Módulo estructural

Music’s separate existence as an essence - a thing apart from its manifestations in specific compositions - confers a particular status and responsibility on the composer. Its separation from a recognisable worldly order, in the realms o f the non-rational, means that the composer has a cmcial effect on the way in which music is understood within the human world. Given Mann’s long-standing preoccupation with the artist’s effect on his pubhc, it is inevitable that he would be concerned about this process o f understanding and the composer’s involvement in it. Camegy sums up the potential moral imphcations o f the separation o f music from the rest o f life thus:

Music is a perfect example o f an artefact, itself o f no intrinsic moral standing, which is coloured by what we make o f it. It exhibits in extreme form the indifference and moral unaccountabihty o f great art.^^

The composer’s task is, therefore, not easy. In Schopenhauer’s system, the notion o f music as the direct expression o f the Will means that it is an uncomfortable and problematic

substance to handle. His concept o f the Will is characterised by restless striving and desiring. The mark o f the artist is his abihty to escape this by attaining a state o f pure contemplation. In the case o f the composer, this will allow the Will itself to be contemplated free o f incessant activity. It is not enough simply to reproduce the Will. Rather, it is necessary to engage the intellect in creative tension with it. Mann’s own essay on Schopenhauer, in 1938, noted how far ahead o f his time the philosopher was in recognising the dark struggle between the intellect and instincts that Freud was later to see as dominating the whole o f human mental hfe:

Schopenhauer, als Psycholog des Wülens, ist der Vater aller modemen Seelenkunde: von ihm geht, über den psychologischen Radikahsmus Nietzsche’s, eine gerade Linie zu F reud. . . Diese Einsicht. . . daB der InteUekt dazu da ist, dem Willen gefalhg zu sein . . . die Triebe zu rationahsieren, birgt eine skeptisch-pessimistische Psychologie, eine Seelenkunde durchschauender Unerbitthchkeit, die dem, was wir Psychoanalyse nennen, nicht nur vorgearbeitet hat, sondem diese selbst schon ist.^^

Marianne Bonwit, ‘Babel in Modem Fiction’, Comparative Literature, Vol. 2 (1950), p. 236-251. P. Camegy, op. cit., p. 26.

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For the composer, the struggle with the Will is a struggle with the very substance with which he composes, and the successful resolution o f this struggle the mark o f genius. It is clear from Schopenhauer’s praise o f Rossini in particular, and the conspicuous absence o f others, that he felt the composers had a key role to play, and that some were more successful than others in allowing music to achieve its true expression:

Von diesem Fehler hat keiner sich so rein gehalten wie Rossini: daher spricht seine Musik so deutlich und rein ihre eigene Sprache, dafi sie der Worte gar nicht bedarf und daher auch, mit blofien Instrumenten ausgefiihrt, ihre voile Wirkung tut.^^ It is very clear in Doktor Faustus that the composer is seen as the intermediary between the ontology o f music and the human world at a particular historical juncture. Kretzschmar’s lectures, particularly those about Beethoven, establish the principle o f the composer as a channel between the timeless and the historically specific. His reply to Leverkühn’s ‘Bekermtnisbrief makes explicit the idea that music cannot proceed through time as an historical phenomenon without the help o f individual composers, who are rooted in a particular historical period:

Die Kunst schreitet f o rt. . . und sie tut es vermittelst der Personlichkeit, die das Produkt und Werkzeug der Zeit ist, und in der objektive und subjektive Motive sich bis zur Ununterscheidbarkeit verbinden, die einen die Gestalt der anderen

annehmen.^*

Inevitably our understanding o f the history o f music tends to focus on the characteristics o f particular ‘great works’ and their reception, by audiences at different times for example, or by the composer’s contemporaries, without necessarily becoming too preoccupied with the nature o f music that lies beneath. Some aestheticians, such as Benedetto Croce, who influenced later thinkers, have denied that any sort o f artistic history exists at all, claiming that each artistic object, such as a musical composition, must be contemplated as self- subsisting. This does not, however, give much credence to the fact that although the initial inspiration for a work may be a timeless phenomenon, like music itself, the process o f creation must occur within a definite historical context, which inevitably exerts its own pressure on the artist. The musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has suggested a middle view, which takes both artistic and historical possibilities for viewing the aesthetic object into account:

Aesthetic and documentary observations, whilst motivated by opposing interests, are not necessarily based on different and mutually exclusive groups o f facts; just which sorts o f facts are to be used in an historical or immanent interpretation is not

determined a priori but must be decided upon in each individual case.^

Welt als WV,^. 365. 28

GWVI, p. 181. Carl Dahlhaus, /

Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 32.

Mann took an elevated view o f the artist’s role in history, referring in his essay on Schopenhauer to;

Die vermittelnde Aufgabe des Künstlers, seine hermetisch-zauberhafte Rolle als Mittler zwischen oberer und unterer Welt, zwischen Idee und Erscheinung, Geist und Sinnhchkeit/^

Mann’s concern with the role o f the artist as intermediary was also sharpened by the concern at the heart o f Adomo’s writings on aesthetics about the interaction between art and ideology. Adomo’s deep involvement in the writing o f Doktor Faustus therefore had a particular influence on Mann’s understanding o f the process by which the composer translates music’s ontological characteristics into specific works, and the way m which these are received by the pubhc.

The figure o f Beethoven provides many o f the most important examples when characters in Doktor Faustus discuss the ways in which composers make manifest the ontological characteristics o f music. Although Mann had hitherto tended to see Wagner as the

quintessentially German representative o f the most dangerous and yet most uplifting aspects o f music, Beethoven had a long estabhshed status as an embodiment o f all things German, not least due to Wagner’s influence.^^ David Dennis’s study o f Beethoven and German politics has shown how parties right across the political spectrum used Beethoven’s works as inspirational vehicles, and how his music even now continues to play a part in social and pohtical development in G e r m a n y I n a letter written in 1946, Mann admitted that “ich schreibe fiber Wagner mit mehr Sicherheit und Richdgkeit, als fiber Beethoven”.^^ Nonetheless, Beethoven, not Wagner, is, as Gunilla Bergsten has identified, the symbohc foreruimer for Leverkühn.^ The prominence o f Beethoven owes much to Adomo’s influence. He was much preoccupied with the composer, whom he found an important, but problematic figure. Adomo kept a diary about Beethoven until 1957 but, unable to come to terms with the Missa solemnis, left fingmentary notes on his death in 1969, which were finally pubhshed only relatively recently.K retzschm ar’s analysis o f Beethoven, which had

^®GWDC,p. 534.

The seventeen year old Wagner was so deeply inspired by Beethoven’s ninth symphony that he transcribed it for piano solo. See Rudolph Sabor, The Real Wagner (London, Sphere, 1987) p. 37-9 for extracts from Wagner’s letters attempting to persuade Schott to publish his transcription. Alongside Shakespeare, Beethoven was the deepest influence on his young life, and was later invoked by Wagner as the inspiration for his ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’.

David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870-1989, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996).

Letter to Gerhard Albersheim of 19 June 1946, Briefe II, p. 493.

Gunilla Bergsten, ‘Musical Symbolism in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus ', Orbis Litterarum 14, (1959), p. 212.

Theodor W. Adomo, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik, ed. R Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995).

such an important influence on Leverkühn, closely follows Adomo’s 1937 essay. Spats til Beethovens, and his notes on the piano sonata Op. I l l , which he lent to Mann.^^

The distinction between music’s ontological characteristics and the ways in which these are translated by the composer into specific, trmebound works, thus forms the starting point for the investigation o f the correspondences between music and German history in Doktor Faustus. The next two sections o f this thesis, 3.2 and 3.3, consider first how the novel portrays the ontological characteristics o f music, and then the examples it gives o f how these characteristics take on specific historical expression in musical works. As noted in the previous chapter, these characteristics divide into four key concepts: the struggle for

‘Durchbmch’, the tension between sensuality and cerebralism, lack o f stability, and a spiritual capacity.

Mann records his gratitude for these notes in his letter to Theodor Adomo of 5 October 1943, DiiD, p. 15.