SECCIÓN CTP401 : Valores de los números CT en

Music began to shape Mann’s personal and artistic development long before he had any notion at all o f politics. It was firmly embedded in his early family life. Like Tonio Kroger’s mother, Mann’s mother Julia was an exotic foil to the sohd, burgher prosperity o f his father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann. Mann’s memories o f her voice were later echoed in the attractive voice and latent musicahty he attributed to Elsbeth Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus} Julia Mann would sometimes sing and play to her children in the evenings, and also hosted musical soirées at the family house. Music was a constant thread running through Mann’s life, in his relationships with his fiiends and family: his intense early relationship with the violinist Paul Ehrenberg, his violinist son Michael Mann, later turned academic, and his many illustrious musical neighbours in California, including Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bruno Walter. Mann himself began to learn the violm as a child, and continued playing into his twenties.^

Mann never considered himself more than an amateur, however, and his later musical life was confined to listening to concerts and recordings, which he had in any case always approached with a singular passion. His letters and diaries are full o f references to music he has heard. He notes in Die Entstehung, for example, that as he neared the end o f Doktor Faustus, he listened to Schubert’s B Minor trio.^ He valued the approval o f musicians, recording with pride in Die Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen how Mahler loved his work:

Was ich machte, meine Kunstarbeiten, urteilt darüber wie ihr wollt und müBt, aber gute Partituren waren sie immer, eine wie die andere; auch haben Musiker sie geliebt, Gustav Mahler zum Beispiel hat sie geliebt, und oft habe ich mir Musiker zu offentlichen Richtem über sie gewünscht.'^

Mann often repeated the observation by the composer, Emst Toch, that he had “musikalische Initiiertheit”.^ From the time o f the Betrachtungen onwards, Mann always saw music as having a particular connection with the German soul:

^ “Das Schonste an ihr aber war ihr Stimme, der Lage nach ein warmer Mezzosopran.... Dieser Stimmreiz kam aus einer inneren Musikalitat, die im übrigen latent blieb, da Elsbeth sich nicht um Musik kummerte, sich sozusagen nicht zu ihr bekannte”, GW VI, p. 33.

^ D Prater, op. cit., p. 2 & 8. ^ GW XI, p. 298.

G W X n,p.319.

^ Emst Toch made this remark in an essay, ‘Thomas Mann und die Musik’, published in Die neue Rundschau. Sonderausgabe zu Thomas Manns 70. Geburtstag, (Stockholm, 6 June 1945), p 188. Mann repeats the compliment in, for example, his letter to Theodor Adorno of 30 December 1945, Briefe II, p. 471, and in the Entstehung, GW XI, p. 170.

Seit Luthers religios-musikalischem Wirken aber ist die Musik, die deutsche, von Bach bis auf Reger, - ist das punctum contra punctum, die grofie fuga, nicht nur tonender Ausdruck protestantischer Ethik, sondem, mit ihrem gewalhg-vieltonigen Ineinander von Eigenwille und Ordnung, Abbild und kimstlerisch-spirituelle Spiegelung des deutschen Lebens selbst gewesen.^

Later on, Mann came to stress the dangerous elements o f this musicahty, and the need to take control o f them, most emphatically in the essay Deutschland und die Deutschen (1945), which he wrote whilst working on Doktor Faustus, and in which he asserted that music was a “damonisches G ebiet"/

Music was not just a relaxing hobby. It shaped Mann’s intellectual development, and pervaded his writing, which, as noted above, he even hked to refer to as pieces o f music - “gute Partituren”. This phrase helps to demonstrate the depth at which music affected Mann’s writing, but is probably not to be taken too hterally, as is sometimes attempted with Mann’s assertion in Die Entstehung that Doktor Faustus does not simply describe, but actually is “constructivist music”.* Mann certainly never wrote a hterary ‘score’, more music than conventional language, in the same sense as, for example, his contemporary James Joyce did with Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939). Joyce and other modernist writers, such as Virginia W oolf and Marcel Proust, were more concerned with music as a means o f representing inward experience, a task for which language had begun to seem wholly inadequate. Alex Aronson, in his study o f music and the novel, notes that modernist writers who were using music as a means o f conveying interior monologues were not usually hkely to have at their disposal the technical language necessary to describe a musical work.^ Long before he came to write Doktor Faustus, however, Mann commonly went into long

descriptions o f specific works, often by Wagner. Attempting to interpret Mann’s novels as pieces o f music is surely to focus too much on their structure at the expense o f the

intellectual, moral and emotional weight that structure bears. Thus, for example, the observation that Mann creates ‘contrapuntal characters’ is surely more important because o f its reference to the ambiguity that Mann’s complementary characterisations portray, than for the musical analogy itself.’® Focusing purely on musical structure loses sight o f the obvious fact that Mann wrote literature and not music, surely never meaning anyone to suppose

^ GW x n , p. 320.

^GWXl,p. 1131.

* “mein Buch selbst das werde sein müssen, woven es handelte, namlich konstmktive Musik”, GW XI, p. 187.

^ Alex Aronson, Music and the Novel. A Stucfy in Twentieth Century Fiction, (Totowa N. J., Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), p. 21-22.

Helmut Koopmann, ‘Doktor Faustus und sein Biograph. Zu einer Exilerfahmng sui generis’, in Rudolf Wolff (ed.), Thomas Manns Dr. Faustus und die Wirkungll, (Bonn, Bouvier, 1983), p. 8.

otherwise. Nor does this reflect the way Mann saw the relationship o f music to his work - important, yet always subordinate to the writing itself;

Die Musik spielt in meine ganze Produktion als ein hoher Anreiz und selbst als ein Objekt der kiinstlerischen Nachahmung und Übertragung in meine kiinstlerische Sphare standig hinein - ohne daB gerade bestimmte Ideen bei Musik konzipiert worden waren.