Most philosophical studies o f music separate in some way the concept o f music as a series o f individual compositions, and as a continuing phenomenon apart from those compositions. Music seems unique amongst the arts in provoking the feeling that it possesses an ontological identity apart from its particular manifestations. That is to say, it is relatively easy to imagine that the material that makes up a great symphony can be separated from the symphony itself. There is less o f a sense that a continuing essence can be found once the colours and textures o f a painting or the language in a poem have been dissected. This timeless essence o f music is something common to aU music, remaining after the detailed components o f a work - its particular notes, phrases, and harmonies - have been analysed.
The division between the timeless essence o f music and its specific compositions dates from the earliest Greek philosophers. They saw the study o f music almost exclusively as tiie study o f a universal system, rather than o f specific compositions, which tended to be regarded as
inferior. Music was an important area o f study for the most eminent philosophers, and Pythagoras’s teaching that the essence o f music embodied the very principles holding the cosmos together, has left its mark on musical aesthetics ever since. It is well known that Plato saw music, and indeed other arts, as a potentially dubious moral and educational influence which should be closely guarded. He also made a distinction between music inaudible to man, which was thought to echo the harmony o f the human soul and o f the universe, and the specific pieces o f music heard in contemporary Athens, which did not impress him. As Jamie James notes in his study o f the concept o f the music o f the spheres: “it would never have occurred to Plato or any o f his students to play a few bars o f the World Soul on the lyre”.^ Plato suggested that this distinction pointed to a musical reality deeper than even the Pythagoreans had supposed:
Our pupils must not leave their studies incomplete, or stop short o f the final objective. They can do this just as much in music as they could in astronomy, by wasting their time on measuring audible concords and n o tes. . . They talk about intervals o f sound, and listen as carefully as if they were trying to hear a conversation next d o o r. . . hey are all using their ears instead o f their minds . . . I’m not thinking so much o f those people as o f the Pythagoreans, who we said would tell us about music. For they do just what the astronomers do; they look for numerical
relationships in audible concords, and never get as far as formulating problems and asking which numerical relations are concordant and why.^°
The intellectual persuasiveness o f images o f the music o f the spheres has inevitably diminished, but the appeal o f this notion o f an underlying natural order in music has never been lost. Although the later aesthetics largely dismissed notions o f affinity between music and the soul, the scientific studies undertaken by Descartes, Kepler and Mersenne amongst others still had at their heart the essentially Pythagorean assumption that the basis o f music lay in nature, and modem studies o f acoustics have the natural occurrence o f sound as their starting point.
The understanding o f music as a natural essence, not created by man, has an important implication for Doktor Faustus. This concept o f music assigns it firmly beyond human reason and intellect. Although the basis o f the earliest philosophy o f music in mathematics meant that the Greeks saw music as largely rational and intellectual, this became overlaid with the thought o f the Romantics. In the Romantic evaluation o f nature, which placed the organic far above systems and rules, music was taken to be the most transcendent and
^ Jamie James, The Music o f the Spheres. Music, Science and the Natural Order o f the Universe, (London, Abacus, 1995), p. 48.
Plato, The Republic, translated by H. D. P. Lee (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1955), p. 299. For example, Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices mundi (1619) and Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636), were both important texts that offered a picture of cosmological order with music at its heart.
important o f all the arts, placing it outside any order into the realms o f subjective feeling. Music could thus culminate in a dangerous irrationality, and - particularly when expanded by the insights o f twentieth century psychoanalysis - the dark, demonic world o f a Faust. There are fewer traces o f the original Greek heritage o f music in Doktor Faustus than o f
Nietzsche’s altogether more turbulent understanding o f the Greek tradition.
Nietzsche’s major work on music. Die Geburt der Tragodie aus dem Geiste der M usik (1872), was in turn deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, who attributed to music the highest status o f all the Romantic arts. Music was at the pinnacle o f the philosophical system outlined in Die Welt als Wiile und Vorstellung As already noted, this work was central to Mann’s own intellectual development: “so las ich denn, Tage und Nachte lang, wie man wohl nur einmal liest”.^^ Schopenhauer clearly assigned the essence o f music an
existence separate from particular works. His starting point was the importance o f realising that the musical language o f specific compositions was merely the surface o f music:
A uf unserm Standpunkte . . . miissen wir [die Musik] eine viel emstere und tiefere, sich auf das innerste Wesen der Welt und unser Selbst beziehende Bedeutung zuerkennen, in Hinsicht auf welche die Zahlenverhaltnisse in die sie sich aufiosen laBt, sich nicht als das Bezeichnete, sondem selbst erst als das Zeichen verhalten.'^ Schopenhauer asserted that the thing signified by music - “das Bezeichnete” - was no less than the Will itself. This was the principle on which, in Schopenhauer’s system, the whole world subsisted. Thus, Schopenhauer saw the ontology o f music, its nature o f being, as itself more bound up with the foundation o f being than any other artistic phenomenon:
Die Musik ist also keineswegs gleich den andem Kiinsten das Abbild der Ideen; sondem Abbild des Willens selbst, dessen Objektivitat auch die Ideen sind; deshalb eben ist die Wirkung der Musik so sehr viel màchtiger und eindringlicher als die der andem Künste: denn diese reden nur vom Schatten, sie aber vom Wesen.
Schopenhauer goes on to make clear that music’s ontology - uniquely amongst the arts - was to be seen as entirely separate from the world, and thus from particular compositions,:
So ist die Musik, da sie die Ideen übergeht, auch von der erscheinenden Welt ganz unabhangig, ignoriert sie schlechthin, konnte gewissermaBen, auch wenn die Welt gar nicht ware, doch bestehn: was von den andem Kiinsten sich nicht sagen lâfît.*^ At the same time, he recognised that music could participate in the physical world. This led to similarities between it and the specifics o f the physical world, perceived by man as the Ideas:
GW XI, p. 111 {Lebensahrifi). Welt als WV,'^. 357-358. Ibid., p. 359.
So mufi zwar durchaus keine unmittelbare Ahnlichkeit, aber doch ein Parallelismus, eine Analogie sein zwischen der Musik und zwischen den Ideen, deren Erscheinung in der Vielheit und Unvolkommenheit die sichtbare Welt ist.'*^
Some o f the analogies that Schopenhauer goes on to draw between music and the specifics o f the world are quite strained. This actually serves to underline his point that the essence o f music is entirely separate from the world, and cannot always easily be moulded in ways that the human world will understand. It is not surprising that Schopenhauer favoured purely instrumental music over any other, as it was much easier to hsten to this in a way entirely disassociated from the Ideas:
Denn iiberall driickt die Musik nur die Quintessenz des Lebens und seiner Vorgange aus, nie diese selbst, deren Unterschiede daher aufjene nicht allemal einflieBen. Gerade diese ihrer ausschlieBhch eigene AUgemeinheit bei genauester Bestimmtheit gibt ihr den hohen Wert, welchen sie als Panakeion (Allheilmittel) aller unserer Leiden hat. Wenn also die Musik zu sehr sich den Worten anzuschlieBen und nach den Begebenheiten zu modeln sucht, so ist sie bemüht, eine Sprache zu reden, die nicht die ihrige ist.^^
The dissociation o f music from reason inevitably gave it an important link with the emotions, but for Schopenhauer this meant more even than the ability to express deep emotions directly. Instead o f a specific instance o f love, for example, music would allow the listener to
experience love itself. This objectification o f emotion is a feature that many would be prepared to attribute to other great works o f art. Goethe was surely claiming no more than the ability o f poetry to transfigure the individual experience in his famous hnes: “Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt/Gab mir ein Gott, zu sagen, wie ich leide”.** But
Schopenhauer is quite clear that hterature, for example, can show only particular instances which, although they may tell us much about man, remain firmly rooted in the world o f the Ideas.
Romantic writers were only too ready to agree that something lay behind music that did not He behind their words, that it could be more deeply expressive than any other art form. The Romantics dehghted in music’s abihty to go beyond the rational, and its privileged
connection with nature. They had an especially passionate relationship with the pure
instrumental music so praised by Schopenhauer, particularly E. T. A. Hoffinann, who greatly contributed to building Beethoven’s almost mythic artistic stature. Nietzsche was later to perform a siroilar function in relation to Wagner. His remarks in Die Geburt der Tragodie
Ibid., p. 360. Ibid., p. 365.
** Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Torquato Tasso, Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgahe. Vol. V, edited by Josef Kunz, (Hamburg Christian Wegner Verlag 1952), p. 166.
See, for example, Schopenhauer’s discussion of the lessons of great tragedy, in Welt als WV, p. 355- 356.
about the inadequacy o f linguistic expression, when placed next to music, became the resounding last lines o f Stefan George’s poem about him:
Und wenn die strenge und gequalte stimme Dann wie ein loblied tont in blaue nacht Und helle flut - so klagt: sie hatte singen Nicht reden sollen diese neue seele!
It is not only German writers who have given an exalted place to music. The poet W. H. Auden, a noted collaborator with Benjamin Britten, wrote passionately o f the inadequacy o f verbal expression next to music:
All the others translate:. . .
From Life to Art by painstaking adaptation. Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption. Only your song is an absolute gift.
Mann did not go to Nietzsche’s lengths o f composing music o f his own - a habit which caused some fiiction and wounded feelings between the philosopher and Wagner.^^ He certainly had musical aspirations, as aheady noted in 2.2. The attraction that music seems to have held for early twentieth century writers is not surprising, bearing in mind that this was a time when they were so frequently questioning the adequacy o f language for conveying true meaning. Patrick Camegy notes that although Mann did not go as far as James Joyce, for example, in pushing back the boundaries o f language, his irony meant that his own language has an ever-present pull towards the ambiguity and abstraction o f music.^^ Marianne Bonwit’s 1950 essay. Babel in M odem Fiction, picked out Doktor Faustus as one o f a handful o f significant works in the context o f the collapse o f values and language in the first half o f the twentieth century. She felt that Mann, with a handful o f other authors, had identified the essential arrogance and fevered activity o f man’s own achievements in the
Stefan George, ‘Nietzsche’, fiomDer siehente Ring {\9Q1), 'mSamtliche Werke, Vol. VLVn, (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1986), p. 12-13. The reference in Nietzsche’s text is “Sie hatte singen sollen, diese ‘neue Seele’ - und nicht reden! Wie schade, dafi ich, was ich damais zu sagen hatte, es nicht als Dichter zu sagen wagte: ich hatte es vielleicht gekonnti”, FNl, Die Geburt der Tragodie, p. 12.
W. H. Auden, The Composer (1938), The Collected Poetry ofW. H. Auden, (New York, Random House, 1945), p. 5. Auden wrote the poem around the time that Britten was composing settings of his work, including Funeral Blues, Fish in the Unruffled Lakes and Tell me the truth about love. Probably the most famous Auden setting by Britten is the Hymn to Saint Cecilia (Op. 27, 1942).
^ In his book about the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau mentions four of Nietzsche’s compositions by name, including one, Hymnus an die Fretmdschaft, to which Cosima Wagner apparently attributed the break between Nietzsche and her husband. Wagner wrote to Nietzsche in December 1894: “Ich meinte, Sie müCten heiraten oder eine Oper komponieren; eines wiirde Ihnen so gut wie das andere helfen. Das Heiraten halte ich aber fiir besser”. See Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Wagner und Nietzsche. Der Mystagoge und sein Abtriinniger, (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974), p. 167-169.
modem age which, like the Bibhcal tower, would crumble around him, Bonwit commended Mann’s conunand o f linguistic devices as an essential ingredient in enhancing the effect o f his protagonist’s downfall. The devil in the novel was, she beheved, a wholly appropriate figure in this confusion: “who inspires Babylonian constructions and who demands human souls as a price”.