by Thomas Mann
For us? No, I shall do better to speak only of myself, my own enchantment, my own pleasure—I scarcely dare to include my friend when I speak of those feelings. Perhaps he wanted to play the son of the house, to whom the warerooms were commonplace everyday; perhaps the coolness native to him in general might thus express itself; for he maintained an almost shoulder-shrugging indifference to all these splendours, replying to my admiring exclamations with his short laugh and a “Yes, very nice” or “Funny stuff” or “What all don’t people think of!” or “More fun to sell this than groceries.” Sometimes—I repeat that it was at my wish, not his—we would descend from his attic, which gave a pleasant view over the roofs of the town, the castle pond, the old water-tower, and invade the show-rooms. They were not forbidden to us; but young Cimabue came too, partly, I suspect, to keep guard, but also to play cicerone in his pleasant way. From him we learned the history of the trumpet: how once it had to be put together out of several metal tubes with a ball connection, before we learned the art of bending brass tubes without splitting them, by first filling them with pitch and resin, then with lead, which was melted again in the fire. And then he could explain the assertion of the cognoscenti that it made no difference what material, whether wood or metal, an instrument was made of, it sounded according to its family shape and proportions. A flute might be made of wood or ivory, a trumpet of brass or silver, it made no difference. But his master, he said, Adrian’s zio, disputed that. He knew the importance of the material, the sort of wood and varnish used, and engaged to be able to tell by listening to a flute what it was made of. He, Luca, would do the same. Then with his small, shapely Italian hands he would show us the mechanism of the flute, which in the last one hundred and fifty years, since the famous virtuoso Quantz, saw such great changes and developments: the mechanism of Boehm’s cylindrical flute, more powerful than the old conical, which sounds sweeter. He showed us the system of fingering on the clarinet and the seven-holed bassoon with its twelve closed and four open keys, whose sound blends so readily with that of the horns; instructed us about the compass of the instruments, the way to play them and more such matters.
There can now be no doubt that Adrian, whether he was aware of it or not, followed these demonstrations with at least as much attention as I—and with more profit than it was given me to draw from them. But he betrayed nothing, not a gesture indicated that all this concerned or ever would concern him. He let me ask Luca the questions, yes, he moved away, looked at something else than the thing under discussion, and left me alone with the assistant. I will not say that he was shamming, and I do not forget that at that time music had hardly any reality to us other than that of the purely material objects in Nikolaus Leverkühn’s storerooms. We were indeed brought into cursory contact with chamber music, for every week or so there was a performance in Adrian’s uncle’s house, but only occasionally in my presence and by no means always in his. The players were our Cathedral organist, Herr Wendell Kretschmar, a stutterer, who was later to become Adrian’s teacher, and the singing-master from the Boniface gymnasium; Adrian’s uncle played with them, quartets by Haydn and Mozart, he himself playing first violin, Luca Cimabue second, Herr Kretschmar cello, and the singing-master the viola. These were masculine evenings, with the beer-glass on the floor beside the chair, a cigar in the mouth, and frequent bursts of talk, strange, dry interruptions in the middle of the language of music; tapping of the bow and counting back of the bars when the players got out, which was almost always the fault of the singing-master. A real concert, a symphony orchestra, we had never heard, and whoever likes may find therein an explanation of Adrian’s obvious indifference to the world of instruments. At any rate he seemed to think it must be sufficient, and so considered it himself. What I mean is he hid himself behind it, hid himself from music: very long, with instinctive persistence, he hid himself from his destiny.
Anyhow, nobody for a long time thought of connecting young Adrian in any way with music. The idea that he was destined to be a scholar was fixed in their minds and continually strengthened by his brilliant performance in school, his rank in his form, which began slightly to waver only in the upper forms, say from the fifth on, when he was fifteen. This was on account of the migraine, which from then on hindered him in the little preparation he had to do. Even so he easily mastered the demands made on him—though the word “mastered” is not well chosen, for it cost him nothing to satisfy them. And if his excellence as a pupil did not earn for him the affection of his masters, for it did not, as I often observed—one saw instead a certain irritation, a desire to trap him—it was not so much that they found him conceited, though they did. They did not, however, think him proud of his achievements; the trouble was, he was not proud enough, just therein lay his arrogance. He obviously looked down on all this that was so easy for him: that is, the subject-matter of the lessons, the various branches of study, the purveying of which made up the dignity and the livelihood of the masters. It was only too natural that they should not enjoy seeing these things so competently and carelessly dismissed.
For my own part I had much more cordial relations with them—no wonder, since I was soon to join their number and had even seriously announced my intention. I too might call myself a good pupil; but I was and might call myself so only because my reverent love for my chosen field, especially the ancient tongues and the classic poets and writers, summoned and stimulated what powers I had, while he on every occasion made it clear—to me he made no secret of it and I fear it was not one to the masters either—how indifferent and so to speak unimportant to him the whole of his education was. This often distressed me, not on account of his career, which thanks to his facility was not endangered, but because I asked myself what was not indifferent and unimportant to him. I did not see the “main thing,” and really it was not there to see. In those years school life is life itself, it stands for all that life is, school interests bound the horizon that every life needs in order to develop values, through which, however relative they are, the character and the capacities are sustained. They can, however, do that, humanly speaking, only if the relativeness remains unrecognized. Belief in absolute values, illusory as it always is, seems to me a condition of life. But my friend’s gifts measured themselves against values the relative character of which seemed to lie open to him, without any visible possibility of any other relation which would have detracted from them as values. Bad pupils there are in plenty. But Adrian presented the singular phenomenon of a bad pupil as the head of the form. I say that it distressed me, but how impressive, how fascinating, I found it too! How it strengthened my devotion to him, mingling with it—can one understand why?—something like pain, like hopelessness!
I will make one exception to this uniform ironic contempt which he presented to what the school offered him and the claims it made upon him. That was his apparent interest in a discipline in which I myself did not shine—mathematics. My own weakness in this field, which was only tolerably made good by joyful application in philology, made me realize that excellence in performance is naturally conditioned by sympathy with the subject and thus it was a real boon to me to see this condition—at least here—fulfilled by my friend too. Mathesis, as applied logic, which yet confines itself to pure and lofty abstractions, holds a peculiar middle position between the humanistic and the practical sciences, and from the explanations which Adrian gave me of the pleasure he took in it, it appeared that he found this middle position at once higher, dominating, universal, or, as he expressed it, “the true.” It was a genuine pleasure to hear him describe anything as “the true,” it was an anchor, a hold, not quite in vain did one inquire about “the main thing.”
“You are a lout,” he said, “not to like it. To look at the relations between things must be the best thing, after all. Order is everything. Romans xiii: ‘For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.’” He reddened, and I looked at him large-eyed. It turned out that he was religious.
With him everything had first to “turn out,” one had to take him by surprise, catch him in the act, get behind the words; then he would go red, and one would have liked to kick oneself for not having seen it before. He went further than necessary in his algebra, played with the logarithmic tables for sheer amusement, sat over equations of the second class before he had been asked to identify unknown quantities raised to a higher power. I caught him at all that by mere chance, and even then he spoke mockingly of them before he made the above admissions. Another discovery, not to say unmasking, had preceded this: I have already mentioned his self-taught and secret exploration of the keyboard, the chord, the compass of tonality, the cycle of fifths, and how he, without knowledge of notes or fingering, used this harmonic basis to practise all sorts of modulations and to build up melodic pictures rhythmically undefined. When I discovered all this, he was in his fifteenth year. I had sought him in vain one afternoon in his room, and found him before a little harmonium which stood rather unregarded in the corridor of the family rooms. For a moment I had listened, standing at the door, but not quite liking this I went forward and asked him what he was doing. He let the bellows rest, took his hands from the manuals, blushed and laughed. “Idleness,” he said, “is the mother of all vice. I was bored. When I am bored I sometimes poke about down here. The old treadle-box stands here pretty forlorn; but for all its simpleness it has the meat of the matter in it. Look, it is curious—that is, of course, there is nothing curious about it, but when you make it out the first time for yourself it is curious how it all hangs together and leads round in a circle.”
And he played a chord: all black keys, F sharp, A sharp, C sharp, added an E, and so unmasked the chord, which had looked like F-sharp major, as belonging to B major, as its dominant. “Such a chord,” he said, “has of itself no tonality. Everything is relation, and the relation forms the circle.” The A, which, forcing the resolution into G sharp, leads over from B major to E major, led him on, and so via the keys of A, D, and G he came to C major and to the flat keys, as he demonstrated to me that on each one of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale one could build a fresh major or minor scale.
“But all that is an old story,” he said. “That struck me a long time ago. Now look how you can improve on it!” And he began to show me modulations between more distant keys, by using the so-called relation of the third, the Neapolitan sixth.
Not that he would have known how to name these things; but he repeated: “Relationship is everything. And if you want to give it a more precise name, it is ambiguity.” To illustrate the meaning of the word, he played me chord-progressions belonging to no definite key; demonstrated for me how such a progression fluctuates between C major and G major, if one leaves out the F, that in G major turns into F sharp; how it keeps the ear uncertain as to whether that progression is to be understood as belonging to C major or F major if one avoids the B, which in F major is flattened to B flat.
“You know what I find?” he asked. “That music turns the equivocal into a system. Take this or that note. You can understand it so or respectively so. You can think of it as sharpened or flattened, and you can, if you are clever, take advantage of the double sense as much as you like.” In short, in principle he showed himself aware of enharmonic changes and not unaware of certain tricks by which one can by-pass keys and use the enharmonic change for modulations.
Why was I more than surprised, namely moved and a little startled? His cheeks were hot, as they never were in school, not even over his algebra. I did indeed ask him to improvise for me a little, but felt something like relief when he put me off with a “Nonsense, nonsense!” What sort of relief was that? It might have taught me how proud I was of his general indifference, and how clearly I felt that in his “It is curious,” indifference became a mask. I divined a budding passiona passion of Adrian’s! Should I have been glad? Instead, I felt at once ashamed and anxious.
I knew now that he, when he thought himself alone, worked on his music; indeed, in the exposed position of the old instrument that could not long remain a secret. One evening his foster-father said to him:
“Well, nephew, from what I heard today you were not practising for the first time.”
“What do you mean, Uncle Niko?”
“Don’t be so innocent! You were making music.”
“What an expression!”
“It has had to serve for worse. How you got from F major to A major, that was pretty clever. Does it amuse you?”
“Oh, Uncle!”
“Well, of course. I’ll tell you something: We’ll put the old box up in your room, nobody sees it down here anyhow. Then you’ll have it at hand, to use when you feel like it.”
“You’re frightfully good, Uncle, but surely it is not worth the trouble.”
“It’s so little trouble that even so the pleasure might be greater. And anyhow, nephew, you ought to have piano lessons.”
“Do you think so, Uncle Niko? I don’t know, it sounds like a girls’ high school.”
“Might be higher and still not quite girls’! If you go to Kretschmar, it will be something like. He won’t skin us alive, because of our old friendship, and you will get a foundation for your castles in the air. I’ll speak to him.”
Adrian repeated this conversation to me literally, in the school court. From now on he had lessons twice a week from Wendell Kretschmar.
CHAPTER VIII
Wendell Kretschmar, at that time still young, at most in the second half of his twenties, was born in the state of Pennsylvania of German-American parentage. He had got his musical education in his country of origin; but he was early drawn back to the old world whence his grandparents had once migrated, and where his own roots lay and those of his art. In the course of his wanderings, the stages and sojourns of which seldom lasted more than a year or so, he had become our organist in Kaisersaschern. It was only an episode, preceded by others (he had worked as conductor in small state theatres in the Reich and Switzerland) and followed certainly by others still. He had even appeared as composer and produced an opera, The Statue, which was well received and played on many stages.
Unpretentious in appearance, a short, thickset, bullet-headed man with a little clipped moustache and brown eyes prone to laughter, with now a musing and now a pouncing look, he might have meant a real boon to the cultural life of Kaisersaschern if there had been any such life to begin with. His organ-playing was expert and excellent, but you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of those in the community able to appreciate it. Even so, a considerable number of people were attracted by his free afternoon concerts, in which he regaled us with organ music by Michael Pretorius, Froberger, Buxtehude, and of course Sebastian Bach, also all sorts of curious genre compositions from the time between Handel’s and Haydn’s highest periods. Adrian and I attended the concerts regularly. A complete failure, on the other hand, at least to all appearance, were the lectures which he held indefatigably throughout a whole season in the hall of the Society of Activities for the Common Weal, accompanied by illustrations on the piano and demonstrations on a blackboard. They were a failure in the first place because our population had on principle no use for lectures; and secondly because his themes were not popular but rather capricious and out of the ordinary; and in the third place because his stutter made listening to them a nerve-racking occupation, sometimes bringing your heart into your mouth, sometimes tempting you to laughter, and altogether calculated to distract your attention from the intellectual treat in anxious expectation of the next convulsion.