vivid example. Categorical renunciation or Abkehr was not his game.

The tensions in Straube's personality meant that on virtually every level— career advancement, political allegiances, aesthetic, and historical assessments—conflicts and contradictions abounded, some of them downright debilitating and intensifying with age. His interactions would always be subject to a propensity for indecision, a need to think things through from multiple perspectives, never granting one solution the absolute upper hand over another. Further, his frequently expressed anti-materialism sensitized him to the transience of human striving. “I say again and again, vanitas, vanitas vanitatum,” he would declare to Manfred Mezger in 1945, bringing the words of Ecclesiastes to bear upon the open-ended task of the Bach edition. That sentiment was already much in evidence during the 1920s, when he pondered if and how to go forward with the project. “He often has been approached to complete the Bach organ edition,” wrote Wolgast.

William Morgan, an obscure army officer, agreed with the Williamite project to improve the morals of the country. Unlike those involved in Anglican renewal, however, he suggested that godly providence could only be delivered by clerical reform. For too long the country had been plagued with priestcraft, practised by a sect of men who had abandoned their reason and were addicted to controversy. Far from bringing men to salvation and peace, as they were ordained to do, too many English clerics engaged in disputes, writing books and pamphlets to the ‘disturbance and confusion of mankind’. In Morgan's view, priests were hypocrites, seeking power for self-interested ends, creating tumults and disturbing the civil peace. Their hypocrisy was most graphically exposed by their attitude to public disputation. It was impossible to say anything against them for they insisted they must not be meddled with, for the press would be broke and the ‘book burned’, and yet far from engaging in reasonable debate they promoted unnatural heats from the ‘pulpit and the press’ constantly disturbing the nation's peace. What good, he continued, had their canting, their ‘preaching and prating, their scribbling and printing’ done in the last sixteen hundred years?

Morgan's tract offered little solution to the canting priests of the age, insisting reform was the duty of politicians. But his tract points to an important development in the 1690s. Both John Locke and John Toland supplemented their anticlericalism with attacks on how clerics distorted public debate with tyrannous actions and their exclusive claims to mediating the truth. In this sense, then, both Locke's and Toland's anticlericalism might be considered as a continuation of Whig ideology, which has been traced back to the exclusion crisis. Anticlericalism can, of course, be made to wear many different guises, but the broad argument has remained much the same in the last decades. Attacking priests for their imposture, distorting power for their own tyrannous ends, helped to form the early English Enlightenment: it was anticlericalism that formed the backbone of Whig civil theology. Whilst Locke's attitude to the press has been extensively studied, it has never been particularly clear how John Toland conceptualised the relationship between anticlericalism and the freedom of the press. Chapter 2 will seek to complicate such claims by reconsidering Toland's understanding of the rules of public debate, which he proposed in Christianity not Mysterious.

The threat posed by a licentious press to the providential status of the country and to the soul of each individual might have been expected to favour the cause of Protestant reconciliation and Anglican unity. Yet the growing realisation that Anne's ministries, in conjunction with parliament, either would or could not successfully legislate against the press caused certain churchmen to call for other solutions to the spread of deism, infidelity and impiety. Before Anne had succeeded to the throne, however, William had made a policy decision that intensified religious division in the eighteenth century. By the end of 1700, King William's parliamentary affairs were in disorder and the junto administration was in disarray. To form a new government he turned to the earl of Rochester (1642–1711), the leading Tory of the day and an ally of Atterbury. As a price for his return, Rochester extracted a concession from the king that convocation would return. In accordance with his wishes, convocation was called and sat from spring 1701 until William's death and then from 1702 to 1705. Almost from the start of its meeting, the clergy in the lower house attempted to employ the jurisdictional authority of convocation to censure heretical and dangerous books that the bishops rejected on legal grounds. The insistence by the bishops that convocation lacked jurisdictional authority struck many clergy as a dishonest way to avoid restraining books and amplified their anger. As a result, the debate between the two houses spilled out from private discussions into public debate. In the first section of this chapter, both the private discussions and printed pamphlets of the houses of convocation are used to outline the increasing anger of the clergy at the refusal to restrain the press, and their increasing concern at the danger caused by the spread of impious books. It details the rearguard action fought by the bishops and their allies to refute the accusation that they approved of a free press and that they themselves were infected by heresy and unorthodox ideas.

These debates emphasised the jurisdictional authority of convocation to control books and paid little attention, aside from general assertions of impiety, to the reasons why they should be stopped, whether they endangered the souls of individuals or corrupted the status of the Church, for example. Alongside these debates Henry Sacheverell began to publish his sermons.

Contrary to Straube's prediction, Germany was still very much at war in spring 1918. On March 3, just as negotiations around his candidacy were getting serious traction, the new Soviet Russian government had ceded the Baltic States in the harsh peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed by the German and Austrian Empires. Now turning its full strategic attention to the western front, Germany launched a series of offensives through mid-July, when the Second Battle of the Marne turned the tides decisively in favor of the Allies. As May gave way to June in faraway Leipzig, there still seemed reason to imagine that the fatherland could prevail against its western enemies, even as the national resolve continued to be severely tested.

These circumstances surely swirled in the minds of the faculty, students, and alumni of the Thomasschule as they gathered on Monday, June 3, to welcome the new cantor in a solemn but simple ceremony. At this moment, they stood on the unstable precipice not only of new political realities, but also of a Thomaskantor who manifestly was not going to conform to the time-honored mold. An alumni choir performed Schreck's “Führe mich,” op. 33, no. 3, and his setting of Psalm 23, “Der Herr ist meine Hirte,” op. 42, memorializing Straube's predecessor and, undoubtedly for some, recalling the fact that the cantorate until now had been a composing office. According to the press account, Rector Tittel welcomed Straube with the pointed wish, “May the assumption of the cantorate, which necessitates the grave relinquishment of certain cherished artistic activities, bring blessings and impart rich fulfillment”—a deliberate way of putting things that will not have escaped Straube's attentive ears, and in which he could perceive the residues of concern over his hitherto “fragmented” schedule. In prepared remarks, the new cantor addressed the issue, at least obliquely, as well as the reservations of those who felt he was going to allow his artistic ambitions to override the larger objective of the boys’ humanist education. “As little as he regards composition as the task that corresponds to his nature,” read the report that paraphrased Straube's brief speech, “he will all the more take care to cultivate the formidable tradition of the past.”

“Old age has arrived with me,” a plaintive Straube had written Mezger late in 1945. “Everything taken together has made of me a fretful, sullen geezer, as is the way of the world.” Mezger had accepted Straube's commission to write a foreword to the chorale-based volumes of the Bach edition, which, as the latter pointed out in the same letter, needed to emphasize “the religious content” and “reveal also to the French and the Americans knowledge of the spiritual values in this wonderful art.” He was nothing if not determined, now framing his work as a last opportunity to preach Bach abroad. By March 1946, and evidently at his own urging, he had in hand a contract from Peters promising 1,200 marks as honorarium for each of nine volumes. Incredibly, for the first time in decades, there was an official mandate to proceed.

Yet Straube continued to stew over the work's ultimate relevance. He fixated on his old conviction about the vanity of human striving, even as he became painfully conscious of himself as a relic. The war's destruction had exacerbated these perceptions, not only because it had taken a toll on his health, but also because it had driven a vivid wedge between past and future. He had issued from a world that now lay in rubble. How could his views on Bach claim currency in a new era? Going forward, such questions played on a loop in his mind, even as those to whom he articulated them offered encouragement. “The name Karl Straube is magical and will remain so,” Hella von Hausegger admonished him. “And particularly given today's uncertainty about style, it's very important that someone like you, who knows the right approach, nails down his thoughts.” He was increasingly prone to compare his “right approach” to the work of others, particularly those west of the Rhine. With evident cynicism he told Mezger that requests for “an instructive foreword” had come from the Americans, “who it seems have not been completely convinced by the program-music interpretations of an Albert Schweitzer.” Now more than ever after the Allied victory, he remained aware of the French bias among American organists, even as he aired disdain for what he had long regarded as Schweitzer's dabbling dressed up as authenticity.

As the assaults on Leipzig's institutions unfolded, Straube stepped up his reading regimen. He now had more free time and wished to keep his mind nimble, sharpening the intellectual faculties he was sure the cantorate's unrelenting musical demands had blunted. Perhaps his insatiable consumption of literature during this period—classical and contemporary, fiction and non-fiction, musical and socio-political history alongside analysis of current events—betrayed an escapism from the deterioration of the cultured world he thought he knew. But as best he could, he also was trying to make sense of that world as it splintered, in part by situating the present in a long narrative arc.

In November 1940 he had plunged into Heinrich Mitteis's Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters, a demanding study in comparative constitutional history of the Middle Ages. Like Haller's Papsttum, this one bore Straube's name as the dedicatee, here in gratitude for “the deepest impressions of my youth.” The eminent legal historian and medievalist Mitteis had studied at the Thomasschule and the University of Leipzig during Straube's virtuoso years and, again like Haller, had bonded with him over common interests in music and history. Mitteis had shown such promise as a musician that Straube had drawn on him to conduct the Bach-Verein. On the cantor's urging he ultimately would pursue an academic career. In the introductory chapter of his book Mitteis wrote that “already the [medieval] Germanic state rested completely on relationships between leaders and those led,” equating this incipient notion of government to “the strong feeling of attachment of all members of the Volk to success and failure,” in which they were invested equally. “Hence also the right of the people to rebel against the king if he should fail to show true loyalty.” Further, “the Germanic world is a world of rights,” and “the deepest sense of legal history” lay in the tracing of how the notion of rights is demonstrated through time. Mitteis's treatment of classed society's relationship to just systems of governance touched a topic that long had piqued Straube's interest. It was at the heart of his concern for “the masses” and their posture toward “the national cause,” the issue he had articulated to Haller back in 1922.

In January 1927, some ten years into his tenure, Straube offered a would-be visitor a candid window into his daily routine. “From 9:00 to 1:00, meeting of the committee for state examinations of the Leipzig Conservatory,” began the intonation of his Saturday obligations. Then: “1:30, Motette; 2:30–3:30, rehearsal with the sopranos, then sleep; 5:00–6:00, rehearsal with the altos; 6:00–7:30, rehearsal with the entire choir; 8:00–10:00, Conservatory teaching. So it goes day in and day out.” At least until Easter “I am on the treadmill of my three offices and actually never free. It may be wrong, but I am not in control of my life and take it as it comes. The more I have to work, the better, because then no bleak thoughts [keine trüben Gedanken] arise.” At fifty-four, Straube felt he was riding a wave not of his own making. The punishing routine rattled off here amounted to a bulwark against a tide of trübe Gedanken, probably a clinical depression now some three years after Elisabet's death. His propensity for sustained hard work was itself nothing new, but his attitude toward it had taken a dark turn by the middle of the decade, stained by personal loss and accumulated bitterness. Each New Year and birthday likely prompted reflection. Almost exactly two years earlier, he had told Raasted that “the only anesthetic” for Elisabet's loss “is work, the more of it and the more desolate, the better… . Thank God that someday this life too will pass.” This talking point would surface repeatedly now, betraying a Weltschmerz that would gain the upper hand in Straube's psyche by the 1940s.

And work he did. Over the second half of the 1920s, as the Republic appeared to stabilize under Hindenburg, and as a newly constituted Nazi party began to incubate on the margins, Straube embraced a bewildering counterpoint of demanding, highly visible projects that would further his status and erode his health, all framed as deeply personal strategies to deflect trübe Gedanken. First, there was the German Handel Festival of June 6–8, 1925, in Leipzig, mounted under his initiative, reflecting a national (and nationalist) interest arising in tandem with Friedrich Chrysander and the Händel-Gesellschaft's edition completed in 1902.

A letter written by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) to Robert Harley provides revealing insight into the changing religious and political atmosphere of the early eighteenth century. Pointing to the instability of the country, Defoe lamented to his patron and employer, not only that we are divided ‘into parties and factions’ but also that their members constantly seek to ‘supplant the other’. He traced England's afflictions back to the reign of Queen Mary in the sixteenth century, for ‘the Papist, the Church of England, and the Dissenter, have all had their turns in the public administration; and whenever any one of them endeavoured their own settlement by the ruin of the parties dissenting, the consequence was supplanting themselves’. According to Defoe, since the Reformation, all monarchs and governments had ruled by and been beholden to the machinations of party interest. And yet early eighteenth-century factional infighting marked a new stage in the history of division. Where previously parties had been primarily religious, sometimes having political effect, the Glorious Revolution had irreparably connected religion to politics and hardened party identity until it was solidified by 1702. It is hardly credible, Defoe told Harley, how opponents ignored their shared values and instead emphasised differences for polemical purposes.

Defoe's concerns were being shared in government before the rise to power of Robert Harley. On 1 September 1701, James Vernon wrote to the duke of Shrewsbury outlining the political situation in London. A largely undistinguished secretary of state, Vernon's sympathies for the court Whigs and diplomatic skills ensured he was well informed of political affairs. Situated within a discussion of the rights of the Commons and Harley's status as speaker, Vernon suggested that politics had not been so divisive since James II had attempted to introduce popery. ‘The partys are every day writing and printing against one another with great bitterness’, he commented, and the ‘chiefs seem to have a hand in it’. Vernon's concerns were not confined to politics. Scribblers from both sides seemed to take great delight in slurring the piety and religious positions of their opponents. Lord Somers had recently been libelled as a Socinian, whilst Lord Rochester, the great political hope of the High Church party, had been subject to false and scandalous reports.

“You aren't able to accompany a chorale!” Reimann exclaimed to him one day. The older man well may have been justified in his criticism concerning a skill he must have observed when Straube deputized at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. After all, during the mid-1890s Straube seems to have concentrated on technique and repertory, not necessarily on service playing and its attendant proficiencies. Writing much after the fact, Wolgast would capture something of the young man's thinking when he remarked that church and organ music since Bach's death “had slept the deepest sleep,” and that “the stature of the organist had lost more and more credibility.” But the way back to that credibility did not run through the church. Rehabilitation was “possible only in connection and on the same front with the other arts, but detached from all ecclesial actualities. The organ had to be lifted from the constrictions of epigonic church art and placed as a concert instrument on the front lines of a vibrant musical life.” This is a striking position for a young man whose family claimed such deep roots in theology and evangelical religion. If Wolgast got it right, though, the attitude goes some way to explaining why Straube may have neglected the cultivation of liturgical skills in favor of repertory playing. Furthermore, the framing of one's task as the liberation of the organ from the church, however backward-looking the environment, could have amounted to a rebellion against a religiously conservative home life. In any case, this had been neither Reimann's nor Dienel's position. Both believed that the organ, even in modernized guise, was by its nature an instrument that enabled religious devotion, that led a congregation “to an animated thinking, feeling, willing, and doing,” to return to Dienel's words.

Despite the brand of secular idealism Wolgast proffered, ultimately the organ would not be disentangled from the church environment, and neither would Straube. If he was going to realize his mission of renovating “the stature of the organist,” of clothing Bach and others in compelling up-to-date form, and of attracting the musical avant-garde to this ancient instrument, he was going to have to do it from inside the church out, not the other way around.