by Thomas Mann
Beethoven, then, so we heard, was reputed not to be able to write a fugue; and now the question was how far this malicious criticism was true. Obviously he had taken pains to refute it. Several times he had written fugues into his later piano music, and indeed in three voices: in the “Hammerklavier” Sonata as well as the one in A major. Once he had added: “with some liberties” (“mit einigen Freiheiten”), in token that the rules he had offended against were well known to him. Why he ignored them, whether arbitrarily or because he had not managed it, remained a vexed question. And then had come the great fugue overture, Op .124, and the majestic fugues in the Gloria and the Credo in evidence at last that in the struggle with this angel the great wrestler had conquered, even though thereafter he halted on his thigh.
Kretschmar told us a frightful story, impressing upon our minds an unforgettable and awful picture of the sacred trials of this struggle and the person of the afflicted artist. It was in high summer of the year 1819, at the time when Beethoven was working on the Missa solemnis in the Haffner house at Modling, in despair because each movement turned out much longer than he had anticipated, so that the date of completion, March of the following year, in which the installation of the Archduke Rudolf as Bishop of Olmutz was to take place, could not possibly be kept to. It was then that two friends and professional colleagues visited him one afternoon and found an alarming state of things. That same morning the master’s two maids had made off, for the night before, at about one o’clock, there had been a furious quarrel, rousing the whole house from slumber. The master had wrought late into the night, on the Credo, the Credo with the fugue, without a thought of the meal that stood waiting on the hearth; while the maids, yielding to nature, had at last fallen asleep. When the master, between twelve and one, demanded something to eat, he found the maids asleep, the food burnt and dried up. He had burst into the most violent rage, sparing the nightly rest of the house the less because he himself could not hear the noise he made. “Could you not watch one hour with me?” he kept thundering. But it had been five or six hours, and the outraged maidservants had fled at dawn, leaving such an ill-tempered master to himself, so that he had had no midday meal either—nothing at all since the middle—day before. Instead he worked in his room on the Credo, the Credo with the fugue—the young ones heard him through the closed door. The deaf man sang, he yelled and stamped above the Credo—it was so moving and terrifying that the blood froze in their veins as they listened. But as in their great concern they were about to retreat, the door was jerked open and Beethoven stood therein what guise? The very most frightful! With clothing dishevelled, his features so distorted as to strike terror to the beholders; the eyes dazed, absent, listening, all at once; he had stared at them, they got the impression that he had come out of a life-and-death struggle with all the opposing hosts of counterpoint. He had stammered something unintelligible, and then burst out complaining and scolding at the fine kind of housekeeping he had, and how everybody had run away and left him to starve. They had tried to pacify him, one of them helped him to put his clothing to rights, the other ran to the inn to get him some solid food… Only three years later was the Mass finished.
Thus Kretschmar, on “Beethoven and the Fugue”; and certainly it gave us matter for talk on the way home-ground too for being silent together and for vague and silent reflection upon the new, the far, and the great, which sometimes glibly running on, sometimes appallingly impeded, had penetrated into our souls. I say into ours, but it is of course only Adrian’s that I have in mind. What I heard, what I took in, is quite irrelevant.
What principally impressed him, as I heard while we were walking home, and also next day in the school courtyard, was Kretschmar’s distinction between cult epochs and cultural epochs, and his remark that the secularization of art, its separation from divine service, bore only a superficial and episodic character. The pupil of the upper school appeared to be struck by the thought, which the lecturer had not expressed at all but had kindled in him, that the separation of art from the liturgical whole, its liberation and elevation into the individual and culturally self-purposive, had laden it with an irrelevant solemnity, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering, which was imaged in Beethoven’s frightful apparition in the doorway, and which did not need to be its abiding destiny, its permanent intellectual constitution. Hearken to the youth! Still almost without any real or practical experience in the field of art, he speculated in the void and in precocious language on the probably imminent retreat from its present role to a more modest, happier one in the service of a higher union, which did not need to be, as it once was, the Church. What it would be he could not say. But that the cultural idea was a historically transitory phenomenon, that it could lose itself again in another one, that the future did not inevitably belong to it, this thought he had certainly singled out from Kretschmar’s lecture.
“But the alternative,” I threw in, “to culture is barbarism.”
“Permit me,” said he. “After all, barbarism is the opposite of culture only within the order of thought which it gives us. Outside of it the opposite may be something quite different or no opposite at all.”
I imitated Luca Cimabue, saying: “Santa Maria!” and crossing myself. He gave his short laugh. Another time he asserted: “For a cultural epoch, there seems to me to be a spot too much talk about culture in ours, don’t you think? I’d like to know whether epochs that possessed culture knew the word at all, or used it. Naivete, unconsciousness, taken-for-grantedness, seems to me to be the first criterion of the constitution to which we give this name. What we are losing is just this naivete, and this lack, if one may so speak of it, protects us from many a colourful barbarism which altogether perfectly agreed with culture, even with very high culture. I mean: our stage is that of civilization—a very praiseworthy state no doubt, but also neither was there any doubt that we should have to become very much more barbaric to be capable of culture again. Technique and comfortin that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization—in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture?”
In such talk, with which he teased and irritated me, there was much that was merely imitative. But he had a way of adapting what he picked up and giving it a personal character which took from his adaptations anything that might sound ridiculous, if not everything boyish and derivative. He commented a good deal too—or we commented in lively exchange—on a lecture of Kretschmar’s called “Music and the Eye”—likewise an offering which deserved a larger audience. As the title indicates, our lecturer spoke of his art in so far as—or rather, also as—it appeals to the sense of sight, which, so he developed his theme, it does in that one puts it down, through the notation, the tonal writing which—since the days of the old neumes, those arrangements of strokes and points, which had more or less indicated the flow of sound—had been practised with growing care and pains. His demonstration became very diverting, and likewise flattering, since it assumed in us a certain apprentice and brush-washer intimacy with music. Many a turn of phrase in musician’s jargon came not from the acoustic but the visual, the note-picture: for instance, one speaks of occhiali because the broken drum-basses, half-notes that are coupled by a stroke through their necks, look like a pair of spectacles; or as one calls “cobbler’s patches” (rosalia) certain cheap sequences one after another in stages at like intervals (he wrote examples for us on the blackboard). He spoke of the mere appearance of musical notation, and assured us that a knowledgeable person could get from one look at the notation a decisive impression of the spirit and value of a composition. Thus it had once happened to him that a colleague, visiting his room where an uninspired work submitted to him by a dilettante was spread out on the desk, had shouted: “Well, for heaven’s sake, what sort of tripe is that you’ve got there?” On the other hand he sketched for us the enchanting pleasure which even the visual picture of a score
by Mozart afforded to the practised eye; the clarity of the texture, the beautiful disposition of the instrumental groups, the ingenious and varied writing of the melodic line. A deaf man, he cried, quite ignorant of sound, could not but delight in these gracious visions. “To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit,” he quoted from a Shakespeare sonnet, and asserted that in all time composers had secretly nested in their writings things that were meant more for the reading eye than for the ear. When, for instance, the Dutch masters of polyphony in their endless devices for the crossing of parts had so arranged them contrapuntally that one part had been like another when read backwards; that could not be perceived by the way they actually sounded, and he would wager that very few people would have detected the trick by ear, for it was intended rather for the eye of the guild. Thus Orlandus Lassus in the Marriage at Cana used six voices to represent the six water-jugs, which could be better perceived by seeing the music than by hearing it; and in the St. John Passion by Joachim von Burck “one of the servants,” who gave Jesus a slap in the face, has only one note, but on the “ziveen” (two) in the next phrase, “with him two others,” there are two.
He produced several such Pythagorean jests, intended more for the eye than the ear, which music had now and again been pleased to make and came out roundly with the statement that in the last analysis he ascribed to the art a certain inborn lack of the sensuous, yes an anti-sensuality, a sacret tendency to asceticism. Music was actually the most intellectual of all the arts, as was evident from the fact that in it, as in no other, form and content are interwoven and absolutely one and the same. We say of course that music “addresses itself to the ear”; but it does so only in a qualified way, only in so far, namely, as the hearing, like the other senses, is the deputy, the instrument, and the receiver of the mind. Perhaps, said Kretschmar, it was music’s deepest wish not to be heard at all, nor even seen, nor yet felt; but only—if that were possible—in some Beyond, the other side of sense and sentiment, to be perceived and contemplated as pure mind, pure spirit. But bound as she was to the world of sense, music must ever strive after the strongest, yes, the most seductive sensuous realization: she is a Kundry, who wills not what she does and flings soft arms of lust round the neck of the fool. Her most powerful realization for the senses she finds in orchestral music, where through the ear she seems to affect all the senses with her opiate wand and to mingle the pleasures of the realm of sound with those of colour and scent. Here, rightly, she was the penitent in the garb of the seductress. But there was an instrument—that is to say, a musical means of realization—through which music, while becoming audible to the sense of hearing, did so in a half-unsensuous, an almost abstract way, audible, that is, in a way peculiarly suited to its intellectual nature. He meant the piano, an instrument that is not an instrument at all in the sense of the others, since all specialization is foreign to it. It can, indeed, like them, be used in a solo performance and as a medium of virtuosity; but that is the exceptional case and speaking very precisely a misuse. The piano, properly speaking, is the direct and sovereign representative of music itself in its intellectuality, and for that reason one must learn it. But piano lessons should not be—or not essentially and not first and last—lessons in a special ability, but lessons in m-m-“Music!” cried a voice from the tiny audience, for the speaker could simply not get the word out, often as he had used it before, but kept on mumbling the m.
“Yes, of course,” said he, released and relieved. Took a swallow of water and went his way.
But perhaps I may be pardoned for letting him appear once more. For I am concerned with a fourth lecture which he gave us, and I would have left out one of the others if necessary, rather than this, since no other—not to speak of myself—made such a deep impression on Adrian.
I cannot recollect its exact title. It was “The Elemental in Music” or “Music and the Elemental” or “The Elements of Music” or something like that. In any case the elemental, the primitive, the primeval beginning, played the chief role in it, as well as the idea that among all the arts it was precisely music that—whatever the richly complicated and finely developed and marvellous structure she had developed into in the course of the centuries—had never got rid of a religious attitude towards her own beginnings; a pious proneness to call them up in solemn invocation—in short, to celebrate her elements. She thus celebrates, he said, her cosmic aptitude for allegory; for those elements were, as it were, the first and simplest materials of the world, a parallelism of which a philosophizing artist of a day not long gone by—it was Wagner again of whom he spoke—had shrewdly, perhaps with somewhat too mechanical, too ingenious cleverness, made use, in that in his cosmogonic myth of the Ring he made the basic elements of music one with those of the world. To him the beginning of all things had its music: the music of the beginning was that, and also the beginning of music, the E-flat major triad of the flowing depths of the Rhine, the seven primitive chords, out of which, as though out of blocks of Cyclopean masonry, primeval stone, the “Gotterburg” arose. Surpassingly brilliant, in the grand style, he presented the mythology of music at the same time with that of the world; in that he bound the music to the things and made them express themselves in music, he created an apparatus of sensuous simultaneity—most magnificent and heavy with meaning, if a bit too clever after all, in comparison with certain revelations of the elemental in the art of the pure musicians, Beethoven and Bach; for example, in the prelude to the cello suite of the latter—also an E-flat major piece, built up in primitive triads. And he spoke of Anton Bruckner, who loved to refresh himself at the organ or piano by the simple succession of triads. “Is there anything more heartfelt, more glorious,” he would cry, “than such a progression of mere triads? Is it not like a purifying bath for the mind?” This saying too, Kretschmar thought, was a piece of evidence worth thinking about, for the tendency of music to plunge back into the elemental and admire herself in her primitive beginnings.
Yes, the lecturer cried, it lay in the very nature of this singular art that it was at any moment capable of beginning at the beginning, of discovering itself afresh out of nothing, bare of all knowledge of its past cultural history, and of creating anew. It would then run through the same primitive stages as in its historical beginnings and could on one short course, apart from the main massif of its development, alone and unheeded by the world, reach most extraordinary and singular heights. And now he told us a story which in the most fantastic and suggestive way fitted into the frame of his present theme.
At about the middle of the eighteenth century there had flourished in his native home in Pennsylvania a German community of pious folk belonging to the Baptist sect. Their leading and spiritually most respected members lived celibate lives and had therefore been honoured with the name of Solitary Brethren and Sisters; but the majority of them reconciled with the married state an exemplarily pure and godly manner of life, strictly regulated, hard-working and dietetically sound, full of sacrifice and self-discipline. Their settlements had been two: one called Ephrata, in Lancaster County, the other in Franklin County, called Snowhill; and they had all looked up reverently to their head shepherd and spiritual father, the founder of the sect, a man named Beissel, in whose character fervent devotion to God mingled with the qualities of leadership, and fanatic religiosity with a lively and blunt-spoken energy.
Johann Conrad Beissel had been born of very poor parents at Eberbach in the Palatinate and early orphaned. He had learned the baker’s trade and as a roving journeyman had made connections with Pietists and devotees of the Baptist confession, which had awakened in him slumbering inclinations towards an explicit service of the truth and a freely arising conviction of God. All this had brought him dangerously near to a sphere regarded in his country as heretical, and the thirty-year-old man decided to flee from the intolerance of the Old World and emigrate to America. There, in various places, in Germantown and Conestoga, he worked for a while as a weaver. Then a fresh impulse of religious devotion ca
me over him and he had followed his inward voice, leading as a hermit in the wilderness an entirely solitary and meagre life, fixed only upon God. But as it will happen that flight from mankind sometimes only involves the more with humanity the man who flees, so Beissel had soon seen himself surrounded by a troop of admiring followers and imitators of his way of life, and instead of being free of the world, he had unexpectedly become, in the turning of a hand, the head of a community, which quickly developed into an independent sect, the Seventh-Day Anabaptists. He commanded them the more absolutely in that, so far as he knew, he had never sought the leadership, but was rather called to it against his intention and desire.
Beissel had never enjoyed any education worth mentioning; but in his awakened state he had mastered by himself the skills of reading and writing, and as his mind surged like the sea, tumultuous with mystical feelings and ideas, the result was that he filled his office chiefly as writer and poet and fed the souls of his flock: a stream of didactic prose and religious songs poured from his pen to the edification of the brethren in their silent hours and to the enrichment of their services. His style was high-flown and cryptic, laden with metaphor, obscure Scriptural allusions, and a sort of erotic symbolism. A tract on the Sabbath, Mystyrion Anomalias, and a collection of ninety-nine Mystical and Very Secret Sayings were the beginning. A series of hymns followed on, which were to be sung to well-known European choral melodies, and appeared in print under such titles as Songs for God’s Love and Praise, Jacob’s Place of Struggle and Elevation, Zionist Hill of Incense. It was these little collections that a few years later, enlarged and improved, became the official song-book of the Seventh-Day Baptists of Ephrata, with the sweetly mournful title “Song of the Lonely and Forsaken Turtle Dove, the Christian Church.” Printed and reprinted, further enriched by the emulative members of the sect, single and married, men and even more women, the standard work changed its title and also appeared once as Miracle Play in Paradise. It finally contained not less than seven hundred and seventy hymns, among them some with an enormous number of stanzas.