Doctor Faustus

by Thomas Mann

  “Comme c’est respectable! Pas prccisement humain mais extremement respectable. Why should we Jews, who are a priestly people, even when we are minaudering about in Parisian salons, not feel drawn to the Germans and let ourselves lean to the German side and an ironic view, as against the world, against art for the little friend? In us nationalism would be impertinent enough to provoke a pogrom. We are international—but we are pro-German, like nobody else in the world, simply because we can’t help perceiving the role of Germany and Judaism on earth. Une analogie frappante! In just the same way they are both hated, despised, feared, envied, in the same measure they alienate and are alienated. People talk about the age of nationalism. But actually there are only two nationalisms, the German and the Jewish, and all the rest is child’s play.—Is not the downright Frenchness of an Anatole France the purest cosmopolitanism alongside German isolation in the subjective and the Jewish conceit of the chosen race… France—a nationalistic pseudonym. A German writer could not well call himself Deutschland, such a name one gives to a battleship. He has to content himself with Deutsch—and that is a Jewish name, oh la, la.

  “Gentlemen, this is now really the door-knob. I am already outside. I must just say one more thing. The Germans should leave it to the Jews to be pro-German. With their nationalism, their pride, their foible of ‘differentness,’ their hatred of being put in order and equalized, their refusal to let themselves be introduced into the world and adopted socially, they will get into trouble, real Jewish trouble, je vous le jure. The Germans should let the Jew be the mediateur between them and society, be the manager, the impresario. He is altogether the right man for it, one should not turn him out, he is international, and he is pro-German. Mais c’est en vain. Et c’est tres dommage! Am I still talking? No, I left long ago. Cher Maitre, j’etais enchante. J’ai manque ma mission but I am delighted. Mes respects, monsieur le professeur. Vous m’avez assiste trop peu, mais je ne vous en veux pas. Mille choses a Madame Schweige—still. Adieu, adieu…"

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  My readers are aware that Adrian in the end complied with Rudi Schwerdtfeger’s long-cherished and expressed desire, and wrote for him a violin concerto of his own. He dedicated to Rudi personally the brilliant composition, so extraordinarily suited to a violin technique, and even accompanied him to Vienna for the first performance. In its place I shall speak about the circumstance that some months later, towards the end of 1924, he was present at the later performances in Berne and Zurich. But first I should like to discuss with its very serious implications my earlier, perhaps premature—perhaps, coming from me, unfitting—critique of the concerto. I said that it falls somewhat out of the frame of Leverkuhn’s ruthlessly radical and uncompromising work as a whole. And I suggested that this was due to a kind of concession to concert virtuosity as shown in the musical attitude of the piece. I cannot help thinking that posterity will agree with my “judgment”—my God, how I hate the word!—and what I am doing here is simply giving the psychological explanation of a phenomenon to which the key would otherwise be lacking.

  There is one strange thing about the piece: cast in three movements, it has no key-signature, but, if I may so express myself, three tonalities are built into it: B-flat major, C major, and D major, of which, as a musician can see, the D major forms a sort of secondary dominant, the B-flat major a subdominant, while the C major keeps the strict middle. Now between these keys the work plays most ingeniously, so that for most of the time none of them clearly comes into force but is only indicated by its proportional share in the general sound-complex. Throughout long and complicated sections all three are superimposed one above the other, until at last, in a way electrifying to any concert audience, C major openly and triumphantly declares itself. There, in the first movement, inscribed “andante amoroso,” of a dulcet tenderness bordering on mockery, there is a leading chord which to my ear has something French about it: c, g, e, b-flat, d, f-sharp, a, a harmony which, with the high f of the violin above it, contains, as one sees, the tonic chords of those three main keys. Here one has, so to speak, the soul of the work, also one has in it the soul of the main theme of this movement, which is taken up again in the third, a gay series of variations. In its way it is a wonderful stroke of melodic invention, a rich, intoxicating cantilena of great breadth, which decidedly has something showy about it, and also a melancholy that does not lack in grace if the performer so interpret it. The characteristically delightful thing about the invention is the unexpected and subtly accentuated rise of the melodic line after reaching a certain high climax, by a further step, from which then, treated in the most perfect, perhaps all too perfect taste, it flutes and sings itself away. It is one of those physically effective manifestations capturing head and shoulders, bordering on the “heavenly,” of which only music and no other art is capable. And the tutti—glorification of just this theme in the last part of the variation movement brings the bursting out into the open C major. But just before it comes a bold flourish—a plain reminiscence of the first violin part leading to the finale of Beethoven’s A-minor Quartet; only that here the magnificent phrase is followed by something different, a feast of melody in which the parody of being carried away becomes a passion which is seriously meant and therefore creates a somewhat embarrassing effect.

  I know that Leverkühn, before composing the piece, studied very carefully the management of the violin in Beriot, Vieuxtemps, and Wieniawski and then applied his knowledge in a way half-respectful, half caricature and moreover with such a challenge to the technique of the player—especially in the extremely abandoned and virtuoso middle movement, a scherzo, wherein there is a quotation from Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata—that the good Rudi had his work cut out to be equal to the demands upon him. Beads of sweat stood out beneath his blond locks every time he performed it, and the whites of his pretty azure eyes were bloodshot. But how much he got out of it, how much opportunity for “flirtation” in a heightened sense of the word, lay in a work which I to the Master’s very face called “the apotheosis of salon music”! I was, of course, certain beforehand that he would not take the description amiss, but accept it with a smile.

  I cannot think of that hybrid production without recalling a conversation which took place one evening at the home of Bullinger, the Munich manufacturer. Bullinger, as we know, occupied the bel etage of an elegant apartment-house he had built in Wiedemayerstrasse; beneath its windows the Isar, that uncorrupted glacial stream, purled past in its well-regulated bed. The Croesus entertained some fifteen guests at seven-o’clock dinner; he kept open house, with a trained staff, and a lady housekeeper who presided with affectedly elegant manners and obviously would have liked to marry. The guests were mostly people in the financial and business world. But it was known that Bullinger loved to air his views at large in intellectual circles; and on occasion he would gather a selection of artistic and academic elements for an evening in his agreeable quarters. No one, myself included, I confess, saw any reason to despise his cuisine or the spacious amenities of his drawing-rooms as a setting for stimulating discussion.

  This time the group consisted of Jeanette Scheurl, Herr and Frau Knoterich, Schildknapp, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Zink and Spengler, Kranich the numismatist, Radbruch the publisher and his wife, the actress Zwitscher, the farce-writer from Bukovina, whose name was Binder-Majoresku, myself and my dear wife. Adrian, urged by me and also by Schildknapp and Schwerdtfeger, was there too. I do not inquire whose plea had been decisive, nor do I flatter myself in the least that it was mine. At table he sat next Jeanette, whose society was always a comfort to him, and he saw other familiar faces about him as well; so he seemed not to regret having yielded but rather to have enjoyed the three hours of his stay. I remarked again with unspoken amusement the involuntary attention and more or less timid reverence paid to him. After all, he was only thirty-nine years old, and besides, but few of the guests present possessed enough musical knowledge for such an attitude on any rational grounds. It amused me, I sa
y; yet gave me a pang at my heart as well. For the behaviour of these people was really due to the indescribable atmosphere of aloofness which he carried about wherever he went. In increasing degree, more and more perceptible and baffling as the years went by, it wrapped him round and gave one the feeling that he came from a country where nobody else lived.

  This evening, as I said, he seemed quite comfortable; he was even conversational, which I ascribed in some degree to the effect of Bullinger’s champagne-and-bitters cocktail and his wonderful Pfalz wine. Adrian talked with Spengler, who was already in wretched health, his disease having attacked his heart, and laughed with the rest of us at the clowneries of Leo Zink, who leaned back at table and covered himself with his huge damask serviette like a sheet up to his fantastic nose and folded his hands peacefully atop. Adrian was even more amused by the jester’s adroitness when we were called on to look at a well-intentioned still-life by Bullinger, who dabbled in oils. To save the company the embarrassment of criticizing it, Zink examined the painting with a thousand acclamations and Good—graciouses which might mean anything and nothing; looked at it from every point of view and even turned it over and looked at the back. This gush of ecstatic yet wholly meaningless verbiage was Zink’s social technique; at bottom he was not a pleasant man, and this was his way of taking part in conversations that went over his head as dilettante painter and enthusiast of carnival balls. He even practised it in the conversation I have in mind, touching the fields of aesthetics and ethics.

  It developed as a sequel to some gramophone music with which the host regaled us after the coffee, as we smoked and drank liqueurs. Very good gramophone records had begun to be produced, and Bullinger played several enjoyable ones for us from his valuable cabinet: the well-recorded waltzes from Gounod’s Faust came first, I remember. Baptist Spengler could only criticize them on the ground that they were drawing-room music, much too elegant for folk-dances on the meadow. It was agreed that their style was more suitable in the case of the charming ball-music in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and we asked to hear a record of the latter. It was not there; but Rudi Schferdtfeger whistled the air faultlessly, in violin timbre, pure and perfect, and laughed at the applause, shrugging his shoulder inside his coat, in the way he had, and drawing down one corner of his mouth in a grimace. By way of comparison with the French somebody now demanded something Viennese: Lanner, Johann Strauss the younger. Our host gave us willingly from his store, until a lady—it was Frau Radbruch, the publisher’s wife—suggested that with all this frivolous stuff we might be boring the great composer who was present. Everybody, in concern, agreed with her; Adrian, who had not understood, asked what she had said. When it was repeated he made lively protest. In God’s name no, that was all a mistake. No one could take more pleasure than he in these things—in their way they were masterly.

  “You underestimate my musical education,” said he. “In my early days I had a teacher” (he looked across at me with his deep, subtle, lovely smile) “crammed full of the whole world of sound; a bubbling enthusiast, too much in love with every, I really mean every, organized noise, for me to have learned any contempt from him. There was no such thing as being ‘too good’ for any sort of music. A man who knew the best, the highest and austerest; but for him music was music—if it just was music. He objected to Goethe’s saying that art is concerned with the good and difficult; he held that ‘light’ music is difficult too, if it is good, which it can be, just as well as ‘heavy’ music. Some of that stuck by me, I got it from him. Of course I have always grasped the idea that one must be very well anchored in the good and ‘heavy’ to take up with the ‘light.’ “

  There was silence in the room. What he had said, at bottom, was that he alone had the right to enjoy the pleasant things we had been regaled with. They tried not to understand it thus, but they suspected that was what he meant. Schildknapp and I exchanged looks. Dr. Kranich went “H’m, h’m.” Jeanette Scheurl whispered “Magnifique!” Leo Zink’s fatuous “Jesus, Jesus!” rose above the rest, in pretended acclamation, but really out of spite. “Genuine Adrian Leverkühn!” cried Schwerdtfeger, red in the face from one Vieille Cure after another, but also, I felt sure, out of private chagrin.

  “You haven’t by chance,” Adrian went on, “Delilah’s D-sharp major aria from Samson by Saint-Saens?” The question was addressed to Bullinger, who found great satisfaction in replying: “Not have it? My dear sir, what do you think of me? Here it is—not at all ‘by chance,’ I assure you!”

  Adrian answered: “Oh, good! It came into my head, because Kretschmar, my teacher, he was an organist, a fugue-man, you must know, had a peculiarly passionate feeling for the piece, a real faible. He could laugh at it too, but that did not lessen his admiration, which may have concerned only the consummate-ness of the thing in its own genre. Listen.”

  The needle touched the plate. Bullinger put down the heavy lid. Through the loud-speaker poured a proud mezzo-soprano voice, which did not much trouble about clear enunciation: you understood: “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix” and not a great deal else. But the singing, unfortunately accompanied by a rather whining orchestra, was wonderful in its warmth, tenderness, sombre lament for happiness, like the melody, which indeed in both of the structurally similar strophes of the aria reaches its full beauty only in the middle and finishes in a way to overpower the senses, especially the second time, when the violin, now quite sonorous, emphasizes with pleasing effect the voluptuous vocal line and repeats the closing figure in delicate and melancholy postlude.

  They were moved. One lady wiped an eye with her embroidered party handkerchief. “Crazy beautiful!” said Bullinger, using a phrase now in favour among stricter connoisseurs, who rejected the sentimental “lovely.” It might be said to be used here exactly in its right and proper place, and perhaps that was what amused Adrian.

  “Well, there!” he said, laughing. “You understand now how a serious man can be capable of adoring the thing. Intellectual beauty it has not, of course, it is typically sensual. But after all one must not blush for the sensual, nor be afraid of it.”

  “And yet, perhaps,” Dr. Kranich was heard to say. He spoke, as always, very clearly, with distinct articulation, though wheezing with asthma. “Perhaps, after all, in art. In this realm in fact one may, or one should, be afraid of the nothing-but-sensual; one should be ashamed of it, for, as the poet said, it is the common, the vulgar: ‘Vulgar is everything that does not speak to the mind and spirit and arouses nothing but a sensual interest.’”

  “A noble saying,” Adrian responded. “We shall do well to let it echo for a bit in our minds before we think of anything to dispute it.”

  “And what would you think of then?” the scholar wanted to know.

  Adrian had made a grimace, shrugged a shoulder, as much as to say: “I can’t help the facts.” Then he replied: “Idealism leaves out of count that the mind and spirit are by no means addressed by the spiritual alone; they can be most deeply moved by the animal sadness of sensual beauty. They have even paid homage to frivolity. Philine, after all, is nothing but a little strumpet, but Wilhelm Meister, who is not so very different from his creator, pays her a respect in which the vulgarity of innocent sensuality is openly denied.”

  “His complaisance, his toleration of the questionable,” returned the numismatist, “have never been looked on as the most exemplary traits of our Olympian’s character. And one may see a danger to culture when the spirit closes its eyes to the vulgar and sensual, or even winks at them.”

  “Obviously we have different opinions as to the danger.”

  “You might as well say I am a coward, at once!”

  “God forbid! A knightly defender of fear and censure is no coward, he is simply knightly. For myself, I would only like to break a lance for a certain breadth of view in matters of artistic morality. One grants it, or allows it, it seems to me, more readily in other arts than in music. That may be very honourable but it does seriously narrow its field. What becomes
of the whole jingle-jangle if you apply the most rigorously intellectual standards? A few ‘pure spectra’ of Bach. Perhaps nothing else audible would survive at all.”

  A servant came round with whisky, beer, and soda-water on a huge tray.

  “Who would want to be a spoilsport?” said Kranich, and got a “Bravo!” and a clap on the shoulder from Bullinger. To me, and very likely to some of the other guests, the exchange was a duel suddenly struck up between uncompromising mediocrity and painful depth of experience. But I have interpolated this scene, not only because I feel the close connection between it and the concerto upon which Adrian was then at work, but also because even then both concerto and conversation directed my attention to the person of the young man upon whose obstinate insistence the piece had been written and for whom it represented a conquest in more than one sense of the word. Probably it is my fate to be able to speak only stiffly, dryly, and analytically about the phenomenon of love: of that which Adrian had one day characterized to me as an amazing and always somewhat unnatural alteration in the relation between the I and the not-I. Reverence for the mystery in general, and personal reverence as well, combine to close my lips or make me chary of words when I come to speak of the transformation, always in the sign of the daemonic, the phenomenon in and for itself half miraculous which negatives the singleness of the individual soul. Even so, I will show that it was a specific sharpening of my wits through my classical scholarship, an acquirement which otherwise tends rather to take the edge off one’s reactions towards life, which put me in a position to see or understand as much as I did.