by Thomas Mann
As for me, I felt sure that the peculiar tension between Kretschmar and Adrian’s mother had reference to Adrian; I divined this because in the silent struggle that went on I stood in my own feeling between the two parties, inclining now to the one and now to the other. What Kretschmar wanted, what he talked about on those walks with Adrian, was clear to me, and privately my own wishes supported him. I thought he was right when, also in talk with me, he pleaded for the musical calling of his pupil, that he should become a composer, with determination, even with urgency. “He has,” he said, “the composer’s eye; he bends on music the look of the initiate, not of the vaguely enjoying outsider. His way of discovering thematic connections that the other kind of man does not see; of perceiving the articulation of a short extract in the form of question and answer; altogether of seeing from the inside how it is made, confirms me in my judgment. That he shows no productive impulse, does not yet write or naively embark upon youthful productions, is only to his credit; it is a question of his pride, which prevents him from producing epigonal music.”
I could only agree with all that. But I could thoroughly understand as well the protective concern of the mother and often felt my solidarity with her, to the point of hostility to the other side. Never shall I forget a scene in the living-room at Buchel when we chanced to sit there together, the four of us: mother and son, Kretschmar and I. Elsbeth was in talk with the musician, who was puffing and blowing with his impediment; it was a mere chat, of which Adrian was certainly not the subject. She drew her son’s head to her as he sat beside her, in the strangest way, putting her arm about him, not round his shoulders but round his head, her hand on his brow, and thus, with the gaze of her black eyes directed upon Kretschmar and her sweet voice speaking to him, she leaned Adrian’s head upon her breast.
But to return: it was not alone these meetings that sustained the relation between master and pupil. There was also frequent correspondence, an exchange, I believe every two weeks, between Halle and Kaisersaschern, about which Adrian from time to time informed me and of which I even got to see some part. It seemed that Kretschmar was considering taking a piano and organ class in the Hase private conservatoire in Leipzig, which next to the famous State Music School in that city was rejoicing in a growing reputation, constantly increased during the next ten years, up to the death of the capital musician Clemens Hase (it no longer plays any role, even if it still exists). I learned this fact in Michaelmas 1904. At the beginning of the next year Wendell accordingly left Kaisersaschern to take over his new position, and from then on the correspondence went forward between Halle and Leipzig, to and fro: Kretschmar’s sheets covered on one side with large, scratching, spluttering letters; Adrian’s replies on rough yellow paper, in his regular, slightly old-fashioned, rather florid script, written, as one could see, with a round-hand pen. I saw a draft of one of them, very compactly written, like figures, full of fine additions and corrections—I had early become familiar with his way of writing and read it quite easily—and he also showed me Kretschmar’s reply to it. He did this, obviously, in order that I need not be too much surprised by the step he purposed to take when he should have actually settled on it. For that he had not as yet, was hesitating very much, doubting and examining himself, as the letter makes clear; he obviously wanted to be advised by me—God knows whether in a sense to encourage or to warn.
There could not be and would not have been on my side any possibility of surprise, even if I had been faced with the fact without preparation. I knew what was on the way: whether it would actually come to pass was another question; but so much was clear to me too, that since Kretschmar’s move to Leipzig, his chances of getting his way were considerably improved.
Adrian’s letter showed a more than average capacity to look at himself critically, and as a confession its ironic humility touched me very much. To his one-time mentor, now aspiring to be that again and much more, he set forth the scruples that held him back from a decision to change his profession and fling himself into the arms of music. He halfway admitted that theology, as an empiric study, had disappointed him; the reasons of course being to seek not in that revered science, nor with his academic teachers, but in himself. That was already plain from the fact that he certainly could not say what other, better choice he could then have made. Sometimes, when he took counsel with himself on the possibilities of a shift, he had, during these years, considered choosing mathematics, in which, when he was at school, he had always found ‘“good entertainment” (his very words). But with a sort of horror at himself he saw it coming, that if he made this discipline his own, bound himself over, identified himself with it, he would very soon be disillusioned, bored; get as sick and tired of it as though he “had ladled it in with a cooking-spoon” (this grotesque simile also I recall literally). “I cannot conceal from your respected self,” he wrote (for he sometimes fell into old-fashioned phrases and spellings), “neither you nor myself, that with your apprendista it is a god-forsaken case. It is not just an everyday thing with me, I would not lain it thus; it addresses itself to your verye bowells of compassion more than makes your heart leap up for joy.” He had, he said, received from God the gift of a “toward wit”; from childhood up and with less than common pain had grasped everything offered in his education—too easily, “belike,” for any of it to win his proper respect. Too easily for blood and brains ever to have got properly warmed up for the sake of a subject and by effort over it. “I fear,” he wrote, “dear and beloved friend and master, I am a lost soul, a black sheep, I have no warmth. As the Gode Boke hath it, they shall be cursed and spewed out of the mouth who are neither cold nor warm but lukewarm. Lukewarm I should not call myself. I am cold out of all question; but in my judgment of myself I would pray to dissent from the taste of that Power whose it is to apportion blessing and cursing.”
He went on:
“Oddly enough, it was best at the grammar school, there I was still pretty much in the right place, because in the upper forms they deal out the gretest variety of thinges, one after the other, changing the subject from one five-and-forty minutes to the next—in other words there was still no profession. But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, they bored me—and boredom is the coldest thing in the world. After fifteen minutes at most I had all that the good man chammed over with the other boys for thirty more. Reading the authors, I read on further; I had done so at home, and if I thought not always give answer, ‘twas but because I was already in the next lesson. Three quarters of an hour of Anabasis was too much of one thing for my patience, in sign thereof my mygryms came on” (he meant his headaches) “and never did they procede from fatigue due to effort, but from satiety, from cold boredom, and, dear master and friend, sith I no longer am a young bachelor springing from branch to branch but have married me with one plot and one profession, it has truly gone hevyli indeed with me.
“In feith, ye will not believe that I hold myself too good for any profession. On the contrary, I am pitiful of that I make mine own, and ye may see in that an homage, a declaration of love for music, a special position towards her, that in her case I should feel quite too deeply pitiful.
“You will ask if it was not so with theology? But I submitted thereunto; not so much, though there was somewhat of that too therein, that I saw in it the highest of the sciences; but for that I would fain humble myself, bow the knee, and be chastened, to castigate my cold contumacy, in short out of contritio. I wanted the sack of heyre, the spiked girdle beneath. I did what those did in earlier times who knocked at the gate of the cloister of strict observance. It has its absurd and comic sides, this professionally cloistered life, but assaye to understand that a secret terror warned me not to forsake it, to put the Scriptures under the bench and scape into the art to which you introduced me, and about which I feel that for me to practise it were shrewidness and shame.
Ye think me called to this art, and give me to understand that the ‘step aside’ to her were no long one. My Lutheranism agrees
, for it sees in theology and music neighbouring spheres and close of kin; and besides, music has always seemed to me personally a magic marriage between theology and the so diverting mathematic. Item, she has much of the laboratory and the insistent activity of the alchemists and nigromancers of yore, which also stood in the sign of theology, but at the same time in that of emancipation and apostasy; it was apostasy, not from the feith, that was never possible, but in the feith; for apostasy is an act of feith and everything is and happens in God, most of all the falling from Him.”
My quotations are very nearly literal, even where they are not quite so. I can rely very well on my memory, and besides I committed much of it to paper at once after reading the draft, and in particular this about apostasy.
He then excused himself for the digression, which scarcely was one, and went on to the practical question of what branch of musical activity he should envisage in case he yielded to Kretschmar’s pressure. He pointed out that he was useless, from the start and admittedly, for solo virtuosity. “It pricketh betimes that will be a sharp thorn,” he wrote, quoting Kumpf, and that he had come too late into contact with the instrument, or even with the idea, from which followed, of course, the clear conclusion that he lacked any instinctive urge in that direction. He had gone to the keyboard not out of desire to master it, but out of private curiosity about music itself; he was entirely lacking in the gypsy blood of the concert artist, who produced himself before the public through music, music being the occasion he took. To that went mental premises which he did not satisfy: desire for love affairs with the crowd, for laurel wreaths and bowing and kowtowing to applause. He avoided the adjectives which would actually have made clear what he meant: he did not say that even if he had not come to it too late, he was too selfconscious, too proud, too difficult, too solitary, to be a virtuoso.
These same objections, he went on, stood in the way of a career as a conductor. As little as a keyboard juggler could he see himself as a baton-waving, frock-coated prima donna of the orchestra, an interpreting ambassador and gala-representative of music on earth. But now there did escape him a word that belonged in the same class with those which I just said would have fitted the case: he spoke of being unsocial; he called himself that, and meant no compliment. This quality, he judged, was the expression of a want of warmth, sympathy, love, and it was very much in question whether one could, lacking them, be a good artist, which after all and always means being a lover and beloved of the world. Now putting these two aside, the solo artist and the conductor, what was left? Forsooth, music herself, the promise and vow to her, the hermetic laboratory, the gold-kitchen: composition. “Wonderful! Ye will initiate me, friend Albertus Magnus, into the mysteries of theory and certes I feel, I know aforehand, as already I know a little from experience, I shalbe no backward adeptus. I shall grasp all the shifts and controls, and that easily, in truth because my mind goeth to meet them, the ground is prepared, it already nourishes some seed therein. I will refine on the prima materia, in that I add to it the magisterium and with spirit and fire drive the matter through many limbecs and retorts for the refining thereof. What a glorious mystery! I know none higher, deeper, better; none more thrilling, or occult; none whereto less persuasion were necessary to persuade.
“And yet, why does an inward voice warn me: ‘O homo fuge’? I cannot give answer unto the question very articulately. Only this much I can say: I fear to make promises to art, because I doubt whether my nature—quite aside from the question of a gift—is calculated to satisfy her; because I must disclaim the robust naivete which, so far as I can see—among other things, and not least among them—pertaineth to the nature of the artist. In its place my lot is a quickly satisfied intelligence, whereof, I suppose, I may speak, because I call heaven and hell to witness that I am not vain of it; it is that, together with the accompanying proneness to fatigue and disgust (with headache), which is the ground of my fear and concern. It will, it ought to, decide me to refrain. Mark me, good master, young as I am I am wel enow seen therein to know, and should not be your pupil did I not, that it passeth far beyond the pattern, the canon, the tradition, beyond what one learns from others, the trick, the technique. Yet it is undeniable that there is a lot of all that in it, and I see it coming (for it lieth also in my nature, for good or ill, to look beyond) that I am embarrassed at the insipidness which is the supporting structure, the conditioning solid substance of even the work of genius, at the elements thereof which are training and common property, at use and wont in achieving the beautiful; I blush at all that, weary thereof, get headache therefrom, and that right early.
“How stupid, how pretentious it would be to ask: ‘Do you understand that?’ For how should you not? It goes like this, when it is beautiful: the cellos intone by themselves, a pensive, melancholy theme, which questions the folly of the world, the wherefore of all the struggle and striving, pursuing and plaguing—all highly expressive and decorously philosophical. The cellos enlarge upon this riddle awhile, head-shaking, deploring, and at a certain point in their remarks, a well-chosen point, the chorus of wind instruments enters with a deep full breath that makes your shoulders rise and fall, in a choral hymn, movingly solemn, richly harmonized, and produced with all the muted dignity and mildly restrained power of the brass. Thus the sonorous melody presses on up to nearly the height of a climax, which, in accordance with the law of economy it avoids at first, gives way, leaves open, sinks away, postpones, most beautifully lingers; then withdraws and gives place to another theme, a songlike, simple one, now jesting, now grave, now popular, apparently brisk and robust by nature but sly as you make them, and for someone with some subtile cleverness in the art of thematic analysis and transformation it proves itself amazingly pregnant and capable of utter refinement. For a while this little song is managed and deployed, cleverly and charmingly, it is taken apart, looked at in detail, varied, out of it a delightful figure in the middle register is led up into the most enchanting heights of fiddles and flutes, lulls itself there a little, and when it is at its most artful, then the mild brass has again the word with the previous choral hymn and comes into the foreground. The brass does not start from the beginning as it did the first time, but as though its melody had already been there for a while; and it continues, solemnly, to that climax from which it wisely refrained the first time, in order that the surging feeling, the Ah-h-effect, might be the greater: now it gloriously bestrides its theme, mounting unchecked, with weighty support from the passing notes on the tuba, and then, looking back, as it were, with dignified satisfaction on the finished achievement, sings itself decorously to the end.
“Dear friend, why do I have to laugh? Can a man employ the traditional or sanctify the trick with greater genius? Can one with shrewder sense achieve the beautiful? And I, abandoned wretch, I have to laugh, particularly at the grunting supporting notes of the bombardone, Bum, bum, bum, bang! I may have tears in my eyes at the same time, but the desire to laugh is irresistible—I have always had to laugh, most damnably, at the most mysterious and impressive phenomena. I fled from this exaggerated sense of the comic into theology, in the hope that it would give relief to the tickling—only to find there too a perfect legion of ludicrous absurdities. Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?—These are of course rhetorical questions, it was not that I still expected an answer to them. But such a despairing heart, such a damp squib as I am, you consider as ‘gifted’ for music and summon me to you and to its service, instead of rather leaving me humbly to tarry with God and theology?”
Thus Adrian’s confession in avoidance. And Kretschmar’s reply: that document I have not by me. It was not found among the papers Leverkühn left. He must have preserved it for a while and then in some moving to Munich, to Italy, to Pfeiffering, it must have got lost. But I retain it in my memory almost as precisely as Adrian’s own, even though I made no notes on it. The stutterer
stuck by his summons, his monitions and allurements. Not a word in Adrian’s letter, he wrote, could have made him for a moment falter in his conviction that it was music for which fate destined the writer, after which he hankered as music after him, and against which, half cowardly, half capricious, he had hidden himself behind these half-true analyses of his character and constitution, as previously behind theology, his first and absurd choice. “Affectation, Adri—and the increase in your headaches is the punishment for it.” His sense of the ludicrous of which he boasted, or complained, would suit with art far better than with his present unnatural occupation, for art, on the contrary, could use it; could, in general, much better use the repellent characteristics he attributed to himself than he believed or made pretence that he believed it could. He, Kretschmar, would leave the question open, how far Adrian was accusing himself in order to excuse his corresponding accusations against art; for this painting art as a marriage with the mob, as kiss—throwing, gala-posturing, as a bellows to blow up the emotions, was a facile misconstruction and a wilful one too. What he was trying to do was to excuse himself on account of certain characteristics, while these, on the other hand, were the very ones art demanded. Art needed just his sort today—and the joke, the hypocritical, hide-and-seek joke, was that Adrian knew it perfectly well. The coolness, the “quickly satisfied intelligence,” the eye for the stale and absurd, the early fatigue, the capacity for disgust—all that was perfectly calculated to make a profession of the talent bound up with it. Why? Because it belonged only in part to the private personality; for the rest it was of an extra-individual nature, the expression of a collective feeling for the historical exhaustion and vitiation of the means and appliances of art, the boredom with them and the search for new ways. “Art strides on,” Kretschmar wrote, “and does so through the medium of the personality, which is the product and the tool of the time, and in which objective and subjective motives combine indistinguishably, each taking on the shape of the others. The vital need of art for revolutionary progress and the coming of the new addresses itself to whatever vehicle has the strongest subjective sense of the staleness, fatuity, and emptiness of the means still current. It avails itself of the apparently unvital, of that personal satiety and intellectual boredom, that disgust at seeing ‘how it works’; that accursed itch to look at things in the light of their own parody; that sense of the ridiculous—I tell you that the will to life and to living, growing art puts on the mask of these faint-hearted personal qualities, to manifest itself therein, to objectivate, to fulfill itself. Is that too much metaphysics for you? But it is just precisely enough of it, precisely the truth, the truth which at bottom you know yourself. Make haste, Adrian, and decide. I am waiting. You are already twenty, and you have still a good many tricks of the trade to get used to, quite hard enough to stimulate you. It is better to get a headache from exercises in canons, fugues, and counterpoint than from confuting the Kantian confutation of the evidence for the existence of God. Enough of your theological spinsterhood!