Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
The late Adrian Leverkuhn
A musical genius
In Freisburg on the Isar, 23 May, 1943, two years after Leverkuhn’s death – from the depths of night to deeper night.
Viola d’ampore
Descendant of the German humanists associated with ‘Letters of Obscure Men’, an heir to Reuchlin, Crotus of Dornheim, Mutianus, and Eoban Hesse
Did not hesitate to prematurely retire from the teaching position I loved
My late friend’s musical genius
Divinus influxibus ex alto
…in some horrible pact
The libretto adapted from Shakespeare’s comedy ‘Love’s Labours Lost’
Leverkuhn’s mischievous youthful composition
The grotesque opera suite ‘Gesta Romanorum’ and the oratorio, ‘The Revelation of St. John the Divine’
His indifference
His isolation to an abyss into which…
All around him lay coldness
Aura of dread
Their most horrifying context
II
My name is Dr. Serenus Zeitblom
Kaisersaschern on the Saale, district of Merseberg
I was never able to agree fully with our Fuhrer and his paladins on the issue of the Jews and their treatment
Breisacher the independent (Jewish) scholar
Catholic background
In the heart of Lutheran country
Leverkuhn the Lutheran
Very much at home in that golden sphere where the Holy Virgin was called ‘Jovis alma parens’
Our local secondary school
Founded in the second half of the fifteenth century
Universities of Giessen, Jena, Leipzig and between 1904 and 1905, Halle – Leverkuhn was a student there
Classical philology
Music
Belongs to a world of spirits
All this is an aside to my topic. Or again, not since the question of whether one can draw a clear and secure line between the noble, pedagogical world of the human spirit, and a world of spirits approached at one’s peril is very much, indeed all too much, part of my topic.
The Acropolis
Iacchus
Eubouleus
The clefts of Plato
Freisburg in Bavaria
For over two decades a professor at the local high school
Instructor at the theological seminary
Helene, his wife. She was the daughter of an old classicist colleague at Zwickau (Kingdom of Saxony)
A daughter, two sons (who both now serve their Fuhrer)
Nepomuk Schneiderwein – Adrian’s nephew
III
Around Schmalkold, partly along the Saale River, in provincial Saxony
Buchel
Attached to the village at Oberweiler, not far from Weissenfels – a forty –five minute train ride from Kaisersaschern
Linden tree
Robust brown bread and sweet butter, golden honey in the comb, luscious strawberries in cream, curdled milk served with dark bread crumbs and sugar
A Germany predating the Thirty Years War
Loved to smoke his cigar with a good jug of Mercersburg beer as a nightcap.
Martin Luther
Princess of Braunschweig –Wolfenbuttel who had married the son of Peter the Great. Later, then, she had faked her own death, even arranged her own burial, whereas in reality she had fled to Martinique and married a Frenchman there.
Herr von Schweinitz’s verse commentaries or the ‘Wisdom of Solomon to the Tyrants’
A desire to ‘speculate the elements’
Pursued studies in the natural science – biology and even chemistry and physics.
A certain trace of mysticism which at one time would have been suspect as an interest in sorcery.
The realm of magic
Some eerie uncertainty
Bold transgression
…colorful illustrations of exotic moths and sea creatures
Fantastically exaggerated beauty eke out an ephemeral life and some of which native peoples consider to be evil spirits that bear malaria
…called Hetaera Esmeralda
….in order to delude her other creatures
…to resemble a leaf to a ‘T’
….this butterfly
Disgusting
Repulsive odor
Asked ourselves if there was not something rather dishonorable about it
He believed all these things should be regarded as with meek reverence – the same dark reverence, for instance, with which he regarded the indecipherable hieroglyphics on the shells of certain mussels
The marine and shellfish
All these spirals and vaults
The Demiurge
….to imagine these exquisite dwellings as the product of the mollusks they defended that was the most astonishing thought.
The aesthetic of externity
Their poisonous sting
Of poison and beauty, poison and sorcery but of sorcery and liturgy as well
A medium-sized conch from New Caledonia
Their meticulous complexity gave every appearance of intending to communicate something
It has been proved, he said, ‘that it is impossible to get to the bottom of these symbols’
Let no one tell me nothing is being communicated here! For the message to be inaccessible, and for one to immerse oneself in that contradiction –that also has its pleasure
Even as a boy, I understood that nature belongs outside of man, is fundamentally illiterate – which in my eyes is precisely what makes her eerie.
…..very close to sorcery, indeed it is already within the realm and is the work of the ‘Tempter’
…setting up vibrations that caused the agitated sand to shift
Diverse figures and arabesques
Jack Frost
Phantasmagoria
Nature, in her creative dreaming, dreamt that same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imitation, then certainly it had to be reciprocal.
The devouring drop
Potassium dichromate and copper sulphate
Osmotic pressure
Heliotropic
With suppressed laughter
…whether such things deserved laughter or tears. I have only this to say: Phantasms of this sort are exclusively the concern of nature and in particular of nature when she is willfully tempted by man. In the worthy realm of humanities, one is safe from all such spooks.
IV
Adrian’s dear mother
The loveliest thing about her was her voice, a warm mezzo –soprano
Thuringian accent
The old guitar
Strum a few chords or even hum a tag of a verse from a song
The figure of Thomas the stable boy
A milkmaid named Hanne
A Frau Luder, the woman in charge of the dairy
He called me Zeitblom
The farm’s dog Suso
Ordained that he descend from the valley of innocence to inhospitable, indeed terrifying heights
The artist’s life functions as the paradigm for how fate shapes all our lives, as the classic example of how we are deeply moved by what we call becoming, development, destiny
In the dreamlike, purely human, and playful state of the child
More disturbing
The word ‘inspiration’
A phrase like ‘fresh ideas’
Mount Zion
Good for sledding in winter
When settled for good with the Schweigestills in Pfeiffering near Waldshut in Upper Bavaria
Kaschperl…
This second son
The bench beneath the linden tree she would sing for us all sorts of folk songs, army tunes and street ballads
Barnyard Hanne
‘row row row your boat’
Are you sleeping?
The one about the cuckoo and the jackass
Are you sleeping?
Ding-dong-ding
The onomatopoetic thing
Variation as a ‘la-la –la’
A brief burst of laughter
More in mockery than amusement
A branch of imitative polyphony
‘good job, droll, curious, amusing
In the dusk of their metallic flecks would retreat deeper into shadow
V
…their irrevocable horror of a German defeat.
Or fear more than a defeat – and that is a German victory
German character
….these papers, and with Spartan denial of every tender consideration, feel compelled to report me to the Gestapo
…singing rounds with barnyard Hanne that, as far as I know, first brought Adrian into contact with the sphere of music
The age of fourteen
Be a scholar
Something higher
Phenomenal ease with which Adrian absorbed his grammar school lessons
Schoolmaster Michelson
Clever and agile mind
Ingenious
‘if you already know everything’ I hear the young man saying, on occasion, “then I can leave’
To the pedagogical temperament
….bars of horizontal melody, when placed vertically above one another in a trio, can result in a harmonious grouping of voices
Bonfire gymnasium
His uncle Nikolaus Leverkuhn
VI
As for my hometown on the Saale…. Lies somewhat to the south of Halle
Thuringia
Halle itself, Handel’s birthplace
or Leipzig the city where Bach was cantor at St. Thomas
Kaiserschern
The historical museum
Crude instruments of torture
Two alliterative magic charms
The tomb of Otto III, Adelheid’s grandson and Theophano’s son who called himself both Emperor of the Romans and Saxonics, not because he wanted to be a Saxon, but in the sense that Scipio took the name Africanus – that is, because he had defeated the Saxons….1002
…for he was a perfect model of German all his life
Seems to bear ‘nunc stans’
Psychological epidemic
Children’s Crusade
A Saint Vitus’ Dance
A bonfire of vanities
The police refrained from ‘acting’ upon in our own day
…burning books, for instance, and other deeds I would rather not put into words
Eccentrics and harmless half crazy..
Certain type of woman has always been immediately suspected of witchcraft…
‘Cellar Lise’
volk
The volk is always the volk
Klein Gelbgeisser Gang, who voted the Social democratic ticket at the polls
In my opinion, the only help comes from literature, the humanistic sciences, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being
A woman named Mathilde Speigel
‘Toodeyloot’
My study above ‘Blessed Messengers’ pharmacy
Visit his uncle’s house, 15 Parochial Strasse, where the mezzanine was occupied by musical instruments the famed inventory of the Leverkuhn firm
VII
Luca Cimabue
…..that thirteenth century painter of Madonnas
A violin maker
German centers of instrument making like Mainz, Braunschweig, Leipzig or Barmen, but also with foreign firms in London, Lyons, Bologna and even New York
Bach festival
Oboe d’amore
Twangs, brays, rumbles, rattles and booms – even keyboard instruments were always represented too, by a celeste with its charming bell-like tones
In Cremona , but also from Tyrol , Holland, Saxony, Mittenwald plus those from Leverkuhn’s own workshop
Antonio Stradivarius
My own viola d’amore
Parochial Strasse
The contrabassoon
Bassoon
That darling of the Romantic period – the convoluted French Horn
The snare drum
Glockenspiel
‘twinkle twinkle little star’
The copper kettle drum, sixteen of which Berlioz still required for his orchestra
Erard pedal harps
Since Quantz, the famous virtuoso
Cathedral organist, Herr Wendell Kretzschmar, a stutterer
For selected quartets by Haydn and Mozart
With intuitive perseverance, the man hid himself from his own destiny
Reverent love for study itself, especially for ancient languages and their classical poets and writers
Mathematics
The ‘true’
Studying ordered relationships is ultimately the best there is
Order is everything
Romans thirteen: ‘for what is of God, is ordered.’
With him everything had to ‘turn out’
Sitting a little harmonium
First time, it seems curious how it all hangs together and goes in circles
And he struck a chord, all black keys – f sharp, c sharp, then added an E and with that
By using any of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale
So called tertian harmony, the Neapolitan sixth
It’s all relationship
Ambiguity
In short, he proved that in principle he was skilled at inharmonic transpositions and not unskilled at certain tricks for using them to evade a key and recasting them as modulation
Adrian had a passion! Should I have been glad? Instead it was somehow embarrassing and scary.
Piano lessons?
VIII
Kretzschmar was born in Pennsylvania of German – American parents
His opera ‘The Marble Statue’
The organ music of Schutze, Buxtehude, Froberger, and of course Sebastian Bach
Handel’s and Haydn’s compositions
Why didn’t Beethoven write a third movement for his last piano sonata Opus III?
Psychological content
Beethoven’s response to his famulus question, you see, had been that he had no time and therefore decided to make the second a little longer instead
Beethoven’s state in 1820, when his hearing afflicted by an incurable degeneration, had progressed to almost total loss
Busying himself as had the aged Haydn, simply with copying out Scottish songs
Modling
The sonata in C minor
A hard aesthetic nut to crack
A process of disintegration of alienation, of an ascent into what no longer felt familiar, but eerie, stood, that is, before a ‘plus ultra’
An excess of introspection and speculation
Arietta theme for stupendous variations that comprised the second movement of the sonata
Otherworldly or abstract
Had left the smug regions of tradition
He was the lonely prince of the ghostly realm
Despite the uniqueness, even freakishness of its formal language, Beethoven’s late work – the last five piano sonatas for instance – had a quite different, much more forgiving and amenable relation to convention
The subjective entered into a new relationship with the conventional, a relationship defined by death
Once again outgrew itself by entering grand and ghostlike, into the mythic and collective
The sonata Opus III
The adagio molto semplice e contabile
‘Sky of blue’, or ‘loves pain’ or fare-thee-well’ or comes a day’ or meadow-land’
‘O – thou sky of blue’ green-est meadowland’. Fare-thee- well for good’, and this added C sharp is the most touching, comforting, poignantly forgiving act in the world
‘Now for-get the pain!’, it says, ‘God was- great in us’. ‘All was- but a dream’’ Hold my – memory dear’
Then it breaks off
A new beginning after that farewell? A return – after that parting? Impossible.
‘Beethoven and the Fugue’
Prince Esterhazy
‘Mass in C’ that Beethoven had written for him
‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’
The funeral march in the ‘Eroica’ and the allegretto of the symphony in A major.
The final movement of the Cello Sonata in D, Opus 102, designated Allegro fugato
Anticipating learning, learning that leaps vast stretches of ignorance
Hammerklavier Sonata and the one that begins in A flat major
‘with some liberties’
The great fugue overture, Opus 124 and the majestic figures in the Gloria and Credo of the ‘Missa Solemnis’
‘Missa‘ at the Haffner house in Modling
For the installation of Archduke Rudolf as archbishop of Olmutz
The Credo
The Credo
The Credo
Not until three years later was the mass completed
The ‘Monster of Quartets’ one of Beethoven’s last five, written in six movements and performed four years after the completion of the ‘Missa‘
Babel of confusion
Handel
For Cherubini whose ‘Medea Overture’ (when he could still hear) he could not hear often enough
He had owned only a few works by Bach, a couple of motets, the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, a toccata and some odds and ends, all compiled in one volume
Symphonies of Bruckner
Sacred music of Brahms and of Wagner ( at least in ‘Parsifal’)
His ‘Missa Solemnis’
A cappella
‘The Kyrie’, was already written with no instrumental accompaniment
‘Palestrina’ or of the contrapuntal polyphonic vocal style of the Spanish Netherlands, in which Luther had seen his musical ideal, of Josquin des Prez perhaps or Adrian Wallaert, the founder of the Venetian school
He was unquestionably an ingenious man
Naiveté
A lack of awareness, everything as second nature – that seems to me to be the first criterion for a state, deserving the word ‘culture’
Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it
Kretzschmar lecture entitled ‘Music and the Eye’
Occhiali
‘cobbler’s patches
The ravishing joy that just the visual image of a Mozart score provides the practical eye
‘Marriage at Cana’ Orlando di Lasso
Joachim a’ Burck’s ‘St.. John Passion’
A six voiced canon by J.S. Bach in which he had re-worked a thematic by Frederick the Great
Such a decidedly instrumental musician as Berlioz
…meant the nobility of music itself, which was its intellectual content
Richard Wagner – who – upon hearing the Hammerklavier sonata once again in old age and losing himself in it, had burst into raptures for these ‘pure spectra of existence’
‘The Elemental in Music’
“Music and the Elemental’
A parallel that a philosophizing artist of recent memory – and again, it was Wagner of whom we spoke – had cleverly put use in his cosmogonic myth, ‘The Ring of the Nibelung’
By equating the basic elements of music with those of the world itself
Of the elemental in the art of pure musicians, of Beethoven and of Bach, in the latter’s prelude to the Cello Suite for example, likewise in E-flat major built on primitive triads
The heart needed to be as Scripture says, ‘swept with the bosom’
Anton Bruckner, who loved to refresh himself at the organ or piano with simple, long series of triads
Pious German sectarians. Practicing Anabaptists, had flourished in his home state of Pennsylvania
Their settlements were two in number, one named Ephrata, in Lancaster County; the other in Franklin County called Snowhill; and all of them had respectfully looked up to their leader, shepard, spiritual father, to a man named Beissel
Orphaned early on
A baker’s trade
A weaver’s craft
The Seventh Day Baptists
Primarily as a writer and poet
His style was high-flown and cryptic, laden with metaphors, dark allusions to passages of Scripture
A tract in the Sabbath, ‘Mysterion Anomalias’ and a collection of ninety –nine ‘Mystical and very Secret Sayings’
‘Tones of Divine Love and Praise’
‘Jacobs Place of Struggle and Knighthood’
‘Zion’s Hill of Incense’
‘the Song of the Lonely and Forlorn Turtledove’
‘Namely the Christian Church’
The Wandrous Sport of Paradise’
Ultimately it contained no less than seven hundred hymns including some with a vast number of stanzas
The John Conrad Beissel was overcome by the promptings. The spirit demanded that he take on not just the role of poet and prophet but of composer as well
He decreed that there should be masters and servants in every scale
Reminiscent of the line in Terence that speaks of ‘acting foolishly with reason’
‘Do you believe love is the strongest emotion? ”he asked.
‘Do you know of any stronger?’
‘yes, interest’
‘By which you probably mean o love that has been deprived of its animal warmth, that is!’
‘Let’s agree on that definition! he said, with a laugh. Good night!’
X
Offered his imagination something one might call nourishment or stimulus
Laurence Sterne
University of Geissen – Adrian learned English on his own
But especially Shakespeare’s works
Together Shakespeare and Beethoven formed d a binary star that outshone everything else in his intellectual heavens
Those two giants
Russian, English and French novels
Shelly and Keats, Holderlin and Novalis, Manzioni and Goethe, Schopenhauer and Meister Eckhart
Four part psalms by Palestrina
Little preludes and fughettas by Bach, as well as his two voiced inventions, the ‘Sonata Facile’ by Mozart, one movement sonatas by Scarlatti
Having taken up the piano so late
Tomfoolery
Dissonance
So many contradictions
The mordant sound, like a wizard’s cryptogram, forged relationships between the most distant notes and keys
Transformation of the intervals within a chord (which occupied him more than anything else) of the horizontal, that is, into the vertical, of the sequential into the simultaneous
Polyphony
Voices
Dissonance is the criterion of its polyphonic merit
Schumann’s ‘Scenes from Childhood’
And the other two little sonatas of ‘Opus 49’ by Beethoven
Demonstrating the structure of the sonatas for him from works by Clementi, Mozart and Haydn
Works by Brahms and Bruckner, Schubert, Robert Schumann
Borodin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky –Korsakov; by Antonin Dvorak, Berlioz, Cesar Franck and Chabrier
‘Cello cantilena’
Oboe solo!
What Gounod had taken from Schumann, Cesar Franck from Liszt, how Debussy leaned on Mussorgsky and where d-Indy and Chabrier were Wagnerizing
Tchaikovsky and Brahms
Handel’s alfresco chords
Bach’s problem, he said, was this:
‘How can one create polyphony that is harmonically meaningful? For the modern the question presents itself somewhat differently. It is more like, ‘How can one create harmony that has the appearance of polyphony?’
Piano piece by Schubert or Beethoven
The glorious culture of the German art song
Schubert
Schumann, Robert Franz, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Mahler
Schumann’s, ‘Moonlit Night’
Eichendorff poems
In the eerie moralistic warning, ‘Beware! Stay alert and awake!
Mendelssohn’s ‘On the Wings of Song’
Brahms, ‘The Four Serious Songs’
‘O death, how bitter thou art’
Schubert’s always darksome genius brushed by death
‘It came from the mountains‘, by Schmidt of Lubeck,
‘Der Wanderer’ Schubert
and in ‘Why do I pass the highways by that other traveler’s take?’ from ‘Winterreise’
I have surely done no wrong
that I should shun humankind
Why then do I madly long
Barren Wilderness to find?
The childlike esotericism of ‘The Magic Flute’
The perilous charm of ‘Figaro’
The demonic depths of the clarinets in Weber’s gloriously ennobled operetta ‘Der Freischutz’
Gloomy and painful isolation like Hans Heiling or ‘The Flying Dutchman’
And finally the lofty humanity and brotherhood of ‘Fidelio’ with its great overture in C played before the final scene
The score of Overture no. 3
‘Imitation Dei’
X
During his last, his senior year at school, Leverkuhn began, along with everything else, to study Hebrew
It turned out that the wanted to study theology
Sovereign polyhistor and philosopher
A discipline in which Queen philosophy herself becomes a handmaiden an auxiliary science, or in academic terms, a minor subject’ – and that discipline is theology. Where love of wisdom rises to contemplation of the highest of beings, the fountainhead of existence, to the study of God and things divine
As Scripture says, it passeth all understanding
The sacrificum intellectus
Polyhymnia
Stoienton’s warnings
Particularly about natural merits’
From Goethe
Often speaking of ‘innate merits’
Only scoundrels are modest
Schiller
‘a confused nation, he insisted, and a puzzle to others (Germany)
The mood for laughter and foolishness
Sense of the comic
And so a potbellied and knock-kneed King Heinrich in Lohengrin
Augustine’s ‘De Civitat Dei’
And was about Ham, the son of Noah and the father of Zoroaster the Magician
He found later, in Rudolf Schildknapp the writer and Anglophile whose acquaintance he made in Leipzig, a far better partner for such moods – which is why I have always been a little jealous of the man
XI
At Halle on the Saale
August Hermann Francke
Francke Foundation
Canstein Bible Institute
Luther’s bible
Heinrich Osiander
Hans Kegel, D.D.
Alma mater hallensis
University of Wittenberg, since the two were joined upon their reopening at the end of the Napoleonic War
Crotus Rabianus
Whom Luther called ‘Crotus the Epicurean’ no less, or even Dr. Krote, the toad who licks plates for the Cardinal of Mainz
Archbishop Albrecht placed upon partaking Holy Communion under….
Justus Jonas, who arrived in 1541 and was one of those who, like Melanchthon and Hutton, had changed camps from the humanists to the reformers – much to Erasmus’ distress
Just as Lutheranism had been in its day, Pietism
There surely can be no doubt that humanity would have been spared endless bloodletting and the most horrible self-mutilation had Martin Luther not restored the Church
Schleiermacher
Feeling and taste for the infinite and called a factual state existing in man
Psychological fact a given within man.
That is reminiscent of the ontological proof of God
Kant has demonstrated this proof cannot stand up against reason any better than its fellows
Everything must be tested against reason as against the philosopher’s stone
A generation that declared as obsolete everything in the Bible that did not serve ‘moral improvement’ and announced that it saw only a comedy of errors in the history of the Church and its teachings.
In my opinion ‘liberal theology’ is ‘wooden Iron’, a contradictio ad adjecto
But religion cannot be reduced to mere ethics, and thus it turns out that scientific and real theological thought must once again part company
Its moralism and humanism lack any insight into the demonic character of human existence
The demonic
Runs the risk of becoming demonology
Halle was ….more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, but despite all its modern hurly-burly….
…in the stamp of dignified old age
A citadel near valuable saltworks on the Saale
Magdelburg and Otto III
Moritz and Hans Strasse
There runs a kind of Bridge of Sighs
‘Red Tower’
The statue of Roland and the bronze statue of Handel
Durer’s ‘Melancholia’
The square was divided into sixteen fields inscribed with Arabic numbers, but so that the’1’’was at the lower right, the ‘16’ at the upper left, and the magic –or curiosity- lay in the fact that when added, whether from the top or bottom, horizontally or diagonally, the numbers always gave the sum of thirty – four
Kolonat Nonnanmacher
The neo-Socratics
Anaximander, and most extensively Pythagoras, though with the infusion of a great deal of Aristotelian stuff, since we know about the Pythagorean explanation of the world almost exclusively by way of the Stagirite
Grand gesture
‘cosmos’
‘autos epha’
We were delighted by Aristotle’s theory of content and form
His theory of entelechy
The thoughts that eternally thinks itself, which we call ‘God’.
I could only think ‘May your angel prove wise and fruitful’
Philosophy of religion, dogmatic ethics, and apologetics, toward the end come the practical disciplines, catechism, the care of souls, the study of church order and law
Ehrenfried Kumpf
‘rugged personality’
And he never said anything but ‘Holy Writ’ when referring to the Bible
You must set pins if you would bowl’ or No use killing nettles to grow docks’
Exclamations like ‘s’blood!’, ‘zounds’!, ‘cod’s eyes!’ or even ‘God’s bodykins!’
Learned by heart all the important works of Schiller and Goethe the Pauline message of sin…
Damascus experiences
Path that Descartes had taken – for when, on the contrary, the certainty of self-awareness, the ‘cogitaire’ had seemed more legitimate, than all scholastic authority
Not only anti-Pharisaical, anti-dogmatic, but also anti metaphysical, oriented entirely towards the ethical and epistemological concerns
An affirmer of culture – especially of German culture, for at every turn he revealed himself to me a massive nationalist of the Lutheran variety and could say nothing more vehement of someone than that he thought and taught like a giddy foreigner’.
And may the Devil shit on him, amen!’
A sturdy faith in revelation
Devil
The personal existence of the Adversary, but I tell myself…
Then the Devil is part of the picture and asserts his complementary reality over and against that of God
But ultimately he saw the Liar, the Evil Enemy at work primarily in reason itself and seldom spoke of it without adding ‘Si Diabolus non esset mendax et homicidal!’
‘Old Clootie’
‘Debbil’, ‘Dickens’, ‘Deuce’, ‘Old Scratch’
‘Master Dicis – et – non – facis’
‘Black Caspar’
‘God’s Enemy’
….and not disdain thy gifts of God the leg of lamb, the light Moselle
With dessert indeed, and to our horror, he took a guitar from the wall…..
‘How the Miller Loves to Roam’
‘Lutzow’s Wild and Reckless Hunt’
‘The Lorelei” and ‘Gaudeaumus Igitur’
Who loves not women wine and song, remains a fool his whole life long.”
‘He Who Rove So Gay and Free’
All the same after the dual with that Devil he had one of his fits of laughter out on the street and it subsided only slowly under the diversion of conversation
XIII
He was a private lecturer Eberhard Schleppfuss, who for two semesters exercised his venia legend in Halle
‘Psychology of Religion’
Yet the example merely shows that even the piquant can forfeit popularity if tied to something intellectual. I have already said that by its very nature theology tends – and under certain conditions must always tend- to become demonology.
His demonic concept of God and the world was illuminated by psychology making it acceptable, indeed appealing to the modern scientific mind
Professor Krump’s crude but honest treatment of the Devil was child’s play in comparison to the psychological reality with which Sclheppfuss endowed the Destroyer, the personified apostasy from God.
The reality of the betrayal of God; of pacts with the Devil, of ghastly intercourse with demons
The name apostates gave to the Holy Virgin, ‘The Fat Lady”
Evil the Evil One himself – was a necessary outpouring and inevitable extension of God Himself
Freedom
Freedom meant either keeping faith with God voluntarily or carrying on with devils and being able to mutter horrible things at mass.
that was one definition, as supplied by psychology of religion
Freedom is the freedom to sin, and piety consists in making no use of freedom out of love for God, who had to grant it
If I was not totally misled. In short it bothered me
For example the acts of the Inquisition had been inspired by the most touching humanity. He told about a woman who had been imprisoned during the classical period, tried, and burned to ashes for having had intercourse with an incubus for six whole years three times a week, and particularly on holy days – even when lying beside her sleeping husband
Employed fire to snatch this soul from the Devil at the last moment, thereby obtaining for her God’s forgiveness
That woman with her incubus, and no one else, had sunk to absurd superstition
Superstition meant gullibility for the whisperings and incitements of the Enemy of the human race, the concept included all invocations, songs and conjuring’s, all transgressions in the realm of magic, all vice and crime, the flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum, the illusions daemonum
Evil was far more evil when there was good and good far more beautiful when there was evil, yes perhaps there could be disagreement on this) evil would not be evil at all were there no good- and good at all were there no evil. Augustine at least had gone so far as to say, that the function of the bad was to let the good emerge more clearly, making it all the more pleasing, and thus praiseworthy when compared to the bad
Schleppfuss said this opened up the problem of the absolutely good and beautiful, of the good and beautiful with no relation to the evil and the ugly – the problem of quality without comparison
He had created the world as it is, that is interlarded with evil – that is, it had to be yielded up in part to demonic influences
Whenever the topic was the power of demons over human life, sexual matters always played a conspicuous role. How could it be otherwise? The demonic character of that domain was a primary fixture of that classical psychology, for it, sexuality was the demon’s favorite playground, the ideal starting point for God’s adversary, the Enemy and Destroyer
‘the demon hath power to overcome those who lust’. For the power of demons lay in men loins, and it was those that had been meant by the Evangelist when he said “ when a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace.’
‘There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger Satan to buffet me
Already the raging sin in our blood, and was there not considerable surrender to evil in the state of itching lust?
It came from the Devil
The object, instrumentum of the tempter, was the female. Granted she was at the time also the instrument of holiness, for it would not exist without the raging’s of sinful lust.
‘as a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman.’
‘and I find more better than death the woman, and even a good woman, is subject to the lusts of the flesh
Femina – which came half from fides, half from minus, and so meant, ‘lesser faith’’ – not have stood on wickedly intimate footing with the filthy spirits who populate that realm, not be most particularly suspected of intercourse with them, witchcraft?
To be sure there were not only incubi, but succumbi as well
Lived with an idol
I, patient idol
In Meersburg near Constance, there lived an honest lad. Henry Klopgessel by name and a cooper by trade, of handsome figure and good health. Father demanded he first achieve a worthy position in life, become a master in his trade, before he would give him his daughter
The two prematurely became as one
…he did not want to go along
….but the lads made fun of him called him a prudish milksop…..
A lad of his build who suddenly could not manage it must be a victim of the Devil
And for him there was no longer any doubt that he was a victim of the devil
Accepted a specificum, a salve, which ostensibly had been prepared from the fat of a dead unbaptized child and with which she had secretly rubbed her Heinz during an embrace, drawing on his back a prescribed figure that would bind him securely to her
The old hag did indeed have an agreement with the Devil
But also of the odious panaceas, among them a grease, smeared with which any stick of wood promptly rose into the air, bearing its witch with it.
The Dragon
The two witches, old and young, were publicly burned at adjacent stakes
His manhood, so sinfully taken from him, was restored to him again…
To be sure, Barbel had pinned her Heim down and ‘restrained’ him – not by some devilish elixir, however, but with her charms and the spell of her own will, with which she protected him against other temptations
But even this viewpoint includes a recognition of a certain natural wonder-working power of the mind and its ability to regulate and alter the organic and corporeal – and this, if you will, magic side of the matter was what Schleppfuss deliberately emphasized, of course, in his commentary on the Klopfgeissel case
That one mind knowingly and willingly – that is, by means of magic – had the power to alter some person’s bodily substance. In other words: the reality of magic, of demonic influence and bewitchment was thereby confirmed and certain phenomena – like the evil eye, an empirical complex concentrated in the saga of the basilisk’s deadly glance – were thus wrested from the realm of so-called superstition
‘questionable’
A great philological value to it.
‘your very humble servant’
XIV
Numerology
XIII
XIII
XIII
Urgency and futility
On frère –et – cochon
With a solo, a Bach toccata, or a movement from Beethoven or Schumann
Not at all uninteresting debate about creativity
All sorts of preconditions, to culture , traditions, initiation, convention, routine, although in the end…
‘Sons of Muses’
In corpore
Thuringia; and there, usually in Naumburg or Apolda
Shank’s mare
‘quod demonstramus’
Rebirth was once called ‘renascimento’ out of that pastoral romance Adrian insisted, ‘came the French Revolution, and Lutheran Reformation was only an offshoot and ethical byway of the Renaissance, its application in religious matters
…live out its full vitality that natural and demonic element of existence of which Kierkegaard has again made us aware
‘do you believe religiosity is a peculiarly German talent?, Adrian asked.
“In the way I defined it, as an inner youth, as spontaneity, as faith in life, as a Dureresque ride between death and the Devil – yes I do.’
And France, the land of cathedrals, whose king was called His Most Christian Majesty, and which produced theologians like Bossuet, like Pascal?
‘That was a long time ago……’
I’m aware that the most talented among you, who have read your Kierkegaard, locate truth, woven ethical truth entirely in subjectivity and reject with horror collective life in the herd
And the theonomous bond
Humbug of the ‘contrat social’
Look at the Ruhr
But nationality is finite, as well, someone else recalled, either Hubmeyer or Schappler, I cannot say for certain. ‘Nationality as eternal – we can’t accept that as theologians
Mathaus Arzt
Some act of obedience to God
Carl Teichleben nationalism
Germaness
National bond
Whether the world is truly the sole work of a benevolent God, or if it is perhaps a cooperative venture, I won’t say with whom
‘one should make the exception, Arzt suggested, ‘of Russia’s revolutionary youth. There you’ll find, if I’m not mistaken, an untiring interest in discussion ‘and one hell of a lot of dialectic tension’
‘The Russians’, Deutschlin said sententiously, ‘have depth, but no form. Those to our west have form, but no depth, only we Germans have both together
Our relationship to people and things has become a subject to endless reflection and complication and presents only problems and uncertainty, so that any attempt to plot the truth threatens to end in resignation and despair
A myth of dubious authenticity and indubitable arrogance that is, to the nationalist myth with its structural romanticizing of the warrior
‘the demonic, in German…..that means the instinctual
With a psychology of the instincts
‘bipolar posture’
XV
The young student of divine sciences
Chladni’s sonorous figures and the devouring drop
In Germany music enjoys the same high popular regard accorded literature in France
‘he has’, he said, the initiate’s, the composer’s eye for music, not that of some outsider finding motifs….but also letters exchanged fairly frequently (every two weeks I believe) between Halle and Kaisersaschern
Hase’s Private Conservatory
That excellent pedagogue Clemens Hase
Miniscule interpolations and corrections
He had thought of switching to mathematics
The Baroque turn of the phrase….
‘neither from you nor from myself, that there be something godforsaken queer about you ‘apprendista’, a thing not of the workadays, and I play not all-hid here, but a thing that sooner gives cause to misericord than that it makes the eye shine bright
For I have not warmth
Lukewarm
‘I am decidedly cold’
Anabasis
I am no longer a bachelor lad leaping from matter to matter, but am wed to a profession, to a course of study, it has grown stronger along with me, indeed at times wickedly so
Out of contritio
‘no use killing nettles to grow docks’ , he wrote
He spoke of being a ‘recluse’ and did not intend it in any kind of praise
Albertus Magnus
An adeptus
The prime material
Magisterium
‘O homom fuge’?
How it is done
The cellos enlarge on….the wind instruments
Power of brass
Law of economy
Recedes lingers, very beautifully
Then steps back
The bombardon – boom , boom boom – bang!
The urge to laugh is overwhelming
Why must almost everything appear to me as its own parody?
The sense of the comic
Personal weariness and intellectual boredom
The ‘sense of the comic’ – what I am saying is this: ‘Art, in its will to live and progress, puts on the mask of these dull-hearted personal traits in order to manifest, objectivize, and fulfill itself in them virginity, though fine, needs motherhood to hallow
What else is but a sad and barren field left fallow
Cherubin’s ‘Wayfarer’
Signing up with the Third Field-Artillery Regiment in Naumberg
The university for lectures in philosophy and to get his doctorate in that field
At the beginning of the winter semester 1905, Leverkuhn moved to Leipzig
XVI
Our formal goodbye was cool and reserved
Once my military service as complete
And flinging himself totally into the arms of music
Uniquely stamped with destiny
His uncle’s harmonium
Our singing canons with barnyard Hanne
I think you know yourself
Service in Naumberg
Leipzig, the Friday after Purification, 1905 in Peter Strasse, House # 27
To my honorable, erudite esteemed beneficent master and Baluster:
The sins of Ninevah
Centrum musicae
August Platz
The Gewandhaus
The Collegium Beatae Virginis
Peter Strasse
Central Station
I pursue harmony, and the punctum contra punctum principally in theory
Papa Haydn
Bach of Hamburg
Droll studies in the canon and the fugue
In praxi
Per aversionem
Thus am diligent, zelo virtutis
Devilishly pronounced French – peandiful puilding and antiquade endemment interessant
Paul’s church
Thomas’s Church
John’s church
Demeanor, piping high sweet pleasure and dallying with me…
….the nymphs and daughters of the wilderness, six or seven – how shall I put it – morphos clearurings esmereldas, scantily clad transparently clad, in tulle gossamer and glister…
Led me to the bawdyhouse…
In the finale of ‘‘Freischutz’
Esmerelda
Ars magnificandi
Gewandhaus concert with Schumann’s ‘Third’
A piece de resistance
Mendelssohn said of Gluck: ‘My cook knows more about counterpoint than he.”
Mendelssohn n, for whom, as you know, I have a tender spot
He is despite his elves and nixies, a classicist
Delacroix, who writes him, ‘l’epere vous voir ce soir, mais ce moment est capable de me faire dwiner fou! All quite possible for the Wagner of painting
Chopin
Shelley
Take the Nocturne in c-sharp minor Opus 27 no. 1 and the duet that begins after the enharmonic substitution of c- sharp major with D flat major in its desparate beauty, the sound surpasses all ‘Tristan’ orgies.
The letter ends with the cry of ‘Ecce epistola!’
XVII
The term ‘deeply attentive’ coined to describe Delacroix’s friendship for Chopin?
Wagging and buffoonery
His ‘jape’
‘Jan satis est’
Appended remarks about Schumann, Romanticism and Chopin
The language of the Age of Reformation with its historical affinity to religious matters
‘hell hole of lusts’
That Leipzig bamboozlement
‘prude’
Ideas adopted from Kretzschma about how the sensual was not to be disdained in art
Among the seminarians there was no talk of women or wenches, girlfriends or love affairs
That I had tasted of the apple
I entered into the liaison not so much out of hot-blooodedness as out of curiosity, vanity, and a desire…
A nature like Adrian’s does not have much ‘soul’
The proudest intellect stands in most immediate confrontation with what is bestial
But now a female had touched him and he had fled Adrian would return to the spot where his deceiver had led him
XVIII
During my year in the military
University of Leipzig
My educational tour of the classical world, which took place in the years 1908 and 1909
The two years he spent in Italy – and fer a short stay in Munich, with his friend Schildknap, a Silesian by birth
The next seventeen years, until the catastrophe of 1930
Strangely cabalistic, simultaneously playful and rigorous, ingenious and profound craft
Had him orchestrate a great deal of piano music, movements from sontas, and even string quartets
Berlioz, Debussy, and the late Romantics both Germany and Austria
The operas of Gretry or Cherbini
Later achieve his highest and boldest creations, the ‘Revelation of St. John’ and the ‘Lamentation of Dr. Faustus‘ – all that emerged very early on in both word and attitude
His own symphonic fantasy, ‘The Phosphorescence of the Sea’
The ‘Cello Sonata in A Major’
One of his ‘Brentano Songs‘
It’s the root canal work I’ve learned to do.’
Clandestine
Traits of parody
Intellectual irony
Lie an eerie stroke of genius
XIX
I was discharged from the military and joined him again finding him externally unchanged but in reality already marked man pierced by the arrow of fate
Apollo and the Muses
Contradiction between my own psychological state and the actual coloration of the story I must tell
The ‘nut-brown lass’
Called Esmeralda
May 1906, the first Austrian performance of ‘Salome’ was to take place in Graz, the capital of Styria
This successfully revolutionary work to whose aesthetic sphere he was not in the least drawn, but which of course interested him in its technical musical aspects, particularly the way prose dialogue had been set to music
Love and poison
The hapless woman warned the man who desired her against herself’
That caused him, though warned, to spurn the warning and insist on possessing that flesh
She saw to it that he would never forget her, but he, who would never see her again, never forgot her for her own sake, either, and her name – the one he had given her from the beginning haunts his work like a rune, legible to no one but me.
To insert secret messages as formula or logograms in his work, revealing music’s innate predilection for superstitious rites and observances charged with mystic numbers and alphabetical symbols
Use of a figure, a sequence of five or six notes, that begin with an H (which Anglo Saxons call B) and ends on an Es (known in the English speaking world as E-flat) with E and A alternating in between – a basic motif with an oddly melancholy sound that pervades his music in a variety of harmonic and rhythmic disguises
Thirteen ‘Brentano Songs’
‘O sweet maiden, how bad you are’
‘Lamentation of Dr. Faustus’
And that encoded sound reads as : H – E – A – E – E – Es : Hetaera esmerelda
What a talented shipmate!
For a localized infection
Erasmi
A problem with Pooh
Pooh-poohing
A parlor with two windows
In the middle of the room, however, was Dr. Erasmi dressed in a ruffled white shirt and lying –goatee at the vertical, eyelids closed – on a tassled cushion in an open coffin set atop two tressles
The dead man was lying there so alone and exposed to the wind
That strange juncture never became clear
He does not appear to have investigated the doctor’s sudden death any further, had no interest in the matter, it seemed
He suggested that the man’s constant pooh –poohing had surely always been a bad sign
That his second choice was made under a similarly unlucky star
Potted plants – palms and African hemp
A tag of a moustache beneath his nostrils – a style popular in those days among the upper classes, ad which would later become a hallmark of a face in world history
Patterns of speech were sloppy
Falls on the Rhine and by substituting ‘rind’ for Rhine turn it into slips on a banana peel
Their stiff hats set at the back of their heads. Dr. Zimbalist’s eyes were lowered as if he were minding every step down he took. One of his wrists was linked by a bracelet and chain to the wrist of one of his escorts. Looking up and recognizing his patient, he gave a sour wince of his cheek nodded and said, “Some other time!” thunderstruck, Adrian, who otherwise would have stood in their way, pressed his back to the wall and let them pass, watched them depart, and soon followed back down the stairs. He saw them climb into a waiting car, which then drove off at high speed
The localized infection healed quickly and vanished
Just as Adrian was presenting a compositional study, he did suffer a bad dizzying spell that sent him reeling and forced him to lie down
And when, having been returned to civilian life, I moved to Leipzig, I found my friend’s nature and ways unaltered
XX
I had not expected him to meet me at the train station
‘Hello’, he said, without looking up, “we can talk in a moment.’ And he continued to work for several minutes…
The Schaffgosch Quartet is playing Opus 132 this evening
The late Beethoven work, the ‘String Quartet in A Minor’
Claudius Ptolemaeus, a man from Upper Egypt living in Alexandria who had produced the best of all known scales, the natural or pure scale
Ultimately’. He said, every one of the four must be a Paganini
Allegro appassionato
Adrian was looking for a text for an opera
He was considering ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’
From a collection of Mediterranean verse in a felicitous German translation, which included Provencal and Catalonian lyrics from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Italian poetry, visionary highlights from the ‘Divina Comedia’, as well as some Spanish and Portuguese works
The influence of Gustav Mahler would be felt here and there
And today we recognize in all that the master of the grotesque visions of his ‘Apocalypse’
The ‘Purgatorio’ and the ‘Paradisio’
Attempted union of music and word and quoted a rough maxim of Soren Kierkegaard’s: He did not have much use for the sublime sort of music that thought it could do without word, because it regarded itself as ranking higher than the word, whereas it ranked lower.
Kierkegaard must therefore have little respect for our own Opus 132 and that on the whole, the man uttered a great deal of aesthetic nonsense
Beethoven
He would normally sketch out the conceptual flow of a composition in words, with at most a ….
Ninth Symphony
And finally it was surely true that the whole development of German music had striven toward Wagner, dramas of music and word, had found its goal in them
Brahms
Adrian’s own ‘Light on His Back’
Don Armado
Despair of the witty Berone
It cannot be, it is impossible
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony
The blood of youth burns not with such excess
As gravity’s revolt to wantonness
Verlaine
Chanson d’autonne
C’est l’heure expuse – final line is
‘Une grand sommeil noer – Tombe sur ma vie,’
Couple of pieces from his ‘Fetes Glantes’
Including ‘He bosoir la lune’!’
‘Mourons ensemble, voulez – vous?’
As for Blake’s singular poetry…
And the uncanny sixteen lines of ‘Poison Tree’
Lectures by Lautensack and the famous Bermeter
The Café Central group
Leipzig Kemmerspiele
Rudiger Schildknapp
Schildknapp had been born in a medium sized town in Silesia
And since the Prussian hierarchy either excluded him from the upper circle of the town or, when it did admit him by way of exception gave him a good taste of humiliation
Fits of foul temper
Rudiger, is son
Endeavor to translation
Skelton’s morality plays, a few pieces by Fletcher and Webster, some didactic poems by Pope, and supplied excellent German editions of Swift and Richardson, as well
Strike up an acquaintance with all the sons of Albion who came to Leipzig as tourists
Had an ‘elective affinity’ for their language and spoke it perfectly
Black and white and one would see him surrounded by females, whose admiration was undisguised
He took no part in sports, except to do a little skiing in Saxony’s Switzerland
And potentiality was his domain
The most frequent phrase to pass his lips were the two words, ‘one ought’…
‘one ought to write a Leipzig novel of manners’, ‘one ought to take a trip around the world, if only as a dishwasher’….
‘one ought to run a grocery’
He got himself invited out a lot even at the tables of rich Jews, although he had been heard to make anti-Semitic remarks
These wives of Jewish publishers and bankers looked up to him with that profound admiration their race has for German master blood and long legs
Thus he had also refused Adrian’s proposal that he furnish the libretto to ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’
Yet he loved Adrian very much, was truly devoted to him
The act of chewing on raunchy zwieback
Torpedo
A war that in the view of reasonable men can no longer be won
Of the historical circumstances
Of my sixty year old body
As the Last Judgment fell upon Munich as well, I sat here in my study, turning ashen, shaking like the walls, doors and windowpanes of my house – and writing this account of a man’s life with a trembling hand. But since this hand has reason to tremble in any case because of my subject, I did not let it bother me that a familiar difficulty was augmented a bit by the terror outside.
Yes, we are a completely different nation, one that is a contradiction to sobriety and common sense and whose soul is powerfully tragic; our love belongs to fate; ant fate, if only it is one, even a doom that sets the heavens afire with the red twilight of the gods
Our Fuhrer, hastening into action, commanded a massive halt to the retreat, spoke aptly and reprovingly of a ‘Stalingrad psychosis’ and ordered the Dnieper line be held at any price, that ‘any price’, has been paid, but to no avail; and how far and to where the Red tide of which our newspapers speak will yet surge is left to our powers of imagination; which are given to wild excesses as it is…
Yes, Monsignor Hinterpfortner is right. We are lost…
Germany is done for, or will be done for.
In short, as all-embracing collapse looms ahead
From which liars and frauds then prepare a stupefying poisonous home brew
Sympathy for Chopin’s not-wanting-to-know, his unadventuresomeness
H disdained pleasures of the eye
He approved of the differentiation between ‘eye-people’ and ‘ear-people’ claimed it to be as incontrovertible, and counted himself definitely among the latter
True, Goethe also says that music is totally inborn
Baroque sacred music
Martin’s church
The Chamber Chorus of Basel
Monteverdi’s ‘Magnificat’
Organ studies by Frscobaldi, an oratorio by Carissimi and a Buxtehude cantata
Carissimi’s ‘Jeptha’ and Shutz’s ‘Psalms of David’
Who could fail to recognize the stylistic influences of this madrigalsm in the quasi- religious music of his later years, in ‘The Apocalypse’ and ‘Faustus’
Orchestra de la Suisse Romande
Adrian’s ‘Phosphorescence of the Sea’
To be born in the provincial and therefore that much more uncanny depths of Germany
Piano pieces; a concerto’ for string orchestra, and quartet for flute, clarinet, corno de bassetto, and bassoon…
Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter’s head like Pallas Athene fully adorned In enchased armor
‘Illusion and games have art’s conscience opposed to them nowadays. Art wants to stop being illusion and games, it wants to become comprehension
Banality’s expanding realm
The ‘Travesty of innocence’
‘Hark, again the flute is weeping’
Through the night that now envelops
Shines for me the light of tones
‘Oh Sweet Maiden’
‘Hymn”
“the Merry Musicians’
‘The Hunter to the Shepherd’
‘Opening’
Oh star and flower
Mind and dress
Love pain and time and
Everness
‘Grandmother Snakecook’
‘Maria, from whose parlor have you come now?’
‘Oh, woe, good mother, what woe!’
Which with incredible artistic empathy conjures up the most cozily frightening and terrifying domains of the German folk song…
Star whispers drifting
Holy and free
All distance lifting
Speak now to me
All is by kindness
By goodness surrounded
Offering comfort, a hand
Grasps a hand:
Even at night by its light
We are bounded
Timelessly held by an
Innermost hand
The Brentano Songs
Tonhalle in Zurich under the baton of Dr. Volkmar Andreas and with the ‘Merry Musicians’
Clemen’s Brentano poems
XXII
September, 1910, at a time that is, when I had already begun to teach high school in Kaisersaschern
198
The perfectly exceptional phenomenon of love. Of course, there is no way to separate sensuality and love
A demonstration of love
Cuts were inevitable in any case. A comedy cannot last four hours – which had been and still remains the major objection to the ‘Meistersinger’
These old sayings of Rosaline and Boyet; their ‘thou can’st not hit it hit it hit it’ etc.,…
Was itself something instinctive and naively consistent with the spirit of music
Your notion of the archaic revolutionary schoolmaster, ‘I said, ‘has something very German about it.’
A rational total organization of all musical material…
Inverted fugues, crab canons, and inverted crab canons
‘a magic square’
Of our domestic national experience
He was never to return to her, did not wish to. She came to him.
XXIII
No shouldering the cart.
He had begun composition of ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’
Rather absurd piece of decor the relic of some forgotten enthusiasm, an immense etching framed in walnut and picturing Giacomo Meyerbeer at the piano
The grand piano in the salon a soft-toned Bechstein that had a bit to much use
A richly framed oil painting from 1850, badly darkened by age and picturing the Golden Horn with a view of Galata
Inez and Clarissa
Bronze paperweight that lay as a hollow – eyed symbol of transience and ‘convalescence’ atop a folio volume, which bore the name of Hippocrates in Greek letters
Took her life by swallowing the poison
Inez, the older sister
‘The Miner’
I mine the human souls
Deep shaft by night
Descending boldly down the
Silent dark
Where sorrow’s precious ore
Gas left a mark
That glistens reticent and yet so bright
And long no more to rise to
Happiness
He would have actually preferred to be a painter as now a dilettante maker of instruments and a cello-player of considerable savagery and inaccuracy…snorting fiercely through…
Kranich, a numismatist and curator of the local coin museum
Plus two painters, members of the ‘Sezession’ Leo Zink and Baptist Spegler
Inez Rodde held him in greatest mistrust – for what reason she would not say, but she did tell Adrian that he was underhanded, a sneak.
Rudolf Schwerdtfeger, a talented young violinist, who sat among the first violins of the Zapfedstosser Orchestra, second only to that of the Hopfkapelle.
Pieces by Vivaldi, Viextemps and Spohr, or Grieg’s ‘C-minor Sonata’, or even the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’.
Works by Cesar Franck played more or less impeccably.
‘View yonder queer sight’
His publisher, the proprietor of the firm Radbruch & Co. on Furster Strasse
The family of a director of Pschorr Brewery Inc.
Wagnerian heroine Tanya Orlanda
Ardent in her love of Chopin, had made some stabs at writing about Schubert
A satisfying exchange on the subject of Mozart’s polyphony and its relation to Bach
Clarissa and Inez
Boticelli’s portrait of a young man in a red cap
A quote from Goncourt’s diary or the letters of Abbe Galiani
Sparkling snow of Ettal, Oberammergau, and Mittenwald
These expeditions
For Adrian loved the bicycle as a mode of independent travel
Else Schweigestill – made lemonade in tall glasses
‘Winged Victory of Samothrace’
Wanted to paint scenery around about Waldshuter Moor
That of 1600 or1700 – wainscoted with uncarpeted plank floors and stamped leather covering the walls
With pictures of saints
The Gray Sisters in Bamburg
‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ the piano sketch of its expository scenes was complete, but then work came to a standstill. Parody of artificiality was difficult to maintain as a style, it demanded the mood of constantly fresh eccentricity and aroused in him a wish for alien air, for more profoundly strange surroundings
‘I am searching’, he wrote me, probing deeply in the world all around, listening for some word about a place where I might bury myself away from the world and engage in undisturbed conversation with my life
It was Italy, on which he decided
XXIV
A Sabine mountain hamlet
The town was Palestrina, the birthplace of the composer called Praeneste by the ancients and mentioned by Dante in Canto XXVII of the ‘Inferno’ as Penestrino, the stronghold of the princess of Colonna
A Capuchin monastery
The shady garden of the Capuchins
A year or so before, among the Manardis’ lodgers had been an elegant Russian family, whose head, a count or prince was given to seeing ghosts and from time to time would furnish the rest of the household a sleepless night by taking pistol shots at spirits haunting his bedroom,
‘Spiriti?, ‘Spiriti?’
‘Alfo’
‘Drink! Drink! Fa sangue il vino’
By the mood of antiquity that lay upon the land and that now and then would take shape in the rim of a well, in the picturesque figure of a shepherd, in the demonic Pan-like head of a goat
‘View yonder sight’’, and Adrian broke into grateful laughter
‘pleasant conceited comedie called ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ as the piece had been titled in 1598
That Rosaline applies to Berowne who in the play is sharp tongued and downright merry, this bit of wisdom:
The blood of youth burns not with such excess
As a gravity’s revolt to
Wantonness
Adrian who always carried with him an English pocketbook edition of the sonnets
Holderlin says of himself, ‘This is a gift that I have, simple, simple! A foolish extra against the spirit full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion
‘He who seeketh hard things shall have it hard’, it says in a letter to the Hebrews
‘How beautiful!, one’s heart said – or at least mine said to itself – and how sad!
‘Bevi! Bevi! ‘ the padrona said, “Fa sangue il vino!’
‘Spiriti!’….Spiriti?’….
They lived in the Via Torre Argentina near the Teatro Comtsangi and the Pantheon, three flights up and had a landlady who prepared breakfast and a light supper. They took their main meal , paid for by the month, in a nearby trattoria
An excursion to Tivoli or the Trappists of Quattri – Fontana, where he would drink eucalyptus schnapps
In puncto puncti
There had always been something of ‘Noli me tangere’ about his nature – I knew it well…
XXV
But one vexation, an uncertainty of what it was caused me to shake the whole time, whether twas the cold or He.
Bevi!. Bevi!
Poveretto!
Pranzo
Kierkegaard
Mozart’s ‘Don Juan’
A strizzi
Calls me Master Dicis –et – non – facis
In good Durer fashion
I (instinctively) ‘You mean in hell’s horrid hole?’
And so it was by giving
Me cooling drink by night
You poisoned life and living
And on the wound the serpent
Now tightly clings and sucks
Master Durer drew it for his medicinal broadsheet and there arrived in German lands the small delicate folk, having corkscrews, our dear guests from the Indies, the flagellants
Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum
Their buffooneries are not so crude as before, with open boils and pestilences and noses rotted off
The ‘Diary of Goncourt’
or his Abbe Galiani
It never came to metastasis into the metaphysical, metavenereal, metainfectious.
That some men are better endowed than others for the performance of witchery, and that we know well to distinguish them – the worthy authors of the ‘Malleus’ were already familiar to that.
Quick and quacksalvery
Provocation
A bit commonplace Durer-like melancholy?
All they give, do the gods,
Do the unending gods,
To their darlings entire:
All the joys, and all unending joys,
All the pains, the pains unending
Entire
I: “mocking liar! ‘Si Diabolus non esset mendax et homicida.’
The artist is the brother of the felon and the madman.
Rimsky – Korsakov
Brahms
Take Beethoven’s sketchbooks
‘Meilleur’
Who convince themselves and others that what is tedious has grown interesting, because what is interesting has begun to grow tedious.
‘Touching, touching’. The Devil waxes pathetical.
Devil’s farts
The Christian enamoured of aesthetics
‘You would have knowledge of the pernices, of the confutation?
….which is why the words ‘’subterranean’; cellar, thick walls, ‘soundlessness’; ‘oblivion’, ‘hopelessness, are but weak symbols.
‘there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth’.
‘Lusts of hell’
Attrition cordis
Contrition
Yet do not make account of there being a prideful remorse – that of Cain, who was of the fast opinion that his sin was greater than could e’er be forgiven him. Contrition without hope….
We would long since suffer a want of space if every Tom and Tib were let in.
…shoved the Holy Writ under the bench and thenceforth held entirely to the figuris, characteribus and incantationibus of music, which pleased us not a little.
Algebraic magic it is wed to concordant cunning and calculation and yet all the while is daringly aimed gainst reason and common sense
The arms of my little one, of Esmerelda
‘do, re, mi!
From which shall come the pains of the little mermaid?
XXVI
The Battle for Odessa raged with heavy losses, but in the end that famous city on the Black Sea fell into the hands of the Russians
Leipzig, which plays such a significant role in Leverkuhn’s evolution, in the tragedy of his life, has recently borne the full impact: Its famous publishing district is, I sadly hear, only a heap of rubble and an immeasurable wealth of literary and educational material is now the spoil of destruction – a heavy loss not only for us Germans, but also for the whole world that cares about culture.
Let the wizard stretch
Gereon and Waltpurgis set his bags down on it
The old wainscoting beneath
To keep Kaschperl or Suso, who was free of the chain at that hour from setting up a racket. He did this with a metal whistle whose tone was adjustable by a screw and that could produce a frequency so high that the human ear barely perceived it.
Jeannette Scheurl and Rudi Schwerdtfeger came to tea, to see where and how Adrian was living
The cantilena
Whether staccato of legato
Easter 1913 obtained my position at the high school in Freising. The Catholic heritage of my family working to my advantage.
I have spent my life (with the exception of a few months during the war) and have been a loving unnerved witness to the tragedy of his
XXVII
Greipenkerl, the bassoonist had done a very creditable piece of work in copying the score of ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’
The character of Rosaline, or better, with Berowne’s desparate feelings for her, in the middle section of the final act’s three part bouree’
That two thirds of the audience left the theatre in the middle of the performance just as it said to have happened in Munich six years before at the premier of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melissande”
Hanseatic city on the Trave
William Blake
‘silent, silent night’
But an honest joy
Does itself destroy
For a harlot coy
‘silent, silent night’, is for piano and voice whereas Adrian provided two hymns by Keats (the eight stanzas of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and the shorter ‘Ode on Melancholy’
Sweet life of the South awakened by the ‘immortal bird’ in the soul of the poet of the ‘Nightingale’
Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf
Adieu! Adieu! The plaintive anthem fades
Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?
‘Melancholy’, that in the very temple of Delight veiled Melancholy has her Sovran shine, though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine
Rit ardando
I have often heard it said that a poem should not be too good if it is to provide a good song
Klopstock’s ode ‘The Festival of Spring’
A pint mug of beer to the abbot’s study, and there we sat, smoking cigars – good light Zechbauer’s
A world Adrian claimed to have penetrated
An especially large, flesh-colored, and almost nobly formed merman they spotted who shattered into a thousand pieces upon soft collision with their gondola
Star groups, star clusters, double stars (which revolved in elliptical orbits around one another) of nebulae, luminous nebula, ring nebulae, and so forth.
That meant that a light year, nicely rounded off, equaled some six trillion miles and the eccentricity of our solar system came to thirty thousand times that figure, while the diameter of out galactic sphere totaled two hundred thousand light years
The pyramids are great; Mount Blanc and the interior of St. Peter’s are great…
Can a production ever be declared a work of God, if one’s response to it can just as well be ‘so what’ as ’hosanna’
The galaxies closer to our own, which if I am not mistaken, lay at a distance of eight hundred thousand light years from us
Professor Capercailizie, who it turned out, had traveled with him not only down to the night of the deep, but also to the stars…
Alpha particles in radioactive substances, which achieved 15,600 miles per second
Piety, reverence, decency of the soul – these are possible only in terms of man and through man, only when restricted to what is earthly and human
Of man’s transcendental mystery
A spiritual and intellectual truth; of freedom, of justice
In this solemn attitude, in this duty, in this reverence of man for himself, there is God; I cannot find Him in hundreds of billions of Milky Ways
Moral
The Middle Ages were geocentric and anthropocentric
Helmholtz in his day had assumed that life had been brought to earth from other stars by meteorites
Last months of 1913 into early months of 1914
‘Marvels of the Universe’
‘Symphonic Cosmologica’
A Luciferean travesty
The ambitious Frau Dr. Schlagenhaufen
In order to treat the company to a chaconne or sarabande from the seventeenth century, a Plaisir d’amour from the eighteenth or to present them with a sonata by Handel’s friend Ariosti or of the pieces written by Haydn for the viola di bordone….
Kranich
Baron Riedesel
Russian and French ballet as represented by, let us say, by Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Stravinsky
Tanya Orlanda
The heldentenor Harold Kjoujilund
Isolde’s ‘Know’st thou not the Lady Love?’
The andante’ and minuet by Milandre (1770)
The independent scholar Dr. Chaim Breisacher
A palatinate accent
He was a polyhistor, who could talk about anything and everything, a philosopher of culture, whose opinions, however were directed against culture insofar as he affected to see all of history as nothing but a process of decline. The most contemptuous word from his mouth was ‘progress’, he had a scathing way of saying it, and one indeed sensed that he understood the conservative scorn he devoted to progress to be his true passport into this society, the badge of his presentability.
Barbarism
Savage Britain, which was the first to accept the interval of the third into harmony
The great Bach of Eisnach, who Goethe had rightly called a ‘harmonist’.
The inventor of the tempered clavichord
The connoisseur of Weimar
A music of harmonic chords, had begun already in the sixteenth century, and people like Palestrina, both Gabrialis and on this very spot, out own doughty Orlando di Lasso
On to matters of the Old Testament
For Breisacher, biblical personages revered by every Christian child (such as King David and King Solomon) as well as the prophets with their pious harangues about God in His heaven) were already decrepit representatives of a diluted theology, which no longer had any notion of this old and genuinely Hebrew presence of Yahweh, the people’s Elohim, and saw only ‘riddles of ancient days’
He was especially hard on ‘wise’ Solomon
The man was an aesthete enervated by erotic excess and a progressivist blockhead when it came to religion, was typical of the involution by which a cult built around the effective presence of a national god that quintessence of a people’s metaphysical power becomes mere preaching of an abstract and generally humane God in heaven – the decline from a religion of the ‘volk’ to a workaday religion.
But will God indeed dwell on earth among men? – as if Israel’s whole and exclusive task did not consist in creating a dwelling, a tent, for God and employing any means to provide for his constant presence. Solomon, however, is impudent enough to declaim ‘The heaven cannot contain Thee, how much less this house that I have builded! That is drivel and the beginning of the end – that is of the degenerate notion of God held by the psalmists, for whom God has already been banned entirely to the heavens and who constantly sing about God in heaven, whereas the Pentateuch knows nothing about heaven as the seat of the godhead
To eschew the scrawny word ‘altar’ coined much later in human history
‘Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? It is simply outrageous to put such words in God’s mouth, or a slap by impertinent enlightenment in the face of the Pentateuch, where the sacrifice is expressly called ‘the bread’ – that is the actual food of Yahweh
Maimonides, the ostensibly greatest rabbi of the Middle Ages, but in truth an assimilator of Aristotle.
A ‘symbol’ (and I can still hear the indescribable disdain with which Dr. Breisacher spoke the word): ‘one does not slaughter the animal, but – as incredible as it may sound – thanksgiving and humility’.
‘Whosoe slaughtereth praise’ it now says, ‘glorifieth me’
‘The sacrifices of God are a contrite heart. In short, it has long since ceased to be ‘volk’ and blood and religious reality, and is only a humane, watery god.
He could not get enough of describing the authentic rite, the cult of the real God of the volk.
So-called prayer
Dreadfully clever card of atavism
The spiritual disdain for animal sacrifice is first found not among the prophets, but in the Pentateuch itself, where Moses himself declares sacrifice to be patently secondary and puts all the emphasis on obedience to God, on keeping his commandments
I was reminded of all this when, at the very beginning of the account, I qualified my confession of pro-Jewish sympathies with the remark that quite annoying specimens of the race had crossed my path and the name of the independent scholar Breisacher slipped pre-maturely from my pen. Can one hold it against Jewish sagacity if its keen eared sensitivity for what is new and yet to come, proves itself in aberrant situations as well, where the avant-garde and the reactionary coincide? It was on that evening at the Schlagenhaufer’s and in the person of this man Breisacher, that I, at any rate, had my first taste of the new world of anti-humanity, about which , in my naïve good nature, I had known nothing at all
XXIX
Munich’s carnival 1914
Festivities celebrated between epiphany and Ash Wednesday
It was after all the last carnival before the sunset of the four-year war that, viewed historically, now merges with the horror of our own time into a single epoch – of the so-called First World War, which put an end forever to an aesthetic innocence of life in the city on the Isar, to its Dionysian coziness
Would lead to catastrophe
Fate of my hero, Adrian Leverkuhn
In a mysteriously fatal way
Clarissa Rodde
Become the ingénue with a provincial theatre that would prove to be a disaster
Institoris
Italian Renaissance as an age
‘reeking of blood and beauty’
Tanya Orlanda
Dichotomy between aesthetic and ethics, which to a great extent governed the cultural dialectic of the era and was more or less personified in these two young people
The contradiction between a scholarly glorification of ‘life’ in its glittering thoughtlessness and a pessimistic veneration of suffering with its depths and wisdom
Beautiful ruthlessness and Italian poisonings
Rudi
His excellent violin playing
‘Hop to!’, when Inez’s dignity was at issue. And she also said “Hop to!’, to Institoris, the suitor, whenever he proved somehow slow or obtuse in his gallantries
How much better to appear to it as ‘good’ rather than ‘beautiful’
A ‘good person’ – in Inez Rodde’s eyes that was surely someone to whom the world relates on a purely moral, not on some aesthetically excited basis, hence her trust in me…
In conversation with Clarissa
Helmut Institoris
Zink and Spengler
Schwerdtfeger
And the way she viewed life from under a veil of mistrust
Flirtation
A social butterfly? Yes and No.
Bullinger
A happy heart and heath untold
Are better than your goods and gold
Social dandy
Had something frightening about it
Debonair and dashing artistic scene
That precious Beidermeier party at the Cococello Club that we had both attended recently
Did it all not stand in agonizing contrast to the sadness and untrustworthiness of life? Did I not know the feeling as well, the horror at the intellectual vacuity and nothingness that reigned at the average ‘affair’, in garish contrast to the attendant feverish excitement that came from wine, music and the undercurrent of people interacting
The progressive disorder, the abandoned and squalid look of a salon at the end of an ‘affair’. She admitted that after such parties that she sometimes lay in her bed and wept for an hour
Who had these two smashing daughters ( I just have to hear the word ‘smashing’, and I take alarm)
The word ‘ignominy’
It could truly reduce a person to tears
Ines Rodde loved young Schwerdtfeger
Whether she knew it, and second, when, at what point in time, had what was originally a sociable brother-sister relationship with the violinist taken on this ardent and pained character?
Ultimately, one does not ‘understand’ it as a cultivated person one simply accepts it with objective respect for the law of nature. Indeed a man tends to behave here with more generous tolerance than does a woman, who usually casts a very jealous eye at any member of her own sex from whom she leans that she has set a man’s heart aflame, even when she herself feels only indifference for that heart
‘there are lots of unhappy women already!’
Compare with Institoris, who merely instructed about beauty, Rudolf had on his side the advantage of art – which nourishes passion and transfigures all things human
An especially brilliant performance of a Tchaikovsky symphony
His hero up there
She assumes an air that displays cold surprise at his presence in the world, refuses to offer him a hand, a glance, a word – and hurries on her way.
I could see, even though Inez Rodde was about to become engaged to Institoris, she was helplessly, fatally in love with Rudi Schwardtfeger
‘Poor heart!’
‘It’s no fun for him either by the way. He needs to watch that he gets out in one piece himself’
XXX
The first blazing August days of 1914
Headlong journey from Friesing to Naumburg in Thuringia, where as a reserve staff sergeant, I was immediately to join my regiment
A catastrophe and ‘grand mahleur’
‘Ah monsieur, la guerre, quell grand mahleur
Youth’s lust for action and adventure was united with the expedient fun of emergency final exams and hasty graduation
And in general, I will not deny that I shared completely in the popular elation that I have just attempted to characterize
The old Adam is laid aside so that a new higher life may be secured in unity, then quotidian morality is thereby superseded and falls silent before what is extraordinary
A new breakthrough seemed due, the breakthrough, that would make us a dominant world power….
‘destiny’ (how ‘German’ the word ‘Schiksa’ sounds – primal – pre-Christian, a tragical-mythological motif from a music—drama)
The world was to be renewed under the emblem of Germany, under the emblem of a militaristic socialism yet to be completely defined
‘let no one think I am poking fun!’
I shared honestly in it
To drown body and soul in the commonality
Zapfenstosser Orchestra
Rudi Schwedtfeger
Youth Rudi had had been forced to undergo an operation that cost him one of his kidneys. He lived, we suddenly heard, with only one – quite competently, so it appeared, and the ladies soon forgot all about it
The Botanical Gardens
Nostalgia for the Rhine League, a fondness for France, Catholic aversion to Prussia, and sinister sentiments
J’en ai assez, jusqu’ a la fin de mes jours’
Adria – whose personal indifference to the entire matter was perfectly self –evident
Rudiger’s view of the war
In his opinion, they should never have been challenged by our marching into Belgium in contravention of treaty. France and Russia – fine, one might take them on if need be – but England- what dreadful folly! And so – being given to morose realism, he saw in the war nothing but mud, stench, gory amputations, sexual license and lice, and bitterly mocked the sort of ideological journalism that glorified this lunacy as a great enterprise Adrian did not refute him and I , though I partook of deeper sympathies, gladly admitted that his statements contained some words of truth
In 1911, 1912 and 1913
Those were the Schweidewen progeny who had come into the world by them: Rosa, Ezechiel and Raimund. As we sat together that evening, it would be another nine years yet until the birth of the enchanting Nepomuk
Belgium, so very reminiscent of Frederick the Great’s incursion into formally neutral Saxony
Assertion that :’Necessity knows no law’
Like Erasmus in Holbein’s portrait
‘Twelfth Night’ was one ‘Much Ado About Nothing” and , if I am not mistaken, ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’
With a cigarette between his lips
……the way a chess player examines the progress of a match on the checkered board
Now that his cosmic music had appeared with Schott & Sons in Mainz
The ‘Gesta Romanorum’
‘Marvels of the Universe’ that solemnly cheeky work
The Lubeck production of ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’
The Brentano cycle
Monsieur Monteaux, the director of the Russian ballet in Paris and formerly if the Colonne Orchestra
His intention to perform ‘Marvels of the Universe’ along with some orchestral pieces in a straight concert version of ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’
Theatre des Champs – Elysees
Wainscoted old room
The psychological elements
‘May God bless your studia’, I heard Adrian say sotto voce and with a brief burst of laughter.
Consciousness, so this writer suggests must pass through an infinity inn order for grace to reappear, and Adam must eat again of the ‘Tree of Knowledge‘ in order to fall back into the state of innocence.
The idea of the breakthrough
Aesthetic deliverance to confinement, that is a destiny, that is what determines one’s happiness or unhappiness, whether one is comfortably at home on this earth , or lives in hopeless, if proud isolation.
But I feel, have always felt, and will plead against all crude appearances, that this is German Kat exochen, deeply German, the very definition of Germanness, a psychological state threatened by the passion of loneliness by eccentricity, provincial standoffishness, neurotic involution, unspoken Satanism
XXXI
‘You all are going in my place’ Adrian had said.
But we never got to Paris!
The favor of the god of war
Je suis la dermiere!’
‘Mechants! Mechants! Mechants!
The order to retreat. How were we to understand that?
The pinions had deceived us. It was not to be.
We did not understand the world’s frenzied joy at the outcome of the ‘Battle of the Marne‘
The infection put me in isolation barracks for weeks
‘To keep an eye on him’
He remained almost untouched by the corrosive changes to which his blockheaded and besieged nation was subjected despite its ongoing military offenses.
The semper idem
Being looked after by two females who had approached him and quite independently of one another, appointed themselves his devoted caring friends.
Indeed maiden ladies
She considered his music sacred…
A bouquet of homage
A plaintive ‘ah!’, ‘Ah yes’, ‘Ah no’, Ah believe me’, ‘ah, but then why not?’, ‘Ah, I’m going to Nuremburg tomorrow’.
For not only was Kunigunde, like almost all Jews, very musical….
Sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate, baked goods, preserves, and shag tobacco for rolling cigarettes
As for tobacco, Adrian did without it only if coerced, – meaning on days when his migraine overcame him.
Occasionally rolling and inhaling a cigarette
The ‘Apocalipsis cum figuris’
The ‘Gesta’, with its historical illiteracy, pius Christian didacticism and moral naiveté’, with its curious casuistry in matters of patricide, adultery and tangled incest, with its undocumented Roman emperors and their daughters, kept under incredible guard so that they may be sold off under the most ingenious conditions – it cannot be denied, I say, that all these fables of knights pilgrimaging to the promised Land of wanton wives, sly bawds, and clerics given to black magic, can have an extraordinarily humorous effect when told in pompous Latin or in an indescribably artless translation.
There is , for instance, in anticipation of the “Decameron’, a basically immoral tale, ‘The Godless Cunning of Old Wives’
The little bitch was once her all- too-chaste daughter…
He may cool his lusts
The puppet stage
I quickly shaped them into their final form
Like the testo in an oratorio
The suite’s piece de resistance, the story entitled ‘The Birth of Saint Gregory the Pope’
The brother loves is sister immoderately so much so that he loses his head, leaving her in more than a delicate condition and making her the mother of a boy of exceptional beauty, the entire story revolves around this boy a child who, in the most awful sense, is his own best cousin.
To be carefully placed in a barrel- not without the addition of an explanatory legend, plus gold and silver for his education – and entrusted to the waves of the sea – which ‘on the sixth feast day’ bear him to a cluster presided over by a pious abbot. He finds the boy, baptizes him with his own name, Gregory, and provides him with an education that, given the boy’s exceptional physical and mental gifts, yields happiest results
Unsuspected horror is heaped upon horror when the son of sin climbs into the nuptial bed with his mother – but I shall not amplify on all that
‘Oh, my sweet son, you are my only child, you are my husband and my lord, you are both my and my brother’s son, oh my sweet child, and oh Thou my God, why did’st Thou let me be borne!”
Agrees with him that utter solitude is the only proper solution
Gregory spends seventeen years of penitence
‘Oh my sweet mother, sister, and wife. Oh my friend. The Devil thought to lead us into hell, yet God’s greatest power has prevented him.’ And he builds her a cloister where she may govern as abbess, but only for a brief while. For it is soon granted unto both of them to surrender their souls back to God.
Faustus
Pocci and Christian Winter
Ingenious hand puppets and shadow plays of the Javanese
We spoke about the linking of the avant-garde with folk traditions about the closing of the rift between art and accessibility, between high and low, achieved at one point to some extent by Romanticism, in both literature and music.
‘Wolfe Glen’ scene
the ‘Bridal Wreath’ scene Wagner? romanticism
Epigonism
An intellectually supple artlessness – that, it seemed, was the task of the desire of art.
‘- the breakthrough, you’d say, whoever might achieve the breakthrough out of intellectual coldness into risk – filled world of new feeling, that person would be called art’s redeemer.
‘Redemption…….he continued….’
The ‘volk’
Votto voce
XXXII
The marriage of Inez Rodde to Professor Dr. Helmut Institori took place in the spring of 1915 (at the start of the war, when my country’s condition was still good, fortified by hope , and I was still in the field)
Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten
A trip to Dresden and Saxon Switzerland
‘Pay heed before you wed for aye’ (classic admonition)
Munich
Cell on the Aller
Formerly the lodgings of the artist who painted those melancholy landscapes of the Waldshuter Moor
That this quite charming woman was addicted to morphine
A model home of German bourgeois culture
The ‘good books’
Leopold von Ranke, the works of Gregorovius, volume of art history, German and French classics – in short, a solid basic collection for perceiving things as they were
Institoris was a friend of several of those Munich artists with the more sober Glass Palace school
Une jeune fille accomplice
‘Hop to man!’ ‘What can you be thinking?’
‘Jump, if you please!’
And a bust of Inez, done in alabaster
‘God forbid!’
I’ve always heard it said that ‘Vengeance is the Lord’s, he will repay.’
Even as a young girl had attempted to write poetry.
She was also a female and in her femininity possessed the means to snatch life and happiness for herself, to force impertinence to succumb to her heart.
The age in which I write, the Allied invasion of France, long known to be a possibility, has since taken place.
To Paris, which in the New Order was assigned the role of a European amusement park and bordello, and where resistance is already boldly raising its head barely held in check by the united forces of our secret police and their French collaborators
The robot bomb
Our sacred German soil! As if anything were still sacred about it, as if it had not long ago been desecrated again and again by the immensity of our rape of justice and did not lie naked, both morally and in fact, before the power of divine judgment
La gloire
As a temperate, cultivated man, I entertain, to be sure, a natural horror of radical revolution and a dictatorship of the lower classes, which by my very nature, I can envisage in scarcely anything but images of anarchy and mob rule, in short, of the destruction of culture
The Russian Revolution
Since then, history has taught me to regard with a different eye our conquerors from that period – who soon, in alliance with the revolution from the east, will be our conquerors again
The word ‘painful’ when I use it to characterize my impressions as a purely passive observer attending the assemblies of certain ‘Councils of Intellectual Workers’, etc.
‘my dear citizens and citizenesses’
Sometimes days of vomiting
Frau Else Schweigestill, who continued to tend him,
‘May God bless your studia!’
His diagnosis, with some reservation, was a stomach ulcer, or the like
A strong dose of quinine to be drunk twice daily which did in fact provide temporary relief
A chronic gastric catarrh with a significant dilation of the stomach on the right side, accompanied by hyperemia, which impaired the flow of blood to the brain
An acute buildup of acidity from which Adrian suffered and that Kurbis was inclined to ascribe, at least in part, to nervous causes, that is , to a central agency, meaning the brain, which now, for the first time began to play a role in his diagnostic speculations
Even when he was not in bed, he spent half the day in the closely curtained shadows of his room
During this period, ice packs and cold dousing of the head were prescribed morning therapies
Clarissa, she reported, truly loved her artistic profession
She was now playing ingénue’ roles in the remote East Prussian town of Elbing….
Pforzheim
About those three pampered bunnies, those three little Snow Whites, whom she visited from time to time in their ideal nursery
Given a concert in Nuremburg and his rendition of the Partita in E Major by Bach (for solo violin) had created quite a sensation
Technically perfect interpretation of Tartini
The conversation took place in a darkened room
Blue January sky in the year 1919
Falla’s ‘Nights in the Garden of Spain” and Debussy’s ‘Sonata for flute, violin and harp’
He also whistled the bouree’ from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’
The marionette piece, ‘The Godless Cunning’
But he was not simply a cavalier, either, it would be a great mistake to take him for such – for a superficial man about town, a lady’s man, he shuddered at the thought. He was a human being and an artist…
I simply can’t help it, Adrian, believe me, you must believe me!
The woman’s unpleasant domination of the love affair
You would do a wonderful job, much better than Delius or Prokofiev
Allegro molto
XXXIV
Knifelike pains of the ‘little mermaid’
Because the excitement that comes with recalling the period I am describing, the period after the collapse of the German authoritarian state…..
In short, the epoch of bourgeois humanism
They in no way felt the war to be the deep and severing rift in history that it appeared to be to us…..
One Sixtus Kridwiss
‘How do I feel?’ he said to me at the time, ‘about like John the Martyr in his cauldron of oil.’
His Imperial Majesty
‘I’m being basted as artfully as a roast, a devil of a roast.’
of Nuremburg
The first sheet in Durer’s series of woodcuts on ‘the Apocalypse’
‘Genius is a form of the life force that is deeply versed in illness, that both draws creatively from it and creates through it.’
The conception of the apocalypse oratorio
‘mind your business and keep your soul clean!
‘you’ll find out soon enough my good man!’
‘Yes, holy horrors are abrewing. One cannot, it would seem, get the theological virus out of one’s blood so easily. Out of nowhere comes a stormy relapse.
A thirteenth century French rendition of the ‘Vision of St. Paul’
Made the descent’. I mean the descent into hell. That creates a bond of familiarity between such totally disparate figures as Paul and Virgil’s ‘Aeneas’. Do you remember how Dante’ refers to them as brothers, as two who have been down below?
Your ‘filia hospitalis’
He had not been able to use his eyes; you see when the painful pressure above and deep within them made reading impossible. Clementina Schwegestill had often had to read to him…
Mechthild that Clementine recounted, it was those of Hildegard of Bingen
The German version of the ‘Historia Ecclesiastica’ by that learned monk, the Venerable Bede.
Pre-Christian and early Christian eschatologies (of which the Revelation of John of Patmos is but one example rich in parallels).
‘Dialogues‘ of Gregory
Vision of Alberich the monk of Monte Cassino, both of whom clearly influenced Dante – this literature, I say, forms a quite dense sphere of tradition.
‘an end is come, the end is come, it watcheth for thee, O thou dwelleth in the land.’
From the prophecy of Babylonian exile, the stories and lamentations of Ezekiel to which, moreover, that mysterious epistle from Patmos, written in the days of Nero, stands in very curiously dependent relation. For instance, the ‘eating of the book’, which Albrecht Durer boldly uses as the subject of one of his woodcuts, is taken almost verbatim from Ezekiel…
The title, ‘Apocalipsis cum figuris’, pays homage to Durer
The Psalms (the piercing cry, for instance of ‘For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the Pit’) as well as the most vivid denunciations and images of terror from the Apocrypha, plus certain fragments of Jeremiah’s, ‘Lamentations’ (which seem utterly offensive nowadays)
There Charon’s barque unloads its cargo, where the dead arise, the saints adore, demonic figures await the signal of Minos, who is girded with serpents, and one damned fleshy voluptuary, surrounded, carried, dragged by the grinning sons of the pit, takes the ghastly departure, a hand covering one eye, the other staring in horror at eternal damnation, while not far away grace snatches the souls of two other plummeting sinners and lifts them towards salvation – in short, from the structured episodes and groupings of the ‘Last Judgment’
But actually, beyond my psychological capacities, to the point, where it made one tremble.
The absolutely uncanny rapidity with which it came into being – the bulk of it in four and a half months, the same time one might have estimated to be required for the mechanical process of simply copying it out.
A state of high tension
Still in very fragile health, he worked ten hours a day or more.
‘Go on! Go on with what you were saying!’
‘The Bird’s Cry of Woe’
The words of Jeremiah:
Wherefore doth a living man complain,
A man for the punishment of his sins?
Let us search and try our ways,
And turn again to the Lord!
We have transgressed
And have rebelled;
Thou hast not pardoned;
Thou hast covered with anger and persecuted us;
Thou hast slain, thou hast pitied.
Thou hast made us as the offscouring,
And refuses in the midst of the people
Fugue forms of certain canzoni and ricercari of the period before Bach, in which the fugue’s theme is not always clearly defined and adhered to.
Awake, psaltery and harp!
I myself will awake early.
He suffered a three-week relapse into his previous condition of pain and nausea.
It took him, amazingly enough, six months to put the finished draft of the ‘Apocalypse’ to paper.
XXXIV (cont.)
Kridwiss was a graphic artist, an ornamentor of books, and a collector of East Asian color woodcuts and ceramics.
A small, ageless, rather gnome like gentleman with a strong Rhine-Hessian accent and uncommon intellectual enthusiasms….
Was decorated with charming Chinese works in ink and watercolor (from the Sung dynasty)
The grand duchy of Hessen-Nassau…
Chaim Breisacher
Whom, as I admitted some time ago, I could not stand…
Indeed, indeed, not bad, no doubt at all, one can say that!’
Proclamations
Christus, Imperator, Maximus
The sheerest aesthetic mischief I have ever encountered.
‘riily ‘norm ‘sly ‘mportant’
To be sure had things in common here and there with the ascetically beautiful terrors of Daniel’s fantasies
They quoted Alexis de Tocqueville, who had said that two streams flow from the wellspring of revolutions – one allowing men to build free institutions the other leading to absolute power.
This was its fate – that is, if one did not simply toss all that emotional stuff about human rights overboard from the start, which these times appeared much more inclined to do, rather than embark on a dialectical process that eventually turned freedom into dictatorship of its own cause. Everything ended in dictatorship in violence, in any case, for with the demolition of traditional forms of government and society by the French Revolution, a age had dawned that – consciously or not, admittedly or not – was moving towards despotic tyranny over atomized disconnected masses leveled to common denominator and as powerless as the individual
A book by Sorel entitled ‘Reflexions sur la violence’
All that entitled this to be called the book of the age.
Parliamentary discussions would necessarily prove utterly inadequate as a means of shaping political will, that in the future what was needed in its place were mythic fictions, which would be fed to the masses, would be the vehicle of political action – fables, chimeras, phantasms that needed to have nothing to do with truth, reason or science in order to be productive nonetheless, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities.
That truth’s goal was community, and that whoever wished to be a part of the community must be prepared to jettison major portions of truth and science. To make the ‘sacrificium intellectus’
Historically productive fiction, with a so-called fraud, with, that is, a community – building belief…
Was tantamount to humanity’s being transferred along with all these new ideas, back into the theocratic situations and conditions of the Middle Ages.
Regressive
Why words at all. Why writing, why language? Radical objectivity had to embrace things, nothing else. And I recalled a satire by Swift…
XXXIV (conclusion)
‘It’s coming, it’s coming, and once it’s here it will find us at the crest of the moment. It is interesting, it is even good – simply because it is what is coming, and to reorganize that fact is both achievement and enjoyment enough. It is not up to us to take measures against it as well.’
The opposition of ‘harmonic subjectivity’ and ‘polyphonic detachment’
The ‘great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, who stood before the throne and before the lamb’ (see Durer’s ‘seventh woodcut’)
He signed with ‘Perotinus Magnus’
‘Parsifal’ Richard Wagner added the title ‘Member of the High Consistory’
Adrian’s signature
My friend’s statement that the antithesis that would replace bourgeois culture was not barbarism, but community.
Of bloody barbarism and bloodless intellectuality.
I have always tended to hear something ant cultural, indeed anti-human, even demonic.
Leverkuhn’s the ‘Apocalypse’
The chorus of the ‘Apocalypse’ when it assumes the role of screaming humanity upon the opening of the seventh seal, when the sun grows black, the moon is turned to blood, and all ships flounder…
Vocal forces into disjointed and interwoven antiphonal groupings, into dramatic dialogues and isolated cries, which to be sure, take as their distant classical model the shouted answer of ‘Barabbas!’ from the ‘St. Matthew Passion’
The voice of the whore of Babylon, the woman upon the beast, with whom the kings of the earth have fornicated, is assigned, surprisingly enough, to the most graceful coloratura soprano and her virtuoso runs are at times so completely like a flute that they melt into the orchestra.
Burlesqued, French impressionism, bourgeois drawing room music hall songs, the syncopations and rhythmic somersaults of jazz – it all whirls round like a brightly glittering tilting match, yes always sustained by the main orchestra, speaking its serious, dark, difficult language and asserting with radical rigor the work’s intellectual status.
That odd duck from across the sea, about whom we learned in our youth from yet another odd duck, Adrian’s teacher.
The testo
‘I, John’, who describes the beasts of the abyss with the faces of a lion, a calf, a man, and an eagle….
In the range of castrato
Stand in horrible contrast to the contents of his catastrophic message.
When in 1926 – at the festival of the International Society for New Music held in Frankfurt am Main – the ‘Apocalypse’ was given its first and thus far last performance (under Klemperer)
‘the latest news from doomsday’
‘Soullessness’ – I know very well that is what people mean when they attach the word ‘barbarism’ to Adrian’s creation.
As soullessness such longings of the little mermaid!’
The pandemonium of laughter, of infernal laughter, that forms the brief, but ghastly conclusion of the first part of the ‘Apocalypse’. I hate, I love, I fear it….
This sardonic gaudum of Gehenna
And jettisons, to swell to a horrible fortissimo tutti.
Who has ears to hear and eyes to see, a reprise of the Devil’s laughter.
Transformation, transfiguration.
But there is not a note in these scaring, susurrant tones of the spheres and angels that did not appear with strictest correspondence in the laughter of hell.
Calculation elevated to mystery.
XXXV
What word that I have written here is not caught up in catastrophe, which has become the very air of life for us all?
Twenty-three years have now passed since the actress Clarissa Rodde, whose sister Inez was obviously just as imperiled as she, perished almost before my eyes
Her life with the poison she had long kept at the ready for the moment when her pride could no longer endure life
A fully unnecessary and easily misconstrued self- dramatization
The woman he had chosen, the oldest son (or better perhaps, sonny boy)…
She could picture her future children prattling in French
And then the ghost of her past…
Blackmailed her
This murderer
But that very confession only roused the monster to cruelty
Inside the object d’art inside the book with the skull..
her extortionist
Adjoining bedroom, the old woman heard her daughter gargling with water at the washstand- we no know this was to cool the horrible burning of the acid in her throat. Then came silence…
By a dose of cyanide that could easily have killed accompany of soldiers
‘je t’aime. Une fois je t’ai trompe, mais je t’aime.
Et maintenant – comme ca!
Had he not been such a lame sonny boy
Morphine
This exhilarating and pernicious drug
A certain mawkish dishonesty
The reckless indifference she showed toward her own children in abandoning herself to the mischief.
XXXVI
The monstrous untrustworthiness, eccentricity, and virulent sans –culottism of our deportment since 1933 and especially since 1939
‘cultural Bolshevism’
I might say an audience whose artistic views were republican’. In Weimar it was the ‘Cosmic Symphony’ under the direction of Bruno Walter…
Han’s Platner’s famous marionette theatre all fine selections of the ‘Gesta Romanum’ were performed.
The International Society for Contemporary Music in 1922
Choral and instrumental fragments of Adrian’s ‘Apocalypsis cum figuris’
In the Anbruch, a radically progressive Viennese musical periodical, ….the pen of one Desidorius Feher’ a Hungarian musicologist and cultural philosopher
Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich
Meister, ‘do you know’, indeed I think he said: ‘Does the meister know’ – Madame de Tolna?’
The world to the hermit of Pfeiffering
Near Szekesfehervar, between the Danube and Lake Balaton
She lived in Paris, Naples, Egypt, the Engadine, and was accompanied from place to place by a lady’s maid, a male employee…
To Kaisersaschern, knew all about the village of Oberweiler and even Buchel Farm
Palestrina, the town in the Sabine Mountains.
‘Mere Manardi’
A Renaissance piece, the gem, a large-faceted emerald, a splendid pale green stone from the Urals, was a marvel to behold
What a trembling now seized Apollo’s sacred laurel tree!
Trembling in all of its beams!
Unholy one, flee and escape it!
I did not find it difficult to identify these lines as the opening words of ‘a hymn to Cipollo‘ by Callimachus
The arrow wound or bite suffered by Philoctetes of Chryse, likewise of the term Aeschylus once used to describe the arrow, ‘hissing winged, serpent; and also of the connection made between the arrows of Phoebus and the rays of the sun.
I know that all the while he was composing the ‘Apocalypse’, he wore this jewel on his left hand
The Old French rendition in verse of the ‘Vision of St. Paul’
That covertly placed considerable funds at the disposal of Platner’s marionette theater for the expensive and musically flawless production of the ‘Gesta’ in Donaueschingen
In the spring of 1924, he went to Vienna, where at Ehrbar Hall, as part of one of the so-called Anbruch evenings, Rudi Schwerdtfeger at last gave his first performance of the violin concert written for him
Met him later in the restaurant of the little hotel on Herren Gasse where he had put up….
Be a ‘crazy hoot owl’
‘Saul Fitelberg, Arrangements musicaux. Representant de nombreux artistes prominents’
A German, un broche qui par son genie appartient au monde et qui marche a la tete du progress musical!
‘Ah, ca c’est bien allemande, par exemple! For you to do that, cher Maitre, pourquoi pas le dire?
‘Phosphorescence de la mer’
Your fierce discipline, et que vous enchainez votre art dans un systeme de regles inexorables et neoclassiques.
Your qualite d’Allemand
A certain squareness, rhythmic ponderousness, immobility, grossierete’ that are venerably German – en effet entre nous, one finds them in Bach as well. Will you take offense at my critique?
C’est ‘boche’ dans un degre fascinant
Do not think I am finding fault with it! It is simply enorement caracteristique
You will conduct the ‘Phosphorescence’ selections from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ , ‘Symphonique Cosmologique’
Cosmopolitisme’, genereux et versatile!
Hymns by Keats,… the Flonzaley Quartet from Geneva or the Pro Arte Quartet from Brussels
Monsieur Diaghilev’s ‘Ballets Russes’
Among your brothers in Apollo
Jean Cocteau the poet, Massine the choreographer, Manuel de Falla the composer, Les Six those six greats of contemporary music…
‘does one live if others live?’
Wolf, Brahms and Bruckner lived for years in the same city, in Vienna, and the entire time each avoided the others and more of them, as far as I know, ever met the others.
Bruckner had an extremely low opinion of Brahms. He found the first theme in the D minor concerto’ to be quite good, but that was convinced that Brahms never came close to finding one equal to it.
For Wolf, Brahms was le dernier ennui.
And have you ever read his review of the ‘Bruckner 7th‘? In the ‘Vienna Salonblatt’?
There you’ll find his opinion of the man’s general significance. He accused him of a lack of intelligence
Avec quelque raison….
Wolf’s letters and happen upon statements about Dostoevsky, qui sont simplement stupefants.
His unfinished opera ‘Manuel Venegas’
A hymn entitled ‘To the Fatherland’ for male chorus, he even wanted to dedicate it to the German Kaiser.
Wagner reviled the impressionist paintings of his day as daublings
But in reality his taste in art was probably more like something between Piloty and Makart, the inventor of the decorator bouquet
Whereas Titian was more to Lenbach’s taste….
Now, I am a Jew, you should know – Fitelberg, that is a patently Jewish name. I have the Old Testament in my bones, and that is no less a serious matter than Germanness – it basically leaves little predisposition for the sphere of the valse brillante in the world outside, and seriousness only in Germany.
We are quite aware of the difference between Gounod’s and Goethe’s ‘Faust’, even if we do speak French…
Gounod’s ‘Faust’
A pearl – une marguerite – full of the most ravishing musical invention. Laissez-moi, laisse –moi contempler – bewitching! Even Massenetis – bewitching, liu aussi.
A pedagogue, a professor at the ‘conservatoire’
Bruckner had students
One speaks of the age of Nationalism, but in reality there are only two nationalisms, the German and the Jewish, and all the rest is child’s play.
The Germans should leave it to us Jews to be pro- German. The Germans, with their nationalism, their arrogance, their fondness for their own incomparability, their hatred of being second or even placed on a par, their refusal to be introduced to the world and to join its society – the Germans will bring about their own misfortune a truly Jewish misfortune, a truly Jewish misfortune, je vous le jure.
The Germans should allow the Jew to play the mediator between them and society, to be the manager, the impresario, the agent of Germanness – the Jew is definitely the man for the job, he should not be sent packing, he is international, and he is pro-German.
XXXVIII
Rudi Schwerdtfeger
A violin concerto all his own
The end of 1924
He was present for repeat performances
In Bern and Zurich
A psychological explanation for a phenomenon to which it would otherwise lack the key
B minor, C minor, and D minor
The C minor declares itself openly. In the first movement, which is designated andante amoroso and whose sweetness and tenderness constantly verge on mockery, there is a dominant chord that to my ears has something French about it: C – G – E – B flat – D – F sharp – A …a chord that, along with the violins high F above it, contains, as one can see, the tonic triad of each of the three main keys.
An obvious reminiscence of the first violin’s recitative in the last movement of Beethoven’s A major Quartets’
Beriot, Vieuxtemps, and Wieniawski
Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata
His cornflower blue eyes
Zink regarded the well-intentioned painting from all sides, even turned it upside down once, and greeted it with a thousand cries of ‘Jesus’ – which might mean any number of things.
His own horizons as an artist and carnivalist
Issues of aesthetics and morality
Some mechanically produced music
At the time, the quality of gramophone records was making great progress
The waltz from Gounod’s ‘Faust’
The charming ball music in Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique’
Waltzes by Lanner and Johann Strauss the younger
His objection to Goethe’s statement that art is concerned with the serious and the good.
Delilah’s aria in D flat major from Saint-Saens’ ‘Samson’
The needle was placed in the groove
Bullinger let the heavy lid down
The ‘mon Coeur s’ouvre a ta voix.’
‘idiotically beautiful’
Vulgar is all that does not speak to the mind and rouses naught but sensual interest.’
Idealism overlooks the fact that the mind, the human spirit, is by no means addressed only by things intellectual, but rather can be profoundly moved by the animal sadness of sensual beauty.
Philine
Wilhelm Meister
What is left of the whole ding-dong-ding, if one measures it by the most rigorous intellectual and moral standards? A few pure spectra of Bach. Perhaps nothing audible whatever is left.
A servant arrived with whiskey, beer and soda water or a large tea tray.
A resounding ‘Bravo!’
XXXIX
1923
Bern and Zurich
Swiss Chamber Orchestra
Conductor Herr Paul Sacher
Bern Conservatory
Zurich Tonhalle
House on Mythen Strasse, near the lake
Drinking heartily of a non-alcoholic beverage from an exquisitely cut glass
Andrea, the Tonhalle’s permanent conductor
Schuh, the excellent music critic for the Neue Zurher Zeitung
Mademoiselle Godeau
If even the word sympathetique was indispensable for describing a person
For smaller opera and operetta stages in Paris for the Gaite Lyrique and the old Thetre de Treanon
Recent works of French Ballet and opera
Poulenc, Auric, Rieti
Ravel’s ‘Daphne and Chloe’
Debussy’s ‘Jeux’
Scarlatti’s music for Goldoni’s ‘Donne di buon umore’
Cimarosa’s ‘Il matrimonio segreto’ and
Chabrier’s ‘Education manquee’
Kept him engaged for a good while in a conversation about mystical matters in Zurich and Munich
His world of oratorio, with its musical theology and mathematics of magic numbers.
Schiller’s great-grandson, Herr von Gleichen-Russwum, was no more – for he had been convicted of an abortive attempt at fraud, a silly and ingenious scheme that had banished him from the world and held him under semi- voluntary house arrest on his estate in Lower Bavaria. The affair was almost beyond belief. The baron had allegedly carefully packaged a necklace insured for far above its value, and sent to a distant jeweler for resetting – who upon receiving the package, found nothing inside but a dead mouse. The mouse had proved inept at fulfilling the task is sender assigned to it. The idea had apparently been for the rodent to bite through the package and escape creating the illusion that the necklace had fallen through a hole of God knew what origin and was now lost, a loss for which the insurance company would have to make good.
The instigator of this roguery found himself ridiculously exposed.
His crazy notion
The Catholic People’s Party, even a noted ‘Social Democratic parliamentarian..
Certain elements who were energetically ill-disposed toward the ‘liberalistic’ republic and on whose brow was boldly written the intent to avenge Germany’s disgrace and their awareness of representing a coming world.
His dear Jeanette and the Social Democratic member of Parliament, who was a serious and knowledgeable admirer of Bach
One possibility was Fussen, with nearby Neuschwanstein
Oberamegau, and a sleigh ride from there to the monastery at Ettal….by way of Linderhof Castle
Chewed a tongue sandwich
The Bavarian Alps boast no giants of exalted rank among their summits
Godeau had heard and read about the performance of fragments of the ‘Apocalypse’ in Prague and inquired about the work. Adrian cut her off. “Let us not speak”, he said, ‘of those pious sins.’
Dvorak’s ‘Humoresque’
Our roomy sleigh, well-supplied with fur blankets and pulled by two horses.
Schildknapp carried out his intention of being pulled behind us on skis.
Curiosity, joy, worry and fervent hopes.
Linderhof, Ludwig II’s little rococo castle.
Letting von Bulow play the piano for him and listening to Kainz’s enchanting voice.
‘unhappy’ (why unhappy really?)
The country folk’s fanatical love for their Kini, their little king.
The stonemason’s and gilder’s had got fat on his fairy-tale castle
XLI
My sympathetic readers and friends – I shall proceed. Ruin masses above Germany, rats grown fat on corpses inhabit the rubble of our cities, the thunder of Russian cannons rolls on toward Berlin, for the Anglo-Saxons the crossing of the Rhine was child’s play and was made that, it seems, by the uniting of our own with that of the enemy. And end is come, the end is come, it watcheth for thee and is come into thee, O thou that dwellest in the land – but I shall proceed.
Brahms’ First again, as the piece de resistance.
That Tenth Symphony! Again? ….the adagio
Brahms
The highly romantic horn theme in the final movement.
If I understood you rightly, I am to woo Marie for you, to propose to her for you?
Why don’t you send your Serenus?
XLII
Only good enough to be a tool, a means to an end…
This heartbreaker, this violinist with the small tone
To marry in Paris
The Orchestra Symphonique
A program of Berlioz and Wagner that was sure to fill the house
The overture to ‘Meistersinger’
Professor Gilgen Holzschuher, the Durer expert,….
An article on the problems of proportion in Gothic architecture that he had recently published in the magazine ‘Art and Artist’
Schwerdtfeger
Kranich
Inez Institoris
Shots erupted in the car – even sharp, cracking detonations, one after the other, three, four, five, with wildly deafening rapidity…
In the aisles hurled themselves at Inez – much too late of course. We did not have to wrest the revolver from her; she had dropped it, or rather, thrown it away, in the direction of her victim.
Kranich
What a horrible, senseless, irrational act.
‘har – r – r- ible.’
XLIII
My tale hastens towards its end – as does everything. Everything is pushing and plummeting toward the end, the world stands in the sign of the end, at least it stands in it for us Germans, whose thousand year history – confounded, carried to absurdity, proven by its outcome to have gone fatally amiss and demonstrably astray – is rushing into the void into despair, into unpatrolled bankruptcy, is descending into hell amid the dance of thundering flames.
I, a simple German man and scholar, have loved many things German…
I have withdrawn into my hermit’s cell in Freising and avoid the sight of our hideously battered Munich – the toppled statues, the facades that gaze from vacant eye sockets to disguise the yawning void behind, and yet seem inclined to reveal it, too, by supplying more of the rubble already strewn over the cobblestones.
In pity of my foolish sons
The prophecy of the end , entitled ‘Apocalypsis cum figuris’
Adrian’s laughing to the point of tears…
Overcome by a stagnation of the intellect…
Emptiness, virtual idiocy, a dog’s life’, an unbearably idyllic, vegetal existence lacking all memory…
‘may hell have mercy on me!’
‘pray for my poor soul!’
The stagnation of his creative powers
Severe migraine attacks
Beset with alternating catarrhs of the stomach, bronchi and throat throughout the winter of 1926
Max Schwergestill and Jonathan Leverkuhn both passed away, both at the age of seventy-five…
The length of time we hang on afterward a little shorter, a little longer, is what is called immortality.
Adrian’s health improved visibly….
The year 1927 became the year that yielded a miracle harvest of finest chamber music.
The Romanticism
Titled ‘Fantasia’
The string Quartet, perhaps Leverkuhn’s most esoteric work…
A presto
Allegro con fuoco
In studying philosophy, he in fact said, ‘I learned that to set limits is to go beyond them.’ I’ve always held to that notion.
Hegel’s critique of Kant.
Trios for violin, viola and cello…
‘A night’, Adrian said, ‘that never grows dark for the lightning
At the university of Cracow where magic had been publicly taught in the sixteenth century.
‘Sorrow did move Dr. Faustus that he made writ of his lamentation.
‘The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus’
XLIV
Ursula Schneidenwein, Adrian’s sister in Langensalza had suffered from lung problems…
A sanatorium in the Harz Mountains
The birth of her youngest, little Nepomuk
‘Holy Mary, Joseph and Jesus!’
Nepomuk or ‘Nepo’ as the family has called him or ‘Echo’
What evoked the sense of the fairy tales
‘int’ for ‘isn’t’
‘well, well’
‘Ah, thou babe of God, thou blessed one!
…with illustrations in the English taste, in a kind of Kate Greenaway style, and not half-bad rhymed verses,
A puppy dog and no one else
Was left once silence fell
But when the puppy got back home,
He was not feeling well
Good morrow, Mr. Caraway
I fear the swimming’s bad today
A swordfish, saw-fish and a shark –
Who’ve swum in close just for a lark
The very presence of the Child on earth
Echo, the elfin prince, had come – very well, one must treat him according to his nature, with no further fuss.
Fragrance of black alder and lilac and at times of jasmine growing alongside the road
The lightfoot lad
The ‘mizzle’ had ‘whickened the mold’
Yes, he comes from a long way off.’
A music box
Harmonized little Biedermeier melodies
Some ‘idea’ of the draft score of Ariel’s songs from the ‘Tempest’
‘Where the bee sucks, there sucked I’
In a setting for soprano, celesta, muted violin, oboe, muted trumpet and the flageolet tones of the harp…
‘Where should this music be?’ I th’ air or the earth?’
‘my dainty Ariel’, but also that whole world of elves of hills, brooks and groves, those weak masters and demi puppets, as Prospero describes then, whose pastime by moonshine is to make midnight mushrooms and green sour ringlets whereof the ewe not bites.
‘bowwow’
‘cock-a-diddle-dow’
The damned witch Sycorax
Which rift
Rumpelstiltskin, about Fallada and Rapunzel, about the Lilting, Leaping Lark…
For who heedeth Goad’s command
He liveth well in Goad’s good hand
S’when I obey my Goad’s behest,
I help myself to Goad’s good rest. Amen
Or
So be man’s wrong however great,
The grace of Goad hath larger weight,
At sin, swhich hath a narrow space,
My Goad doth smile so wide His grace.
Amen.
Or this prayer remarkable for its unmistakable coloring of pre-destination:
No man be given leave to sin
But that there be good therein
No man’s good deed will be forlorn,
Save that to hell he hath been born
May blissful for eternity!
Amen.
Or on occasion:
The sun doth shine upon the Deil
Yet after spends its purest weal
Keep thou me pure on earth each day,
Till death’s great toll I sometime’s pay
Amen
Or finally:
Mark that another prayer is fit
To save the prayer’s soul with it,
Swhile Echo prayeth for mankind,
In Goad’s good arms is he entwined.
Amen
XLV
Nuff
‘nuff’
‘night!
‘Not quite right’
‘Help!, Help!’, Oh head ache! Head ache!’
It was brain fever, cerebrospinal meningitis.
‘I am a simple man, he said. ‘It is wise to summon a higher authority.’ I believe there was sad irony in his words. He did, however, trust himself to perform an immediate spinal puncture, which was necessary to confirm the diagnosis and also the only means by which to provide the sick child some relief.
The spinal tap
‘hydrocephalic cry’
That sweet face to look strangely, horribly deformed and especially when accompanied by fits of teeth-gnashing that were soon part of the affliction, the impression created was that of a child possessed.
He objected to the morphine because it could simulate a coma, which had not ensued as yet, and permitted only codeine.
‘Take him, monster!’
‘Take him, scum!’
‘….You foul filth, were cast out. Spare yourself and make the sign of the cross!’
‘then to the elements. Be free, and fare thou well!’
XLVI
This year of destiny 1945 – our nation’s defenses in the west have plainly been in total disarray.
That hideous man who was a target last year of a plot laid by desperate patriots attempting to salvage some last bit of national fortune, some future, but who escaped with his life – ordered his soldiers to drown the attack on Berlin in a sea of blood and to short any officer who talks of surrender.
‘Werewolf’, a unit if berserk boys who, by hiding in the forests to burst forth at night, have already rendered the fatherland meritorious service by doughtily murdering many an intruder.
‘Oh what retched grotesquery! And so, to the bitter end, the cruelest fairy tale, that grim substratum of saga deep in the soul of the nation, is still invoked – not without finding a familiar echo.
Germany was transformed by a vile regime of conspirators sworn to nihilism from the very start….
Our ignominy.
Whatever lived as German stands now as an abomination and the epitome of evil.
Damn, damn those corruptors who taught their lessons in evil to an originally honest, law-abiding, but all too docile people, a people all too happy to live by a theory!
Ah! It is probably more than a mere question that for every reason this defeated nation now stands wild-eyed before the abyss, because its final and most extreme attempt to find its own potential form is perishing in such ghastly failure.
The two years 1929 and 1930
His last and indeed in a historical sense somehow final and ultimate work – the symphonic cantata ‘The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus’
A kind of spiritual suffering, indeed something Christ like…
Inexhaustibly heightened lament, accompanied by the most painful Ecce homo gestures
At the very moment it understands itself as expression, music, becomes a lament of Ariadne, softly echoed in the plaintive song of the nymphs.
Linked so strongly and unmistakably to Monteverdi and the seventeenth century…
The echo
Echo
Echo
The days of the madrigalists
‘O sweet maiden, how bad you are’
H-E-A-E-Es
The magic square of a style or technique
In my attempt to present some idea of Leverkuhn’s apocalyptic oratio, did I not refer to the substantial identity of what is most blessed and most heinous, to the inner sameness of its children’s angelic chorus and hell’s laughter? To the mythic horror of those who can hear it, what is realized there is a formal utopia of terrifying ingenuity.
Faust
This gigantic lamento (lasting approximately and hour and a quarter)
In much the same way as when a stone is cast into the water the concentric circles that spread farther out.
‘magisters, baccalaurs, and other students’
‘St. John’s farewell’
‘For I die as both a wicked and good Christian’
Following the spirit and inflection of Monteverdi’s ‘Lamento’
The same identity that reigns between the crystal chorus of angels and the howls of hell in the “Apocalypse’
The return of Monteverdi
‘the reconstruction of expression’
A kind of process of alchemistic distillation
‘Ah, Faustus, thou desperate and unworthy heart ah, ah, reason, mischief, presumption, and free will…’
Repetitions like those in the ‘Lasciatemi’
A ‘furioso’ dance
‘the Evil Spirit besets the aggrieved Faust with curious mocking jests and by words’ – with its dreadful, ‘It is too late, be mum, refrain from telling others of thy pain, of God’s despair, thy prayers are vain, thy ill luck runneth now amain.’
Hetaera Esmerelda
‘so be it!’
Taking so to speak, the opposite path of the ‘Ode to Joy’
With an eye to Beethoven’s Ninth
A work dealing with the Tempter
As the conscious and deliberate reversal of the ‘Watch with me!’ of Gethsemane. And again, his last drink with friends, the ‘St. John’s farewell’ has all the marks of ritual, is presented as another Last Supper
To Jesus’ temptation by Satan
I mean the cantata’s last orchestral movement, in which the chorus loses itself and which sounds like the lament of God for the last state of His world, like the Creator’s sorrowful ‘I did not will this’
XLVII
‘sleep in peace and be not troubled!’
‘forsake me not! Be about me in my hour!’
The year 1930
Leverkuhn invited a group of people to Pfeiffering
A large crowd, about thirty people
Obeyed both grammatical and and orthographical rules
‘esteemable, peculiarly beloved brethren and sisters.’
I have already since my twenty-first year been wed with Satan…
Would come to pass solely by His help and is Devil’s work, poured out by the Angel of Poison.
For it was a mere butterfly, a gaudy thing, Hetaera Esmerelda, that charmed me by her touch, the milk – witch, and followed after her into the dusky leafy shade…. I was initiate and the promise sealed.
I did devote myself solely and entirely to figuris characteribus, formis conurationum and whatsoever other names such evocation and magic be named.
Negromantia, carmina, incantation, venificium, and whatsoever names may be named.
Hyphialta
‘Beautiful! No doubt whatever, it is beautiful!’
…also as a murderer.’
He who seeketh hard things shall have it hard.’
So diligent and complished all with pertinacity
Even as I recognize the brazen calculation renders mercy wholly impassable
I will in farewell play for you some few things from the structure that I heard from Satan’s sweet instrument, and which in part the craftly children sang for me.’
Kranich, as a numismatist, consider myself completely incompetent here.’
And with that he left.
Epilogue
It is done. An old man, bent, almost broken by the horrors of the time in which he wrote…
But just as those miscreants willed it, Germany has been so razed to the ground that one does not even dare hope that Germany….
To my manuscript
I fear the youth of my country have become too alien to me for me to be their teacher.
He did not come to himself, but rather to an alien self that was only the burned out shell of his personality and that basically had nothing to do with the man called Adrian Leverkuhn. Originally the word ‘dementia’ simply meant this deviation from one’s own ego, this alienation from oneself.
Kurbis had readied for the trip with sedatives, to Munich and a private mental clinic run by Dr. von Hasslin in Nymphenburg, where Adrian spent three months. This experienced specialist’s immediate prognosis had stated without reservation that his was a mental illness that could only grow worse over time.
More horribly touching and pitiful.
It was very hard to drown oneself in a pond in which one has often bathed and swum. Yet he had never swum in Klemmer Pool…
Almost approaching certainty, that behind this frustrated attempt at flight there also lay a mystical notion of salvation very familiar to an older theology, especially to an early Protestantism: the supposition, that is, that he who invokes the Devil can save his soul only by ‘consigning the body’
Again the old linden tree…
El Greco
What a sardonic trick of nature, one might well say that she is able to create the image of highest spirituality where the spirit has departed! The eyes lay deep in their sockets….
On august 25 1940
Plus a muffled, unrecognizable stranger, who had vanished again as the first clods fell on the lowered coffin.
‘May God have mercy on your poor soul, my friend, my fatherland.
The End
Author’s note:
Schoenberg’s ‘Theory of Harmony’
tomreading 
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