Authors: Thomas Mann
“Dear friend, why do I have to laugh? Can a man employ the traditional or sanctify the trick with greater genius? Can one with shrewder sense achieve the beautiful? And I, abandoned wretch, I have to laugh, particularly at the grunting supporting notes of the bombardone, Bum, bum, bum, bang! I may have tears in my eyes at the same time, but the desire to laugh is irresistible—I have always had to laugh, most damnably, at the most mysterious and impressive phenomena. I fled from this exaggerated sense of the comic into theology, in the hope that it would give relief to the tickling—only to find there too a perfect legion of ludicrous absurdities. Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are
good for parody only?
—These are of course rhetorical questions, it was not that I still expected an answer to them. But such a despairing heart, such a damp squib as I am, you consider as ‘gifted’ for music and summon me to you and to its service, instead of rather leaving me humbly to tarry with God and theology?”
Thus Adrian’s confession in avoidance. And Kretschmar’s reply: that document I have not by me. It was not found among the papers Leverkühn left. He must have preserved it for a while and then in some moving to Munich, to Italy, to Pfeiffering, it must have got lost. But I retain it in my memory almost as precisely as Adrian’s own, even though I made no notes on it. The stutterer stuck by his summons, his monitions and allurements. Not a word in Adrian’s letter, he wrote, could have made him for a moment falter in his conviction that it was music for which fate destined the writer, after which he hankered as music after him, and against which, half cowardly, half capricious, he had hidden himself behind these half-true analyses of his character and constitution, as previously behind theology, his first and absurd choice. “Affectation, Adri—and the increase in your headaches is the punishment for it.” His sense of the ludicrous of which he boasted, or complained, would suit with art far better than with his present unnatural occupation, for art, on the contrary, could use it; could, in general, much better use the repellent characteristics he attributed to himself than he believed or made pretence that he believed it could. He, Kretschmar, would leave the question open, how far Adrian was accusing himself in order to excuse his corresponding accusations against art; for this painting art as a marriage with the mob, as kiss—throwing, gala-posturing, as a bellows to blow up the emotions, was a facile misconstruction and a wilful one too. What he was trying to do was to excuse himself on account of certain characteristics, while these, on the other hand, were the very ones art demanded. Art needed just his sort today—and the joke, the hypocritical, hide-and-seek joke, was that Adrian knew it perfectly well. The coolness, the “quickly satisfied intelligence,” the eye for the stale and absurd, the early fatigue, the capacity for disgust—all that was perfectly calculated to make a profession of the talent bound up with it. Why? Because it belonged only in part to the private personality; for the rest it was of an extra-individual nature, the expression of a collective feeling for the historical exhaustion and vitiation of the means and appliances of art, the boredom with them and the search for new ways. “Art strides on,” Kretschmar wrote, “and does so through the medium of the personality, which is the product and the tool of the time, and in which objective and subjective motives combine indistinguishably, each taking on the shape of the others. The vital need of art for revolutionary progress and the coming of the new addresses itself to whatever vehicle has the strongest subjective sense of the staleness, fatuity, and emptiness of the means still current. It avails itself of the apparently unvital, of that personal satiety and intellectual boredom, that disgust at seeing ‘how it works’; that accursed itch to look at things in the light of their own parody; that sense of the ridiculous—I tell you that the will to life and to living, growing art puts on the mask of these faint-hearted personal qualities, to manifest itself therein, to objectivate, to fulfill itself. Is that too much metaphysics for you? But it is just precisely enough of it, precisely the truth, the truth which at bottom you know yourself. Make haste, Adrian, and decide. I am waiting. You are already twenty, and you have still a good many tricks of the trade to get used to, quite hard enough to stimulate you. It is better to get a headache from exercises in canons, fugues, and counterpoint than from confuting the Kantian confutation of the evidence for the existence of God. Enough of your theological spinsterhood!
‘Virginity is well, yet must to motherhood;
Unear’d she is a soil unfructified for good.’”
With this quotation from the “Cherubinic Wandersmann” the letter ended, and when I looked up from it I met Adrian’s subtle. smile.
“Not badly parried, don’t you think?” he asked.
“By no means,” said I.
“He knows what he wants,” he went on, “and it is rather humiliating that I do not.”
“I think you do too,” I said. For indeed in his own letter I had not seen an actual refusal, nor indeed had I believed he wrote it out of affectation. That is certainly not the right word for the will to make harder for oneself a hard decision, by deepening it with self-distrust. I already saw with emotion that the decision would be made; and it had become the basis for the ensuing conversation about our immediate futures. In any case, our ways were parting. Despite serious short-sightedness I was declared fit for military service, and intended to put in my year at once; I was to do it in Naumburg with the regiment of the 3rd Field Artillery. Adrian, on whatever grounds—narrow-chestedness, or his habitual headaches—was indefinitely excused; and he planned to spend some weeks at Buchel, in order, as he said, to discuss with his parents his change of profession. It came out that he would put it to them as though it involved merely a change of university. In a way, that was how he put it to himself too. He would, so he would tell them, bring his music more into the foreground, and accordingly he was going to the city where the musical mentor of his school-days was working. What did not come out was that he was giving up theology. In fact, his actual intention was to enroll himself again at the university and attend lectures in philosophy in order to make his doctorate in that school.
At the beginning of the winter semester, in 1905, Leverkühn went to Leipzig.
CHAPTER XVI
I
t scarcely needs saying that our goodbye was outwardly cool and reserved. There was hardly even a pressure of the hand, an exchange of looks. Too often in our young days we had parted and met again for us to have kept the habit of shaking hands. He left Halle a day earlier than I; we had spent the previous evening together at the theatre, without any of the Winfried group. He was leaving next morning, and we said goodbye on the street, as we had hundreds of times before. I could not help marking my farewell by calling him by name—his first name, as was natural to me, but he did not follow suit. “So long!” he said, that was all; he had the phrase from Kretschmar, and used it half-mockingly, as a quotation, having in general a definite liking to quote, to make word-plays on something or someone. He added some jest about the soldier’s life I was now to pursue, and we went our different ways.
He was right not to take the separation seriously. After at most a year, when my military service should be finished, we would come together, one place or another. Still, it was in a way a break, the end of one chapter, the beginning of another; and if he seemed not to be conscious of the fact, I was, with a certain pang, well aware of it. By going to him in Halle I had, so to speak, prolonged our school-days; we had lived there much as in Kaisersaschern. Even the time when I was a student and he still at school I cannot compare with the change now impending. Then I had left him behind in the familiar frame of the gymnasium and the paternal city and had continued to return thither. Only now, it seemed to me, did our lives become detached, only now were both of us beginning on our own two feet. Now there would be an end to what seemed to me so necessary, though so futile withal; I can but describe it in the words I used above: I should no longer know what he did or experienced, no more be able to be near him, to keep watch over him. I must leave his side just at the very moment when observation of his life, although it could certainly change nothing in it, seemed most highly desirable, I mean when he abandoned the scholarly career, “put the Bible under the bench,” to use his own words, and flung himself into the arms of music.
It was a significant decision, one pregnant with fate. In a way it cancelled the more immediate past and linked up with moments of our common life lying far, far back, the memory of which I bore in my heart: the hour when I had found the lad experimenting with his uncle’s harmonium, and still further back, our canon-singing with Hanne the stable-girl, under the linden tree. It made my heart lift up for joy, this decision of his—and at the same time contract with fear. I can only compare the feeling with the catch in the breath that a child feels in a swing as it flies aloft, the mingled exultation and terror. The Tightness of the change, its inevitability, the correction of the false step, the misrepresentation theology had been: all that was clear to me, and I was proud that my friend no longer hesitated to acknowledge the truth. Persuasion, indeed, had been necessary to bring him to it; and extraordinary as were the results I expected from the change, and despite all my joyful agitation, I took comfort from being able to tell myself that I had had no part in the persuasions—or at most had supported them by a certain fatalistic attitude, and a few words such as “I think you know, yourself.”
Here I will follow on with a letter I had from him two months after I entered the service at Naumburg. I read it with feelings such as might move a mother at a communication of that kind from her son—only that of course one withholds that sort of thing from one’s mother, out of propriety. I had written to him some three weeks before, ignorant of his address, in care of Herr Wendell Kretschmar at the Hase conservatoire; had described my new, raw state and begged him, if ever so briefly, to tell me how he lived and fared in the great city, and about the program of his studies. I preface his reply only by saying that its antiquated style was of course intended as a parody of grotesque Halle experiences and the language idiosyncrasies of Ehrenfried Kumpf. At the same time it both hides and reveals his own personality and stylistic leanings and his employment of the parodic, in a highly characteristic and indicative way.
He wrote:
Leipzig, Friday after
Purificationis 1905
In the Peterstrasse, house the 27th
Most honourable, most illustrious, learned, and well-beloved Magister and Ballisticus!
We thank you kindly for the courtesy of your communication and the highly diverting tidings touching your present arrangements, so full of discipline, dullness, and hardship as they be. Your tales of the whip-cracking and springing to order, the curry-combing and spit-and-polish, have made us heartily to laugh: above all that one of the under-officer which even as he planes and polishes and breketh to harness, yet holdeth so much in estimation your high education and grete learning that in the canteen you must needs mark off for him all the metres according to feet and morae because this kind of learning seemeth to him the high prick of intellectual aristocracy. In requital thereof we will an we hold out counter thee with some right folish facecies and horseplay which we fell into here that you too mayst have to wonder and to laugh thereat. Albeit first our friendly hert and good will, trusting and playing that thou maist almost joyfully bear the rod and in tract of time be so holpen thereby, till at the last in braid and buttons thou goest forth as a reserve sergeant major.
Here the word is: Trust God, honour the King, do no man any nuisance. On the Pleisse, the Parthe, and the Elster existence and pulse are manifestly other then on the Saale; for here many people be gathered togyder, more then seven hundred thousand; which from the outset bespeaketh a certain sympathy and tolerance; as the Lord hath already for Nineveh’s sin a knowing and humorous eye when He says excusingly: “Such a great city, therein more than a hundred thousand men.” Thus maist thou think how among seven hundred thousand forbearance is counselled when in the autumn fair-times whereof I as novice had even now a taste, more stream from all parts of Europe, and from Persia, Armenia, and other the Asiatic lands.
Not as though this Nineveh particularly doth like me, ‘tis not the fairest city of my fatherland, Kaisersaschern is fairer; yet may easier be both fair and stately, sithence it needs but be olde and quiet and have no pulse. Is gorgeously builded, my Leipzig, of clear stone as out of a costly box of toy bricks. The common people’s tongue is a devilishly lewd speech so that one shrinks before every booth before one bargains. It is even as though our mildly slumbering Thuringian were woke up to a seven-hundred-thousand-man impudence and smattered abhominably, jaw stuck out—horrible, dreadful, but, God keep us, certes meaning no harm, and mixed with self-mockery which they can graunt unto themselves on the ground of their world-pulse.
Centrum musicae, centrum
of the printing trade and the book rag-fair, illustrious universitie, albeit scattered in respect to buildings, for the chief building is in Augustusplatz, the library hard by the Cloth Hall, and to the divers faculties long several! college buildings, as the Red House on the Promenade to the philosophic, to the juristic the
Collegium Beatae Virginis
, in my Peterstrasse, where I found forthwith fresh from the station, on the next way into the town, fitting lodging and accommodation. Came early in the afternoon, left my fardels at the station, got hither as directed, read the notice on the rain-pipe, rang, and was straightaway agreed with the fat landlady with the fiendish brogue on the two rooms on the ground floor. Still so early that I had on that same day looked over almost the whole town in the first flush of arrival—this time really with a guide, to wit the porter who fetched my portmanteo from the station; hence at the last the farce and foolery of which I spake and may still reherse.The fat frau made no bones about the clavicymbal, they are used to that here. Sha’n’t be assaulting her ears too much for I am chiefly working on theory, with books and pen and paper, the harmoniam and the
punctum contra punctum
, quite off my own bat, I mean under the supervision and general direction of
amicus
Kretschmar, to whom every few days I take that I have practised and wrought, for his criticism, good or bad. Good soul was uncommon glad that I came, and embraced me for that I was not minded to betray his hope. And he will hear not of my going to the conservatoire, either the big one or the Hase, where he teaches; it were, he says, no atmosphere for me, I must rather do as Father Haydn did, who had no preceptor at all, but got himself the
Gradus ad Varnassum
of Fux and some music of the time, in especial the Hamburg Bach, and therewith sturdily practised his trade. Just between ourselves, the study of harmony makes me for to yawn, but with counterpoint I wax quick and lusty, cannot concoct enough merry frolics in this enchanted field, with joyous passion soyle the never-ending problems and have already put together on paper a whole stook of droll studies in canon and fugue, even gotten some praise from the Master therefore. That is creative work, requirith phantasy and invention; playing dominoes with chords, without a theme is meseemeth neither flesh nor fowl. Should not one learn all that about suspensions, passing-notes, modulation, preparations and resolution, much better in praxi from hearing, experiencing, and inventing oneself, then out of a boke? But altogether, now, and
per aversionem
it is foolishness, this unthinking division of counterpoint and harmony, sith they interact so intimately that one cannot teach them sunderlye but only in the whole, as music—in so far as it can be taught.Wherefore I am industrious,
zelo virtutis
, yea almost overburdened and overwhelmed with matters, for I go to lectures at the academie in hist. phil. by Lautensack and Encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences as well as logic from the famous Bermeter.
Vale. Jam satis est
. Herewith I commit you to the Lord, may He preserve you and all clear souls. Your most obedient servant, as they say in Halle.—I have made you much too curious about the jocus and jape, and what is afoot betwixt me and Satan; not much to it after all, except that porter led me astray on the evening of the first day—a base churl like that, with a strap round his waist, a red cap and a brass badge and a rain-cape, same vild lingo as everybody else here. Bristly jaw; looked to me like unto our Schleppfuss by reason of his little beard, more than slightly, even, when I bethink, or is he waxen more like in my recollection? Heavier and fatter, that were from the beer. Introduces himself to me as a guide and proved it by his brass badge and his two or three scrapes of French and English, diabolical pronunciation; “peautiful puilding, antiquide extrement inderessant.”Item: we struck a bargain, and the churl shewed me everything, two whole hours, took me everywhere: to the Pauluskirche with wondrously chamfered cloisters, the Thomaskirche on account of Johann Sebastian, and his grave in St. John’s, where is also the Reformation monument, and the new Cloth Hall. Lively it was in the streets, for as I said whilere the autumn fair still happened to be, and all sorts of banners and hangings advertising furs and other wares hung out at windows down the house-fronts, there was great bustle and prease in all the narrow streets, particularly in the heart of the town, nigh the old Town Hall, where the chap shewed me the palace, and Auerbach’s inn and the still standing tower of the Pleissenburg—where Luther held his disputacyon with Eck. Great shoving and shouldering in the narrow streets behind the Market, very old, with steep, gabled roofs; connected by a criss-crosse labyrinth of covered courts and passages, and adjoining warehouses and cellars. All this close packed with wares and the hosts of people look at you with outlandish eyen and speak in tongues you’ve never heard a syllable of afore. Right exciting, and you felt the pulse of the world beating in your own body.
By little and little it gat dark, lights came on, the streets emptied, I was aweary and ahungered. I bade my guide draw to an ende by shewing me an inn where I could eat. “A good one?” he asks, and winks. “A good one,” quoth I, “so it be not too dear.” Takes me to a house in a little back lane behind the main street—brass railing to the steps up to the door—polished as bright as the fellow’s badge, and a lantern over the door, red as the fellow’s cap. I pay him, he wishes me “Good appetite!” and shogs off. I ring, the door opens of itself, and in the hall is a dressed-up madame coming towards me, with carmine cheeks, a string of wax-coloured beads on her blubber, and greets me with most seemely gest, fluting and flirting, ecstatic as though she had been longing for me to come, ushers me through portieres into a glistering room, with panelled tapestries, crystal chandelier, candelabra with mirrors behind them; satin couches, and on them sitting your nymphs and daughters of the wilderness, ribaudes, laced muttons all, six or seven, morphos, clear-wings, esmeraldas, et cetera, clad or unclad, in tulle, gauze, spangs, hair long and floating, hair short with heart-breakers; paps bare, thick-poudered, arms with bangles; they look at you with expectant eyes, glistering in the light of the chandelier.
Look at me, mark wel, not thee. A hothouse the fellow, the small-beer-Schleppfuss, had brought me into. I stood, not showing what I was feeling, and there opposite me I see an open piano, a friend, I rush up to it across the carpet and strike a chord or twain, standing up, I wot still what it was, because the harmonic problem was just in my mind, modulation from B major to C major, the brightening semitone step, as in the hermit’s prayer in the finale of the
Freischutz
, at the entry of timpani, trumpets, and oboes on the six-four chord on G. I wot it now, afterwards, but then I wist not, I but fell upon it. A brown wench puts herself nigh me, in a little Spanish jacket, with a big gam, snub nose, almond eyes, an Esmeralda, she brushed my cheek with her arm. I turn round, push the bench away with my knee, and fling myself back through the lust-hell, across the carpets, past the mincing madam, through the entry and down the steps without touching the brass railing.There you have the trifle, so it befell me, told at its length, in payment for the roaring corporal to whom you teach the
artem inetrificandi.
Herewith amen—and pray for me. Only a Gewandhaus concert heard up till now with Schumann’s Third as piece de resistance. A critic of that time belauded the comprehensive world-view of this music, which sounds like very unobjective gabble—the classicists made themselves thoroughly merry over it. But it did have some sense, for it defines the improvement in their status which music and musicians owe to romanticism. It emancipated her from the sphere of a small-town specialism and piping and brought her into contact with the great world of the mind, the general artistic and intellectual movement of the time—we should not forget that. All that proceeds from the Beethoven of the last period and his polyphony; and I find it extraordinarily significant that the opponents of the romantic movement, that is of an art which progresses from the solely musical into the universally intellectual sphere, were the same people who also opposed and deplored Beethoven’s later development. Have you ever thought how differently, how much more suffering and significant the individualization of the voice appears in his greatest works than in the older music where it is treated with greater skill? There are judgments which make one laugh by the crass truthfulness of them, which are at the same time a judgment on the judge. Handel said of Gluck: “My cook understands more about counterpoint than he does”—I love this pronouncement of a fellow musician!Playing much Chopin, and reading about him. I love the angelic in his figure, which reminds me of Shelley: the peculiarly and very mysteriously veiled, unapproachable, withdrawing, unadventurous flavour of his being, that not wanting to know, that rejection of material experience, the sublime incest of his fantastically delicate and seductive art. How much speaks for the man the deep, intent friendship of Delacroix, who writes to him: J’espere vous voir ce soir, mais ce moment est capable de me faire devenir fou.” Everything possible for the Wagner of painting! But there are quite a few things in Chopin which, not only harmonically but also in a general, psychological sense more than anticipate Wagner, indeed surpass him. Take the C-sharp minor Nocturne Op .27, No .1, and the duet that begins after the enharmonic change from C-sharp minor to D-flat major. That surpasses in despairing beauty of sound all the
Tristan
orgies—even in the intimate medium of the piano, though not as a grand battle of voluptuosity; without the bull-fight character of a theatrical mysticism robust in its corruption. Take above all his ironic relation to tonality, his teasing way with it, obscuring, ignoring, keeping it fluctuating, and mocking at accidentals. It goes far, divertingly and thrillingly far…