Authors: Thomas Mann
We laughed.
“When I hear of hearing!” said Adrian. “In my view it is quite enough if something has been heard once; I mean when the artist thought it out.”
After a while he added: “As though people ever heard what had been heard then! Composing means to commission the Zapfenstosser orchestra to execute an angelic chorus. And anyhow I consider angelic choruses to be highly speculative.”
For my part I thought Griepenkerl was wrong in his sharp distinction between archaic and modern elements in the work. “They blend into and interpenetrate,” I said, and he accepted the statement but showed little inclination to go into what was fixed and finished; preferring apparently to put it behind him as not further interesting. Speculations about what to do with it, where to send it, to whom to show it, he left to me. That Wendell Kretschmar should have it to read was the important thing to him. He sent it to Lubeck, where the stutterer still was, and the latter actually produced it there, in a German version, a year later, after war had broken out—I was not present—with the result that during the performance two thirds of the audience left the theatre. Just as it is supposed to have happened six years before at the Munich premiere of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande. There were only two more performances of Adrian’s opera, and it was not, for the time, to penetrate beyond the Hansa city on the Trave. The local critics agreed to a man with the judgment of the lay audience and jeered at the “decimating” music which Herr Kretschmar had taken up with. Only in the Lubeck Borsenkurier an old music professor named Immerthal—doubtless dead long since—spoke of an error of justice which time would put rignt, and declared in crabbed, old-fashioned language that the opera was a work of the future, full of profound music, that the writer was of course a mocker but a “god-witted man.” This striking expression, which I had never before heard or read, nor ever since, made a peculiar impression on me. And as I have never forgotten it or the knowledgeable old codger who coined it, I think it must be counted to his honour by the posterity he invoked as witness against his spineless and torpid fellow-critics.
At the time when I moved to Freising, Adrian was busy with the composition of some songs and lieder, German and foreign, or rather, English. In the first place he had gone back to William Blake and set to music a very strange poem of this favourite author of his. “Silent, Silent Night,” in four stanzas of three lines each, the last stanza of which dismayingly enough runs:
But an honest joy
Does itself destroy
For a harlot coy.
These darkly shocking verses the composer had set to very simple harmonies, which in relation to the tone-language of the whole had a “falser,” more heartrent, uncanny effect than the most daring harmonic tensions, and made one actually experience the common chord growing monstrous. “Silent, Silent Night” is arranged for piano and voice. He set two poems by Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” and the shorter “Ode on Melancholy” with a string-quartet accompaniment, which indeed left far behind and below it the traditional conception of an accompaniment. For in fact it was an extremely artificial form of variation in which no note of the singing voice and the four instruments was unthematic. There reigns here without interruption the closest relation between the parts so that the relation is not that of melody and accompaniment, but in all strictness that of constantly alternating primary and secondary parts.
They are glorious pieces—and almost unsung up till today, owing to the language they are in. Odd enough to make me smile was the expressiveness with which the composer enlarges in the “Nightingale” on the demand for southern sweetness of life which the song of the “immortal Bird” rouses in the soul of the poet. For, after all, Adrian in Italy had never displayed much gratitude or enthusiasm about the consolations of a sunny world, which make one forget “the weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.” Musically the most priceless, the most perfect, beyond doubt, is the resolution and dissipation of the vision at the end, the
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
… … … … .
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?
I can well understand how the beauty of the poems, like that of an antique vase, challenged the music to crown them; not to make them completer, for they are complete, but to articulate more strongly and to throw into relief their proud and melancholy charm; to lend more lastingness to the priceless moment of their every detail than is granted to the breathed—out words; to such moments of condensed imagery as in the third stanza of the “Ode on Melancholy,” the image of the “sovran shrine” which veiled Melancholy has in the temple of delight, though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine—all that is so brilliant that it scarcely leaves the music anything to say. It may be that it can only injure it, unless by simply speaking with it, and so lingering it out. I have often heard say that a poem must not be too good to furnish a good lied. Music is at home in the task of gilding the mediocre. Just as real virtuosity in an actor shows up more brilliantly in a poor piece. But Adrian’s relation to art was too proud and critical for him to wish to let his light shine in darkness. He had to look very high, intellectually, where he was to feel himself called as musician, and so the German poem to which he gave himself productively is also of the highest rank if without the intellectual distinction of the Keats lyrics. In place of literary exquisiteness we have something more monumental, the high-pitched, sounding pathos of the religious hymn, which with its invocations and depictions of majesty and mildness yields even more to the music, is more faithfully compliant with it than are those British images with their Greek nobility.
It was Klopstock’s
Spring Festival
, the famous song of the “Drop to the Bucket,” which Leverkühn, with but few textual abbreviations, had composed for baritone, organ, and string orchestra—a thrilling piece of work, which was performed, through the efforts of some courageous conductors friendly to the new music, during the first World War and some years after it in several German music-centres and also in Switzerland. It received the enthusiastic approval of a minority and of course some spiteful and stupid opposition too. These performances contributed very much to the fact that at latest in the twenties an aura of esoteric fame began to unfold about the name of my friend. But this much I will say: deeply as I was moved—yet not really surprised—by this outburst of religious feeling, which was the purer and more pious for the restraint and absence of cheap effects, no harp-twanging (though the text is actually a challenge to it), no drum to give back the thunder of the Lord; however much went to my heart certain beauties not at all achieved by hackneyed tone-painting: the magnificent truths of the paean; the oppressively slow movement of the black cloud; the twice-repeated thundering “Jehovah!” when “the shattered wood steams” (a powerful passage); the so new and enlightened concord of the high register of the organ with the strings at the end, when the Deity comes, no longer in storm, but in hushed murmurings and beneath it “arches the bow of peace”; yet despite all these I have never understood the work in its real spiritual sense, its inward necessity, its purpose, informed by fear, of seeking grace in praise. Did I at that time know the document, which my readers now know too, the record of the “dialogue” in the stone-floored sala? Only conditionally could I have named myself before that “a partner in your sorrow’s mysteries,” as it says in the “Ode on Melancholy”; only with the right of a general concern since our boyhood days for his soul’s health; but not through actual knowledge, as it then stood. Only later did I learn to understand the composition of the
Spring Festival
as what it was: a plea to God, an atonement for sin, a work of
attritio cordis
, composed, as I realized with shudders, under the threat of that visitor insisting that he was really visible.
But in still another sense did I fail to understand the personal and intellectual background of this production based on Klopstock’s poem. For I did not, as I should have done, connect it with conversations I had with him at this time, or rather he had with me, when he gave me, quite circumstantially, with great animation, accounts of studies and researches in fields very remote from my curiosity or my scientific comprehension: thrilling enrichments, that is, of his knowledge of nature and the cosmos. And now he strongly reminded me of the elder Leverkühn’s musing mania for “speculating the elements.”
Indeed, the composer of this setting for the
Spring Festival
did not conform to the poet’s words that he “would not fling himself in the ocean of the worlds”; that only about the drop in the bucket, about the earth, would he hover and adore. For Adrian did fling himself into the immense, which astro-physical science seeks to measure, only to arrive at measures, figures, orders of greatness with which the human spirit has no longer any relation, and which lose themselves in the theoretic and abstract, in the entirely non-sensory, not to say nonsensical. Moreover I will not forget that it all began with a dwelling on the “drop,” which does not ill deserve this name, as it consists mainly of water, the water of the oceans, which on the occasion of the creation “also ran out from the hand of the Almighty.” On it, at first, we dwelt, and its dark secrets; for the wonders of the depths of the sea, the extravagant living things down there where no sun’s ray penetrates, were the first matters of which Adrian told me, and indeed in such a strange and startling way that I was both entertained and bewildered, for he spoke as though he had personally seen and experienced it all.
Of course he had only read of these things, had got books about them and fed his fancy. But whether he had so concentrated on them, had so mastered these pictures mentally, or out of whatever whim it was, he pretended that in the region of the Bermudas, some nautical miles east of St. George, he had himself gone down into the sea and been shown by his companion the natural phenomena of the deeps. He spoke of this companion as an American scholar named Akercocke, in company with whom he was supposed to have set up a new deep-sea record.
I remember this conversation most vividly. It occurred at a week-end I was spending in Pfeiffering, after the simple meal served us in the big piano-room, when the primly clad young Clementine had kindly brought us each our half-litre mug of beer, and we sat smoking Zechbauer cigars, light and good. It was about the hour when Suso, the yard dog, in other words Kaschperl, was loosed from his chain and allowed to range the courtyard.
Then Adrian embarked with gusto on his jest, which he related to me in the most circumstantial manner: how he and Professor Akercocke climbed into a bullet-shaped diving-bell of only one point two metres inside diameter, equipped somewhat like a stratosphere balloon, and were dropped by a crane from the companion ship into the sea, at this point very deep. It had been more than exciting—at least for him, if not for his mentor or cicerone, from whom he had procured this experience and who took the thing more coolly as it was not his first descent. Their situation inside the two-ton hollow ball was anything but comfortable, but was compensated for by the knowledge of their perfect safety, absolutely watertight as it was, capable of withstanding immense pressure. It was provided with a supply of oxygen, a telephone, high-voltage searchlights, and quartz windows all round. Somewhat longer than three hours in all they spent beneath the surface of the ocean; it had passed like a dream, thanks to the sights they were vouchsafed, the glimpses into a world whose soundless, frantic foreignness was explained and even justified by its utter lack of contact with our own.
Even so it had been a strange moment, and his heart had missed a beat, when one morning at nine o’clock the four-hundred-pound armoured door had closed behind them and they swayed away from the ship and plunged into the water, crystal-clear at first, lighted by the sun. But this illumination of the inside of our “drop in the bucket” reached down only some fifty-seven metres. For at that depth light has come to an end; or rather, a new, unknown, irrelevant world here begins, into which Adrian with his guide went down to nearly fourteen times that depth, some thirty-six hundred feet, and there remained for half an hour, almost every moment painfully aware that a pressure of five hundred thousand tons rested upon their shelter.
Gradually, on the way down, the water had taken on a grey colour, that of a darkness mixed with some still undaunted rays of light. Not easily did these become discouraged; it was the will and way of them to make light and they did so to their uttermost, so that the next stage of light’s exhaustion and retreat actually had more colour than the previous one. Through the quartz windows the travellers looked into a blue-blackness hard to describe; perhaps best compared to the dull colour of the horizon on a clear thawing day. After that, indeed long before the hand of the indicator stood at seven hundred and fifty to seven hundred and sixty-five metres, came solid blackness all round, the blackness of interstellar space whither for eternities no weakest sun-ray had penetrated, the eternally still and virgin night, which now had to put up with a powerful artificial light from the upper world, not of cosmic origin, in order to be looked at and looked through.
Adrian spoke of the itch one felt to expose the unexposed, to look at the unlooked-at, the not-to-be and not-expecting-to-be looked-at. There was a feeling of indiscretion, even of guilt, bound up with it, not quite allayed by the feeling that science must be allowed to press just as far forwards as it is given the intelligence of scientists to go. The incredible eccentricities, some grisly, some comic, which nature here achieved, forms and features which seemed to have scarcely any connection with the upper world but rather to belong to another planet: these were the product of seclusion, sequestration, of reliance on being wrapped in eternal darkness. The arrival upon Mars of a human conveyance travelling through space—or rather, let us say, upon that half of Mercury which is eternally turned away from the sun—could excite no greater sensation in the inhabitants—if any—of that “near” planet, than the appearance of the Akercocke diving-bell down here. The mass curiosity with which these inconceivable creatures of the depths had crowded round the cabin had been indescribable—and quite indescribable too was everything that went whisking past the windows in a blur of motion: frantic caricatures of organic life; predatory mouths opening and shutting; obscene jaws, telescope eyes; the paper nautilus; silver-and gold-fish with goggling eyes on top of their heads; heteropods and pteropods, up to two or three yards long. Even those that floated passively in the flood, monsters compact of slime, yet with arms to catch their prey, polyps, acalephs, skyphomedusas—they all seemed to have been seized by spasms of twitching excitement.