Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

  But although he carried on most dreadfully—slowly, inch by inch, she won him over by practice and persuasion.

  “Pfühl,” she said, “be reasonable, just take it in calmly. His unusual use of harmony confuses you. You find Beethoven pure, clear, and natural in comparison. But remember how Beethoven disconcerted his contemporaries, whose ears were trained to the old ways. And Bach himself, good Lord, they accused him of being dissonant and muddy. You speak of morality—but what do you mean by morality in art? If I am not mistaken, it is the opposite of every sort of hedonism is it not? Well, fine, you find that here as well. Just as in Bach. But grander, more self-aware, more profound than in Bach. Believe me, Pfühl, this music is much less foreign to your inner nature than you think.”

  “Sleight-of-hand and sophistry—if you will beg my pardon,” Herr Pfühl muttered. But she proved right—the music was ultimately less foreign to him than he first thought. Granted, he never quite reconciled himself to Tristan, although, after much pleading on Gerda’s part, he did at last very skillfully adapt the “Liebestod” for violin and piano. He first found a word or two of approbation for certain passages in Meistersinger—and then a love for this new art began to stir within him. He would not admit his growing irresistible attachment, and it almost frightened him—he would grumble and deny it. But once the old masters had been given their due, his partner no longer had to coerce him into the more complicated hand positions and he would glide easily into the vital, subtle weaving of leitmotifs, though always with a look of embarrassment and something close to anger in his eyes. Once he had finished playing, however, a discussion might well follow about the relation of this new music to the old “austere style”; and one day Herr Pfühl declared that, although it was not a matter of personal concern, he would add an appendix to his book on church music and title it “The Use of Traditional Keys in the Sacred and Folk Music of Richard Wagner.”

  Hanno sat very still, his little hands folded on his knees, his mouth slightly askew—he had a habit of rubbing his tongue against a molar. With large, unblinking eyes he watched his mother and Herr Pfühl and listened to them play and talk. And so it was that, after taking only a few steps down the path of life, he came to regard music as something extraordinarily serious, important, and profound. He understood only a word or two of what was said, and the sounds themselves were usually beyond his childish comprehension. Nevertheless he kept coming back to sit there hour after hour, never stirring and never getting bored—and it was faith, love, and awe that brought him.

  He was seven years old before he began to try arranging his hands on the keyboard in order to imitate certain combinations of sound that had impressed him. His mother smiled and watched, corrected finger positions he had invented out of silent eagerness, and showed him why he needed a certain note to change one chord into another. And his ear told him that what she said was right.

  Gerda Buddenbrook allowed him do as he liked for a while, but at last she decided that he should be given piano lessons.

  “I don’t think he will ever be a soloist,” she said to Herr Pfühl, “and actually I’m quite glad about that, because it has its drawbacks. By which I don’t mean the soloist’s dependence on accompaniment, although that can be distressing on occasion. And if I did not have you, Pfühl … But there is always the danger that one may get caught up in nothing but virtuosity of one kind or another. And I certainly could tell you a tale about that. To be frank, I must admit that it seems to me that music only really begins for the soloist when he has achieved a very high degree of skill. It requires intense concentration on the treble voice and the phrasing of the melodic line, whereas polyphony remains something only very vague and general, and in someone of mediocre talents that can mean the atrophy of any sense of harmony or the ability to retain harmonic structures, which is very difficult to correct later on. I love my violin and have come rather far with it, but I value the piano more. What I am saying is that, for me, familiarity with the piano—which in its ability to recapitulate the most complex and rich harmonies provides a unique means of musical reproduction—results in a clearer, more intimate and comprehensive relationship with music. Hear me out, Pfühl—I would like to enlist you to teach him. Please do me the favor. I know very well that there are two or three other people here in town—all of them women, I believe—who could instruct him, but they are mere piano teachers. You do understand, don’t you? It has little or nothing to do with training someone on an instrument, but, rather, with his understanding music. I trust you. You take the matter more seriously. And you shall see—you’ll have fine success with him. He has Buddenbrook hands—and Buddenbrooks can span ninths or tenths. But they’ve never considered it important,” she concluded with a laugh. And Herr Pfühl declared himself willing to give Hanno lessons.

  And from then on he also came on Monday afternoons, and Gerda would join them in the living room while he worked with little Johann. He did not go about it in the customary fashion, because he felt that the child’s mute, eager passion required more of him than a few piano lessons. No sooner had they put the first elementary exercises behind them than he began to teach music theory and made it easily understood by demonstrating the basics of harmony as his pupil watched. And Hanno did understand—it was actually only a confirmation of what he had always known.

  Herr Pfühl tried as much as possible to take into account the child’s eagerness to make rapid progress. He gave much loving thought and care to how he might best lighten the leaden load of instruction that fettered the boy’s fantasy and eager talents. He was not all that strict about demanding great dexterity in practicing scales, or at least he did not see it as the purpose of practice. Rather, what he was aiming for, and soon achieved, was a clear, comprehensive, and effective grasp of musical keys, a personal and insightful familiarity with their interrelationships and connections, from which within a short time would come a quick eye for possible combinations and an intuitive mastery of the keyboard that would encourage fantasy and improvisation. He showed a touching sensitivity for the intellectual needs of his little student, who had been spoiled by having heard so much and was trying to develop a serious style. He did not dampen the solemnity and profundity of the boy’s mood by making him practice banal little songs. He let him play chorales where one chord led logically to the next and he never failed to point out the laws of that progression.

  Gerda would sit on the other side of the portieres, reading a book or doing needlework, and follow the lessons.

  “You have exceeded all my expectations,” she said to Herr Pfühl on one occasion. “But are you not going too far? Is your method not a little too out of the ordinary? It is eminently creative, I grant. He is already making honest attempts at improvisation. But if he is not worthy of your method, if he is not talented enough for it, he will learn nothing at all.”

  “He is worthy of it,” Herr Pfühl said with a nod. “I watch his eyes sometimes, and there is so much going on in them, but he keeps his mouth shut tight. And later in life, when his mouth is shut even tighter perhaps, he must have some way of speaking.”

  She gazed at him, at this square-built musician with a fox-brown wig, unkempt mustache, bags under his eyes, and large Adam’s apple—and then she gave him her hand and said, “My best thanks, Pfühl. You mean well, and who knows what all you will accomplish with him.”

  Hanno’s gratitude to his teacher was boundless, and he abandoned himself to his guidance. The same boy who brooded over arithmetic without any hope of ever understanding it, despite all his special tutoring at school, understood everything that Herr Pfühl said to him at the piano, understood it and made it his own—if you can be said to make your own what has always belonged to you. Edmund Pfühl, however, seemed to him like a tall angel dressed in a brown swallowtail coat, who took him in his arms each Monday afternoon to lead him from his everyday misery into the realm of sound, where everything was gentle, sweet, consoling, and serious.

  Sometimes the lessons too
k place in Herr Pfühl’s house, a roomy old gabled affair with all sorts of cool hallways and nooks, where the organist lived all by himself except for an ancient housekeeper. Sometimes little Johann Buddenbrook was allowed to join him up in the organ loft of St. Mary’s for Sunday services, and that was something very different from sitting down in the nave with all the others. High above the congregation, high even above Pastor Pringsheim in his pulpit, the two of them sat amid the surge of massive waves of sound, which together they unleashed and commanded—because sometimes, much to his great happiness and pride, Hanno was permitted to help his teacher in setting the stops. But once the postlude to the choral anthem was over and Herr Pfühl had slowly removed all ten fingers from the keys to let the bass of the tonic chord echo softly and solemnly, there would be a meaningful, artful pause, and then Pastor Pringsheim would lift up his voice from beneath the canopy of the pulpit; and at that point, it was not unusual for Herr Pfühl to start mocking the sermon and to laugh at Pastor Pringsheim’s stylized Franconian accent, his long and dark or sharply accented vowels, his sighs, and the abrupt shifts of darkness and transfiguration passing over his face. Then Hanno would laugh, too, in quiet, deep amusement; for, without even looking at one another or saying a word as they sat there high above it all, they were united in the opinion that his sermons were rather foolish babble and that the real worship service was something that the pastor and his congregation probably thought of as a mere adjunct for elevating the mood of devotion—and that something was music.

  The low level of musical interest that Herr Pfühl knew existed below him in the nave, among the families of senators, consuls, and other solid citizens, was a source of constant sorrow, and that was the real reason he liked to have his young pupil beside him—at least he could call his attention to the extraordinary difficulty of the piece he had just played. He indulged himself in the most remarkable displays of technique. He had composed a “reverse imitation,” a melody that could be read either forward or backward and formed the basis of a fugue that could be played in “crab form.” When he finished, he laid his hands in his lap, a gloomy expression on his face. “Nobody cares,” he said with a hopeless shake of his head. And then, while Pastor Pringsheim preached, he whispered to Hanno, “That was a cancrizans, a crab-form imitation, Johann. You’re not yet familiar with it, but it reproduces every note of a theme from back to front. You’ll learn strict analysis of an imitation in due time. But I’ll never torture you with the crab form, or force you to learn it. But never believe anyone who would tell you that it’s just a game of no musical value whatever. You’ll discover that the crab form has been used by the greatest composers down through the centuries. Only lazy and mediocre composers spurn such exercises—out of arrogance. Whereas humility is in order. Remember that, Johann.”

  On his eighth birthday, April 15, 1869, Hanno joined his mother to play a duet for the assembled family—a little fantasia of his own, a simple motif, which, when it came to him, had seemed so curious that he developed it further. But of course Herr Pfühl, to whom he showed it, found several things to criticize.

  “What a theatrical ending, Johann! It doesn’t really fit the rest, does it? It’s all quite correct at the start, but why did you decide suddenly to leave B major for a fourth-sixth chord, for this interval of a fourth with a diminished third—that’s what I want to know? Mere tricks. And you add a tremolo besides. You’ve picked that up somewhere. And where? I know only too well. You’ve been paying close attention when I have to play certain pieces for your good mother. Change the ending, child, and then it will be a tidy piece of work.”

  But it was the minor chord and the ending that Hanno cared most about; and his mother was so amused by them that they were kept. She picked up her violin and played the treble melody and then a variation on it, ending in a descant of thirty-second notes, while Hanno simply repeated his part. It sounded marvelous. Hanno was so happy that he kissed her. And that was how they played it on April 15.

  Old Madame Buddenbrook, Frau Permaneder, Christian, Klothilde, Herr and Frau Kröger, Herr and Frau Weinschenk, the Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse, and Fräulein Weichbrodt had joined the senator and his wife for a four o’clock dinner in honor of Hanno’s birthday. Now they were all seated in the salon. They listened with their eyes fixed on the child, who sat at the piano in his sailor suit, and on Gerda, looking so elegant and exotic, who first played a splendid cantilena on the G string and then, with impeccable virtuosity, unleashed a sparkling, bubbly flood of cadenzas. The silver trim on the handle of her bow flashed in the gaslight.

  Pale with excitement, Hanno had been able to eat almost nothing at dinner; but now, forgetting everything around him and removed from the world, he surrendered himself totally to his composition—which, alas, would be over in two minutes. The nature of his little melodic fantasia was more harmonic than rhythmic, and there was a very strange contrast between the basic, rudimentary musical resources at the child’s disposal and the momentous, passionate, and almost elegant way he emphasized and enhanced them. Hanno stressed each modulation with a tilt and bob of his head, and, shifting forward to the edge of his seat, he used the pedal to give each new chord emotional value. Indeed, if little Hanno achieved any effect at all—even if it was limited only to himself—it was less a matter of sentiment than of sensitivity. By retarding or heavily accenting some very simple harmonic maneuver, he gave it a higher, mysterious, precious meaning. Raising his eyebrows, rocking or lifting his upper body, he would suddenly introduce a faintly echoing tone-color to some new chord, harmonic device, or attack, lending it a surprising nervous energy. And now came the ending, Hanno’s beloved finale, which was to add the final simple, sublime touch to the whole composition. Wrapped in the sparkling, bubbling runs of the violin, which rang out with gentle, bell-like purity, he struck the E-minor chord tremolo pianissimo. It grew, broadened, swelled slowly, very slowly, and once it was at forte, Hanno sounded the dissonant C sharp that would lead back to the original key; and while the Stradivarius surged and dashed sonorously around the same C sharp, he used all his strength to crescendo the dissonance to fortissimo. He refused to resolve the chord, withheld it from himself and his audience. What would the resolution be like, this ravishing and liberating submersion into B major? Incomparable joy, the delight of sweet rapture. Peace, bliss, heaven itself. Not yet, not yet—one moment more of delay, of unbearable tension that would make the release all the more precious. He wanted one last taste of this insistent, urgent longing, of this craving that filled his whole being, of this cramped and strained exertion of will, which at the same time refused all fulfillment and release—he knew that happiness lasts only a moment. Hanno’s upper body slowly straightened up, his eyes grew large, his tightly closed lips quivered, he jerked back, drawing air in through his nose—and then that blessedness could be held back no longer. It came, swept over him, and he no longer fought it. His muscles relaxed; overwhelmed, he let his weary head sink back on his shoulders. His eyes closed, and a melancholy, almost pained smile of unutterable ecstasy played about his mouth. And while the violin whispered, wove, surged, and dashed around his tremolo, he shifted the pedal and added the base cadence that slid into B major, abruptly swelled to fortissimo; and then, with one brief burst, it broke off without a trace of echo.

  It was impossible for the effect Hanno’s playing had had on him to be transferred to his audience. Frau Permaneder, for example, had not the slightest idea what the whole show was about. But she had seen the child’s smile, the way his upper body had moved, the blissful way the little, delicate head that she loved so much had sunk to one side—and the sight had touched the depths of her easily stirred soft heart.

  “How the boy can play! How the child can play!” she cried, close to tears, and hurried over to fold him in her arms. “Gerda, Tom, he’ll be a Mozart, a Meyerbeer, a …” And since a third name of equal consequence did not immediately occur to her, she resorted to smothering her nephew with kisses—while he
sat there totally exhausted, his hands in his lap and a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Enough, Tony, enough,” the senator said softly. “I beg you, don’t give the boy ideas.”

  7

  IN HIS HEART, Thomas Buddenbrook was not pleased with little Johann and how he was developing.

  The easily shocked philistines had shaken their heads, but he had brought Gerda Arnoldsen home as his bride, because he had felt strong and free enough to show that, in comparison with those around him, his tastes were more distinguished, but in no way compromised his competence as a solid citizen. But was this child, the heir for whom he had waited in vain so long and who bore many physical traits of his father’s family—was this child to be so completely his mother’s son? He had hoped Hanno would one day continue his own life’s work with a more skillful and easy hand—and was the boy now to grow up at odds with the whole world in which he lived and would one day have to work, to be by his very nature a stranger to and estranged from his own father?

  Until now Gerda’s violin playing had been just another charming adjunct to her unique character, as much a part of her as those unusual eyes he so loved, as her heavy, chestnut hair, as her whole unique presence. But he was forced to watch as her passion for music—which he had always found rather odd—took possession of the child at such an early age. In some sense it had been part of Hanno from the very start, and Thomas regarded music as a hostile force that had come between him and his child—after all, he had hoped to make a genuine Buddenbrook of him, a strong and practical man with a powerful drive to master and take control of the world outside him. But in his present irritable mood, it seemed to him as if that hostile force was making him a stranger in his own house.

  He was incapable of drawing nearer to the music that so preoccupied Gerda and that friend of hers, Herr Pfühl; and Gerda, who was always impatient and exclusive when it came to matters of art, made any approach even more difficult, sometimes in truly cruel ways.