Doctor Faustus

by Thomas Mann

  “You’ve come just at the right time,” he said, and sat down on the other side of the table. “The Schaff-Gosch quartet is playing Op .132 tonight. You’ll come along?”

  I understood that he meant Beethoven’s late work, the A-minor String Quartet.

  “Since I’m here,” I replied, “I’ll come with you. It will be good to hear the Lydian movement, the ‘Thanksgiving for Recovery’; I’ve not heard it for a long time.”

  “That beaker,” he said, “I drain at every feast. My eyes run over. ” And he began to talk about the Church modes and the Ptolemaic or “natural” system, whose six different modes were reduced by the tempered, i. e. the false system to two, major and minor; and about superiority in modulation of the “pure” scale over the tempered one. This he called a compromise for home use, as also the tempered piano was a thing precisely for domestic consumption, a transient peace-pact, not a hundred and fifty years old, which had brought to pass all sorts of considerable things, oh, very considerable, but about which we should not imagine that everything was settled for eternity. He expressed great pleasure over the fact that it was an astronomer and mathematician named Ptolemy, a man from Upper Egypt, living in Alexandria, who had established the best of all known scales, the natural or right one. That proved again, he said, the relation between music and astronomy, as it had been shown already by Pythagoras’ cosmic theory of harmony. Now and then he came back to the quartet and its third movement, referring to its strange character, its suggestion of a moon-landscape, and the enormous difficulty of performing it.

  “At bottom,” said he, “every one of the four players has to be a Paganini and would have to know not only his own part but the three others’ as well, else it’s no use. Thank God, one can depend on the Schaff-Gosch. Today it can be done, but it is only just playable, and in his time it was simply not. The ruthless indifference of one who has risen above it towards the sheer earthly difficulties of technique is to me the most colossally entertaining thing in life. ‘What do I care about your damned fiddle?’ he said to somebody who complained.”

  We laughed—and the odd thing was, simply that we had never even said how do you do.

  “Besides,” he said, “there is the fourth movement, the incomparable finale, with the short, marchlike introduction and that noble recitative of the first violin, with which as suitably as possible the theme is prepared. Only it is vexatious, if you don’t want to call it gratifying, that in music, at least in this music, there are things for which one cannot scare up, out of the whole rich realm of language, do what you like, any properly characterizing epithet or combination of epithets. I have been tormenting myself over that these days: you cannot find any adequate term for the spirit, the attitude, the behaviour of this theme. For there is a lot of behaviour there. Tragic? Bold? Defiant, emphatic, full of elan, the height of nobility? None of them good. And ‘glorious’ is of course only throwing in your hand. You finally land at the objective direction, the name: Allegro appassionato. That is the best after all.”

  I agreed. “Perhaps,” I thought, “this evening we might think of something else.”

  “You must see Kretschmar soon,” it occurred to him to say. “Where do you live?”

  I told him I would go to a hotel for the night and look out something suitable in the morning.

  “I understand,” he said, “your not asking me to find something. One cannot leave it to anyone else. I have,” he added, “told the people in Cafe Central about you and your arrival. I must take you there soon.”

  By the people he meant the group of young intellectuals whose acquaintance he had made through Kretschmar. I was convinced that his attitude towards them was very like what it had been towards the Winfried brethren in Halle, and when I said it was good to hear that he had quickly found suitable contacts in Leipzig he answered:

  “Well, contacts… “

  Schildknapp, the poet and translator, he added, was the most satisfactory. But even he had a way, out of a sort of not precisely superior self-confidence, of always refusing, as soon as he saw anyone wanted anything of him or needed or tried to claim him. A man with a very strong—or perhaps on the other hand not so strong—feeling of independence, he said. But sympathetic, entertaining, and besides so short of money that he himself had to help out.

  What he had wanted of Schildknapp, who as a translator lived intimately with the English language and was altogether a warm admirer of everything English, emerged as we continued to talk. I learned that Adrian was looking for a theme for an opera and, years before he seriously approached the task, had had Love’s Labour’s Lost in mind. What he wanted of Schildknapp, who was musically equipped as well, was the preparation of the libretto. But the other, partly on account of his own work, and partly, I surmise, because Adrian would hardly have been able to pay him in advance, would not hear to it. Well, later I myself did my friend this service. I like to think back to our first groping talk about it, on this very evening. And I found my idea confirmed: the tendency to marriage with the word, to vocal articulation, more and more possessed him. He was practising almost exclusively the composition of lieder, short and long songs, even epic fragments, taking his material from a Mediterranean anthology, which in a fairly happy German version included Provencal and Catalan lyrics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Italian poetry, the loftiest visions of the Divina Commedia, and some Spanish and Portuguese things. It was, at that musical time of day and at the young adept’s age, almost inevitable that here and there the influence of Gustav Mahler should be perceptible. But then would come a tone, a mood, a glimpse, a something lone-wandering and unique: it stood strange and firm on its own feet; and in such things we recognize today the master of the grotesque Vision of the Apocalypse.

  This was clearest in the songs of the series taken from the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, chosen with a shrewd sense of their affinity with music. Thus in the piece which especially took me, and Kretschmar too had called very good, where the poet in the light of the planet Venus sees the smaller lights—they are the spirits of the blessed—some more quickly, the others more slowly, “according to the kind of their regard of God” drawing their circles, and compares this to the sparks that one distinguishes in the flame, the voices that one distinguishes in the song “when the one twines round the other.” I was surprised and enchanted at the reproduction of the sparks in the fire, of the entwining voices. And still I did not know whether I should give the preference to these fantasies on the light in light or to the introspective, more—thought-than-seen pieces—those where all is rejected questioning, wrestling with the unfathomable, where “doubt springs at the foot of truth” and even the cherub who looks into God’s depths measures not the gulf of the everlasting resolve. Adrian had here chosen the frightfully stern sequence of verses which speak of the condemnation of innocence and ignorance, and incomprehensible justice is questioned which delivers over to hell the good and pure but not baptized, not reached by faith. He had persuaded himself to put the thundering response in tones which announce the powerlessness of the creaturely good before Good in itself: the latter, being itself the source of justice, cannot give way before anything that our human understanding is tempted to call unjust. This rejection of the human in favour of an unattainable absolute foreordination angered me. And altogether, though I acknowledge Dante’s greatness as a poet, I always feel put off by his tendency to cruelty and scenes of martyrdom. I recall that I scolded Adrian for choosing this almost intolerable passage as his theme. It was then that I met a look from his eye which I had not seen before; it had made me question whether I was quite right in asserting that I found him unchanged after our year’s separation. This look was something new, and it remained peculiar to him, even though one encountered it only from time to time and indeed without especial occasion. Mute, veiled, musing, aloof to the point of offensiveness, full of a chilling melancholy, it ended in a smile with closed lips, not unfriendly, yet mocking, and with that gesture of turning away, so
habitual, so long familiar to me.

  The impression was painful and, intentional or not, it wounded. But I quickly forgave him as we went on, and I heard the moving musical diction given to the parable in the Purgatorio of the man who carries a light on his back at night, which does not light him but lights up the path of those coming after. The tears came in my eyes. I was still happier over the altogether successful shaping of the address, only nine lines long, of the poet to his allegorical song, which speaks so darkly and difficultly, with no prospect of its hidden sense being understanded of the world. Thus, its creator lays upon it, may it implore perception if not of its depth at least of its beauty. “So look at least, how beautiful I am!” The way the music strives upward out of the difficulties, the artful confusion, the mingled distresses of its first part to the tender light of the final cry and there is touchingly resolved—all that I straightway found admirable and did not hide my delighted approbation.

  “So much the better if it is good for something already,” said he. In later talks it became clear what he meant by “already.” The word had not to do with his youth; he meant that he regarded the composition of the songs, however much devotion he gave to the single task, on the whole only as practice for a complete work in words and music which hovered before his mind’s eye, the text of which was to be the Shakespeare comedy. He went about theoretically to glorify this bond with the word, which he would put in practice. Music and speech, he insisted, belonged together, they were at bottom one, language was music, music a language; separate, one always appealed to the other, imitated the other, used the other’s tools, always the one gave itself to be understood as substitute of the other. How music could be first of all word, be thought and planned as word, he would demonstrate to me by the fact that Beethoven had been seen composing in words. “What is he writing there in his notebook?” it had been asked. “He is composing.”

  “But he is writing words, not notes.” Yes, that was a way he had. He usually sketched in words the course of ideas in a composition, at most putting in a few notes here and there.—Adrian dwelt upon this, it visibly charmed him. The creative thought, he said, probably formed its own and unique intellectual category, but the first draft hardly ever amounted to a picture, a statue in words—which spoke for the fact that music and speech belonged together. It was very natural that music should take fire at the word, that the word should burst forth out of music, as it did towards the end of the Ninth Symphony. Finally it was a fact that the whole development of music in Germany strove towards the word-tone drama of Wagner and therein found its goal.

  “One goal,” said I, referring to Brahms and to the absolute music in the “light on his back.” He agreed to the qualification, the more easily because what he had vaguely in mind was as un-Wagnerian as possible, and most remote from nature-daemony and the theatrical quality of the myth: a revival of opera bouffe in a spirit of the most artificial mockery and parody of the artificial: something highly playful and highly precious; its aim the ridicule of affected asceticism and that euphuism which was the social fruit of classical studies. He spoke with enthusiasm of the theme, which gave opportunity to set the lout and “natural” alongside the comic sublime and make both ridiculous in each other. Archaic heroics, rodomontade, bombastic etiquette tower out of forgotten epochs in the person of Don Armado, whom Adrian rightly pronounced a consummate figure of opera. And he quoted verses to me in English, which obviously he had taken to his heart: the despair of the witty Biron at his perjured love of her who had two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes; his having to sigh and watch for “by heaven one that will do the deed, though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.” Then the judgment upon this very Biron: “You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick, and still converse With groaning wretches”; and his cry: “It cannot be: mirth cannot move a soul in agony!” He repeated the passage and declared that some day he would certainly compose it, also the incomparable talk in the fifth act about the folly of the wise, the helpless, blinded, humiliating misuse of wit to adorn the fool’s cap of passion. Such utterance, he said, as that of the two lines:

  The blood of youth burns not with such excess

  As gravity’s revolt to wantonness flourishes only on the heights of poetic genius.

  I rejoiced at this admiration, this love, even though the choice of matter was not quite to my taste. I have always been rather unhappy at any mockery of humanistic extravagances; it ends by making humanism itself a subject for mirth. Which did not prevent me from preparing the libretto for him when he was ready.

  What I at once tried my best to dissuade him from was his strange and utterly impractical idea of composing the comedy in English, because he found that the only right, dignified, authentic thing; also because it seemed indicated, on account of the plays on words and the old English verse with doggerel rhyme. The very important objection, that a text in a foreign language would destroy every prospect of its appearance on a German stage, he did not consider, because he altogether declined to imagine a contemporary public for his exclusive, eccentric, fantastic dreams. It was a baroque idea, but rooted deep in his nature, combined as that was of haughty shyness, the old-German provincialism of Kaisersaschern, and an out-and-out cosmopolitanism. Not for nothing was he a son of the town where Otto III lay buried. His dislike of his own very Germanness (it was that, indeed, which drew him to the Anglicist and Anglomaniac Schildknapp) took the two disparate forms of a cocoonlike withdrawal from the world and an inward need of world-wideness. These it was made him insist on expecting a German concert audience to listen to songs in a foreign language—or, more realistically put, on preventing their hearing them. In fact, he produced during my Leipzig year compositions on poems by Verlaine and the beloved William Blake, which were not sung for decades. The Verlaine ones I heard later in Switzerland. One of them is the wonderful poem with the closing line: “Cest l’heure exquise”; another the equally enchanting “Chanson d’Automne”; a third the fantastically melancholy, preposterously melodious three-stanza poem that begins with the lines: “Un grand sommeil noir Tombe sur ma vie.” Then a couple of mad and dissolute pieces from the “Fetes galantes: “He! Bonsoir, la Lune!” and above all the macabre proposal, answered with giggles: “Mourons ensemble, voulez-vous?”—As for Blake’s extraordinary poesy, he set to music the stanzas about the rose, whose life was destroyed by the dark secret love of the worm which found its way into her crimson bed. Then the uncanny sixteen lines of “A Poison Tree,” where the poet waters his wrath with his tears, suns it with smiles and soft deceitful wiles, so that an alluring apple ripens, with which the thievish friend poisons himself: to the hater’s joy he lies dead in the morning beneath the tree. The evil simplicity of the verse was completely reproduced in the music. But I was even more profoundly impressed at the first hearing by a song to words by Blake, a dream of a chapel all of gold before which stand people weeping, mourning, worshipping, not daring to enter in. There rises the figure of a serpent who knows how by force and force and force to make an entry into the shrine; the slimy length of its body it drags along the costly floor and gains the altar, where it vomits its poison out on the bread and on the wine. “So,” ends the poet, with desperate logic, therefore and thereupon, “I turned into a sty and laid me down among the swine.” The dream anguish of the vision, the growing terror, the horror of pollution, finally the wild renunciation of a humanity dishonoured by the sight—all this was reproduced with astonishing power in Adrian’s setting.

  But these are later things, though all of them belong to Leverkühn’s Leipzig years. On that evening, then, after my arrival we heard the Schaff-Gosch concert together and next day visited Wendell Kretschmar, who spoke to me privately about Adrian’s progress in a way that made me proud and glad. Nothing, he said, did he fear less, than ever to have to regret his summons to a musical career. A man so self-assured, so fastidious in matters of taste and “pleasing the public,” would of course have difficulties, outwa
rdly as well as inwardly; but that was quite right, in such a case, since only art could give body to a life which otherwise would bore itself to death with its own facility.—I enrolled myself with Lautensack and the famous Bermeter, glad that I need not hear any more theology for Adrian’s sake; and allowed myself to be introduced to the circle at Cafe Central, a sort of bohemian club, which had pre-empted a smoky den in the tavern, where the members read the papers afternoons, played chess, and discussed cultural events. They were students from the conservatoires, painters, writers, young publishers, also beginning lawyers with an interest in the arts, a few actors, members of the Leipzig Kammerspiele, under strong literary influence—and so on. Rüdiger Schildknapp, the translator, considerably older than we were, at the beginning of the thirties, belonged, as I have said, to this group. As he was the only one with whom Adrian stood on terms of any intimacy, I too approached him, and spent many hours with them both together. That I had a critical eye on the man whom Adrian dignified with his friendship will, I fear, be evident in the present sketch of his personality, though I will endeavour, as I always have endeavoured, to do him justice.

  Schildknapp was born in a middle-sized town in Silesia, the son of a post-office official whose position elevated him above the lower ranks without leading to the higher administrative posts reserved for men with university degrees. Such a position requires no certificate or juristic training; it is arrived at after a term of years of preliminary service by passing the examinations for secretary in chief. Such had been the career of the elder Schildknapp. He was a man of proper upbringing and good form, also socially ambitious; but the Prussian hierarchy either shut him out of the upper circles of the town or, if they did by exception admit him, gave him to taste humiliation there. Thus he quarrelled with his lot and was an aggrieved man, a grumbler, visiting his unsuccessful career on his own family’s head. Rüdiger, his son. portrayed to us very vividly, filial respect giving way before a sense of the ridiculous, how the father’s social embitterment had poisoned his own, his mother’s and his brothers’ and sisters’ lives; the more because it expressed itself, in accordance with the man’s refinement, not in gross unpleasantness but as a finer capacity for suffering, and an exaggerated self-pity. He might come to the table and bite violently on a cherry-stone in the fruit soup, breaking a crown on one of his teeth. “Yes, you see,” he would say, his voice trembling, stretching out his hands, “that is how it is, that’s what happens to me, that is the way I am, it is in myself, it has to be like this! I had looked forward to this meal, and felt some appetite; it is a warm day and the cold fruit dish had promised me some refreshment. Then this has to happen. Good, you can see that joy is not my portion. I give it up. I will go back to my room. I hope you will enjoy it,” he would finish in a dying voice, and quit the table, well knowing that joy would certainly not be their portion either.