Warning: strpos(): Empty needle in /homepages/5/d845057890/htdocs/clickandbuilds/LionessatLarge/wp-content/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails-advanced/classes/Environment.php on line 47
Thomas Mann: Dr. Faustus – Lioness at Large

Thomas Mann: Dr. Faustus

Doktor Faustus - Thomas Mann

A Reckoning

This review is dedicated, in friendship and grateful memory, to the late Bob Zeidler, one of Amazon.com’s best and brightest customer reviewers. It is partly inspired by an exchange with Bob, whose comments hereon are sorely missed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Yes … we are lost. That is to say: the war is lost, but that means more than a lost military campaign, in fact it means that we are lost, lost is our substance and our soul, our faith and our history. It is over with Germany; … an unnamable collapse, economical, political, moral and spiritual, in short, all-encompassing, is becoming apparent, – I don’t want to have wished for what is looming, because it is despair, it is madness.”*

Thus, the narrator of Thomas Mann’s last completed and, I think, greatest novel sums up Germany’s fate after the barbarities of national-socialism. But this is no mere character speaking: This is Mann himself – the erstwhile self-proclaimed “Unpolitical Man,” condemned to watch the Nazi tyranny’s horrors from the distance of his Californian exile, taking up the mighty pen that had gained him his Literature Nobel Prize and, through the voice of a narrator named Dr. Serenus Zeitbloom (in itself, supremely ironic comment on Mann’s own circumstances) composing his final reckoning with the country he left when the Nazis came to power, and where he never returned to live, although he finally did leave the U.S. in 1952, driven out by McCarthyism.

According to his diaries, as early as 1904 Mann had the idea of using a composer’s temptation by the devil (and thus, updating the Faustian legend, the quintessential theme of Germany’s cultural history at least since the Middle Ages) to illustrate the corruption of art by evil. Seeing the country’s intoxication with the glorious promises of Hitler and his henchmen, seeing all of German society fall under the spell of evil, including the “Bildungsbürgertum,” the educated middle class considering itself guardians of Germany’s cultural tradition (and for whose acceptance the dark-haired merchant’s son without a university education struggled throughout his life, much as they bought his books), reviving that idea first conceived forty years earlier was a logical choice; now further inspired by the personalities of Arnold Schönberg, whom Mann met in exile and whose twelve-tone scale became that of his novel’s protagonist Adrian Leverkühn, and Friedrich Nietzsche, with whose writings and personal fate Mann had been fascinated early on. Philosophically and musically, the novel is also influenced by critical theorist Theodor Adorno, with whom Mann entertained an in-depth epistolary dialogue.

Blending together musical theory, the decline of humanist philosophy, the rise of fascism and the powers of black magic (most of which Mann had already explored in earlier works like “The Magic Mountain” and, very pointedly, in the 1930 short story “Mario and the Magician”), “Doctor Faustus” is thus simultaneously a comment on the political developments, a warning, an attempt to come to grips with Germany’s high-flying, yet so easily destructible philosophical and moral compass – and, masterfully construed though it is, a cry of despair in the face of utter madness. For while the novel is brimming with references to the better part of German (and European) cultural history, from the medieval “Faustus” tale to Goethe, Weber’s “Freischütz,” Martin Luther, Protestantism, and Thuringia and Saxony as focal points of all things German, Mann’s central point remains the parallel between his country’s fate and that of his novel’s protagonist, both ending in ruin and madness-induced stupor after their deal with the devil has run its evil course.

Unlike Goethe, who places his Faust’s temptation at his tragedy’s beginning, leaving no doubt about the event’s physical reality, Mann even narratively lifts Leverkühn’s temptation into the realm of allegory and imagination, by splitting it into two incidents, whose combined effect will only come to fruition in the novel’s final part. On neither occasion Zeitbloom, the narrator, is present; for both we thus have only Leverkühn’s own words. Yet, even the first account, a letter describing how the would-be composer is mischievously led to a brothel and falls under the spell of a prostitute, already intimates the evil to come, the venereal disease that will later constitute the outward cause of his madness; and not only does Leverkühn ask his friend to destroy that letter, he also closes it imploring him to pray for his soul.

Much later in the narrative – although indicating that it was actually written earlier; thus employing yet another level of (temporal) abstraction – Mann introduces Leverkühn’s transcript of his exchange with the devil; a dream-like sequence during which shape-shifting “Sammael,” in language hearkening back to Goethe and even the Middle Ages, promises Leverkühn nothing short of “the metamorphosis of a god”: that by his name a whole generation of “receptively healthy boys”* will swear, “those who thanks to [his] madness will no longer have to be mad themselves;”* and that, indeed, his name will live forever. Still, at this point we have already witnessed Leverkuehn explaining the foundations of his twelve-tone scale, only to be challenged by Zeitbloom’s question whether the strictness of his concept doesn’t deprive the composer of all freedom (which Leverkühn denies, rather seeing the composer as “bound by a self-imposed order, hence free”).* And when in an exchange laden with symbolism Zeitbloom then presses whether the formation of harmony wouldn’t be left to chance, Leverkühn’s response is, “Rather say: to constellation”* – thus squarely introducing, as his friend will quickly note, concepts of black magic, which in addition to the dialogue’s musical and political references again drive home Leverkühn’s exposure to the irrational and evil, long before the reader actually learns about his interview with the devil.

Doubtlessly among Mann’s most intimately personal works, “Doctor Faustus” is also among his most complex ones; and while hardly any of his writings make for a leisurely read, the sardonic “Felix Krull,” the near-humoristic “Royal Highness” and even his early masterpiece “Buddenbrooks” are foils to the seasoned master craftsman’s rapier that is drawn here. Demanding, certainly – but also highly recommended!

________________________________

* Translation mine.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Twelve Tone Technique

The basis of the twelve-tone technique is the tone row, an ordered arrangement of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale (the twelve equal tempered pitch classes). There are four postulates or preconditions to the technique which apply to the row (also called a set or series), on which a work or section is based:

  1. The row is a specific ordering of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (without regard to octave placement).
  2. No note is repeated within the row.
  3. The row may be subjected to interval-preserving transformations—that is, it may appear in inversion (denoted I), retrograde (R), or retrograde-inversion (RI), in addition to its “original” or prime form (P).
  4. The row in any of its four transformations may begin on any degree of the chromatic scale; in other words it may be freely transposed. (Transposition being an interval-preserving transformation, this is technically covered already by 3.) Transpositions are indicated by an integer between 0 and 11 denoting the number of semitones: thus, if the original form of the row is denoted P0, then P1 denotes its transposition upward by one semitone (similarly I1 is an upward transposition of the inverted form, R1 of the retrograde form, and RI1 of the retrograde-inverted form).

A particular transformation (prime, inversion, retrograde, retrograde-inversion) together with a choice of transpositional level is referred to as a set form or row form. Every row thus has up to 48 different row forms. (Some rows have fewer due to symmetry; see the sections on derived rows and invariance below.)

Example

Suppose the prime form of the row is as follows:

B, B♭, G, C♯, E♭, C, D, A, F♯, E, A♭, F

Then the retrograde is the prime form in reverse order:

F, A♭, E, F♯, A, D, C, E♭, C♯, G, B♭, B

The inversion is the prime form with the intervals inverted (so that a rising minor third becomes a falling minor third, or equivalently, a rising major sixth):

B, C, E♭, A, G, B♭, A♭, C♯, E, F♯, D, F

And the retrograde inversion is the inverted row in retrograde:

F, D, F♯, E, C♯, A♭, B♭, G, A, E♭, C, B

Prime, retrograde, inversion and retrograde inversion can each be started on any of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, meaning that 47 permutations of the initial tone row can be used, giving a maximum of 48 possible tone rows. However, not all prime series will yield so many variations because transposed transformations may be identical to each other. This is known as invariance. A simple case is the ascending chromatic scale, the retrograde inversion of which is identical to the prime form, and the retrograde of which is identical to the inversion (thus, only 24 forms of this tone row are available).

 

Prime, retrograde, inverted, and retrograde-inverted forms of the ascending chromatic scale. Prime and retrograde inversion are the same (to within transposition), as are retrograde and inversion.

In the above example, as is typical, the retrograde inversion contains three points where the sequence of two pitches are identical to the prime row. Thus the generative power of even the most basic transformations is both unpredictable and

The “first 12-note work”: Schönberg’s Op. 23, mov. 5, mm. 1–4


Schoenberg - Op. 23, mov. 5.png

The principal forms, P1 and I6, of Schönberg’s Piano Piece, op. 33a, tone row feature hexachordal combinatoriality and contains three perfect fifths each, which is the relation between P1 and I6 and a source of contrast between, “accumulations of 5ths”, and, “generally more complex simultaneity”. For example, group A consists of B–C–F–B while the, “more blended”, group B consists of A–C–D–F.
Schoenberg - Piano Piece op.33a tone row.png
(Source of all of the above: Wikipedia)

6 thoughts on “Thomas Mann: Dr. Faustus

  1. Before I knew much about Germany and and things German-related, this was one of the first books I read that awakened me to the possibility of what it meant to be German. Reading this more than 30 years ago (not in German), made me realise there were more things in heaven and on earth than I could possible have imagined…It’s high time I read it again, this time in German…and I loved the review. One I talk about a visceral take on a book, this is the kind of thing I’m thinking about…wonderful.

    1. Thank you! And, yes, this one is a kick in our collective national belly. For Mann, downright heavy-handed at times (he could be *so* much subtler), but the mere fact that he felt he had to ram this down our throats just shows how much the Nazi era had gotten to him personally …

Leave a Reply to ThemisAthena Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Literature Reviews

Adventures in Arda

Note: This was my summer 2022 project — but while I posted the associated project pages here at the time (Middle-earth and its sub-project pages concerning the people and peoples, timeline, geography, etc. of Arda and Middle-earth, see enumeration under the Boromir meme, below), I never got around to also copying this introductory post from […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Riyria

The Riyria Revelations are the fantasy series that brought Michael J. Sullivan instant recognition back in the late 2000s.  Originally published as a series of six installments, they are now available as a set of three books, with each of the three books comprising two volumes of the original format.  As he did with almost […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Legends of the First Empire

Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria books have been on my TBR for a while, but until I’d read two short stories from the cycle — The Jester and Professional Integrity — I hadn’t been sure whether his writing would be for me.  Then I found out that (much like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History […]

Read More