Summary
Novelist whose Doktor Faustus supplies the catastrophic middle of the forty-third essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays: his composer Adrian Leverkühn finalizes the doom implicit in Beethoven’s and Wagner’s representations of sound and silence, declaring he will “take back” the Ninth Symphony (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.475-478).
Details
- Leverkühn is a highly allegorized figure for post-Reformation Germany and its culture of music, theology and science or magic, symbolizing the country’s course into National Socialism and self-destruction; his devil’s pact gains him a totally organized temporality realized as music evolving into Schönberg’s dodecaphonic method, the more successful the artist the more humanly disastrous his life (PDF p.475).
- After his nephew Echo dies of meningitis, Leverkühn writes The Lamentations of Doctor Faustus, “a mammoth variation-piece of lamentation — as such negatively related to the finale of the Ninth Symphony with its variations of exultation”, built on a chromatic twelve-note row set to “For I die as a good and as a bad Christian”, a formal treatment knowing nothing unthematic and no free note (quoted PDF p.475-476).
- The narrator Serenus Zeitblom, a humanist voice of endless verbal loquacity, describes the decline into madness and silence; Leverkühn’s final speech to summoned friends — a Shahrazad story in reverse — ends with a strongly dissonant chord, a collapse at the piano, and terminal silence in 1940, as Germany stood at the height of her dissolute triumphs under the pact she had signed with her blood (quoted PDF p.476-477).
- Mann’s fable compresses the decline of sound into the decline of Germany itself; Schönberg, translated into words by Adorno, is his reluctant model for Adrian (PDF p.477).
- Against Adorno’s uncompromising finality, Mann gives the ending a more positive dialectical twist through Zeitblom — the classical bourgeois humanist speaking, not Mann himself: the mourning tone “abides as a light in the night” (quoted PDF p.478).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Ludwig van Beethoven, Arnold Schönberg, Theodor Adorno, Richard Wagner