Wolfgang Schneider: Mann and his musical demons
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1440.html
The article originally appeared in German in Literaturen magazine,
July/August 2007.
7.7.18
[Linked by Arts & Letters Daily.]

Thomas Mann was all too aware of the ties between music and Nazi
ideology, writes Wolfgang Schneider

Thomas Mann is considered the most music-obsessed author in the
history of literature. His powers of description were at their best
when he was writing about music. But professional musicians have
constantly objected to his statements on music. How to explain
that?
For this author, music, romantic music in particular, is the
"magician of souls" - but possibly with very dark results. The
argumentative key of "Dr. Faustus" lies in the claim that Germany
did not descend the path into National Socialist barbarianism "in
contradiction" to its classical music culture but rather in
evocation of it. And not only because Adolf Hitler was a fanatic
music-lover and Wagner fan.
[mann_text.jpg] Anyone talking about the "Third Reich" and what
came before also has to talk about music. Musicians don't like to
hear that much. This perspective is made very plausible by Hans
Rudolf Vaget, one of the most profound Thomas Mann experts, in the
fifteen investigations of his book "Thomas Mann and Music"
doubtless one of the best, most informative sources on this topic.
Vaget traces how music has sat at the top of the arts in Germany
since around 1800. It was part of the nation's high culture. Being
German meant belonging to the same people as Bach, Beethoven and
Richard Wagner. At the same time, since Romanticism, the notion has
prevailed that German music was the best expression of the "German
soul."
Imperialistic consciousness needs culture to justify its hegemonic
claim. Nothing was as fitting for this as the so-called "triumphant
procession" of German music through the entire world. In this
domain, Germany truly occupied a superior position and this was a
source of patriotic pride to even the most non-musical of Germans.
In addition to idealism, German musical life from the most modest
hobby musician to the singing clubs and the men's choir movement to
music studies - was infused with a "potentially aggressive
mentality."
Thomas Mann himself contributed a good deal to the German music
idolatry, even before he addressed the issue critically in "Doctor
Faustus". A key line of thought of his "Observations of an
apolitical man," penned during the First World War, is that
Germany's musically centred culture set the country apart from the
West and obliged it to defend its individuality in the war. He
reacted with decisive enthusiasm in 1917 to Hans Pfizner's opera
"Palestrina," a Parsifalesque work of the latest Romanticism, which
seemed to him at last to confirm once more Germany's claim to
leadership in musicis. And his favourite composer, Richard Wagner,
was among those who vouched for this claim. Wagner gave him the
term of "world conquering artistry": "Fifty years after the death
of the master, the globe is ensconced in this music every evening."
The fear of broaching the subject of "Thomas Mann and Wagner"
dominated for a long time. Partly because of the ideological
contaminations; partly because Wagnerism was an obstacle when it
came to locating Thomas Mann within modernism. Because for many,
Richard Wagner represented the depths of the 19th century at its
most ominous: bombast, musical pomp, nationalistic lindworms and
ancient German stretching. Think of the satirical "Lohengrin"
portrait in Heinrich Mann's "Der Untertan" (The Loyal Subject).
Thomas Mann, however, had always differentiated between Wagner's
stage theatrics and the actual inner drama. For him, this
introspective side was "the real Wagner" whom one "had for oneself
after all." The internalisation of the narrative, which
characterised the development of modern literature, was radically
inspired by these qualities of Wagner's oeuvre reaching its climax
in the technique of inner dialogue in the Wagnerian James Joyce. So
there are plenty of progressive links. As Nietzsche said, "Wagner
sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a
Wagnerian."
Wagner's music resonates at the central points of upheaval in Mann'
s novels and stories. For the life-weary figures of the early works
it gives a delighting adrenalin surge, holding the promise of
flight and freedom. And it has deathly powers of seduction. Whether
in "Little Herr Friedemann," "Tristan" or "Buddenbrooks", when
Wagner is played, more often than not paralysis of the will,
disintegration and the end are near at hand.
"Can shorten life expectancy and reactivate suppressed feelings."
Warnings of this kind should consequently appear on every "Tristan"
ticket. The general objection to music is expressed by Lodovico
Settembrini in "The Magic Mountain," who compares its effects with
those of "the opiate." From the start, influenced by Nietzsche's
critique of Wagner, Thomas Mann developed primarily the political
implications of the topic, fostering a culture of suspicion towards
music. From time to time he also described his own relationship to
music in this way, for example when he wrote in a letter that he
was happy to have missed Wagner performance in Bayreuth: "I am
defenceless when it comes to Wagner's music. I'm sure if I saw
'Parsifal' I couldn't write a line for at least two weeks."
Astonishing and not particularly believable words from an author
for whom music was a life elixir and an endless source of
stimulation in his work.
He makes "as much music as one can justifiably make without making
music," he said one time. His ambition was to create "good scores."
Wagner's use of leitmotif was a model for him in doing so. As
static and stereotypical as the leitmotif may seem as a means of
external characterisation, the Wagnerian interweaving of references
allows a more dynamic experience of time by continually referring
to and incorporating elements of the future and the past, pointing
beyond the figures' present consciousness. The passages of
reflection and bundling of motifs are - in the neat phrase of Ernst
Bloch - "plot-driving stopovers" in the musical-dramatic course of
events.
Thomas Mann adopted this compositional procedure, and this above
all comprises the "musicality" of his narrative style. He saw
Wagner's orchestral language as a school of ambivalence and deeper
meaning. In addition to formal elements, many of Mann's stories
have explicit references to Wagner in their content.
"Buddenbrooks", for example, is a replica of the "Ring of the
Nibelung", resetting the mythical tale in a bourgeois environment.
The first book mirrors "The Rhinegold": Here the family of gods
take possession of a castle in Valhalla, there the Buddenbrooks
occupy the house in Mengstrasse in Lübeck. Conflicts appear: here
the giants demand reimbursement for their construction work, there
Gotthold Buddenbrook seeks payment for services rendered. Gold and
"Geld", German for money, are at the heart of both stories.
One compulsory exercise of the realistic novel is to ridicule the
spectacle of illusion in opera, and to deflate its theatrical air.
Thomas Mann was no stranger to this activity in his descriptions of
opera, as far as the events on stage were concerned. The singer
portraying Siegfried may be "a rosy-cheeked man with a bread
coloured beard," and a knock-kneed Hunding may stare into the
audience "with buffalo eyes." Nevertheless the magic of the "inner
drama" remains untouched.
Visits to the opera are also described as social rituals in the
works of Flaubert, Tolstoy and Henry James, which deal less with
the music than with marriageable young women and demonstrating
arrival in society. Social signals are studied with the opera
glass. This is also true of Mann's descriptions of the opera. But
with Mann there is a movement in the other direction, toward
inwardness: Thomas Mann continually swore by his "hours of deep,
solitary happiness in the midst of the opera crowd."
He inherited his passion for music from his mother. Ludwig Ewers, a
journalist friend of the Manns, wrote that Julia Mann "was both a
regular piano player and possessor of a full, clear mezzosoprano
voice with which she delighted her boys." "Lohengrin" at the
Stadttheater in Lübeck was the musical initiation of the 17 year
old Thomas Mann - it changed his life.
Throughout his life, he went regularly to concerts and operas and
he spent many hours of solitary reflection with his record player.
James Meisel, his secretary at Princeton, described the look of
musical devotion on the writer's face: "It's quite something to
behold how he listens to 'Tristan' and 'Götterdämmerung'. His face,
normally so controlled, gradually lets go and becomes soft, mild,
full of pain and joy."
It all started in 1920 with a first-class gramophone that he found
one day in "Villino": his refuge at Lake Starnberg, where he got
away from his many children to work. He listened to it enraptured
and decided immediately to find a place for the magic box in "The
Magic Mountain." Soon, Hans Castorp was also kneeling before a
"Polyhymnia" and putting on his favourite records. The arias from
"Aida" and "Carmen" that he played again and again are projections
of the roles, subtle reflections of his own situation between the
arrogant Peeperkorn, the brave nephew Ziemßen and the beguiling
Clawdia Chauchat.
Thomas Mann specialists love the chapter on music in "The Magic
Mountain." The modern world doesn't play much of a role in most of
Mann's work no democratic masses, no big city hustle and bustle.
But then the record player! Throughout his life, Thomas Mann felt
the need to verify his understanding of music with experts and he
surrounded himself with musical mentors. Possibly his only real
friend, his neighbour in Munich, Bruno Walter, was one of the great
conductor of the day. When the General Music Director was picked up
in the royal carriage, the writer often sat next to him. The seats
in the opera reserved for the Director were often made available to
Mann and his family. His glorious childhood dreams of becoming a
"conductor" (the conductor fantasy is presented with humour in the
novella "Der Najazzo") had almost come true. Being around Bruno
Walter, he could almost take part in the conductor's "joy of
creation."
But he also witnessed the fatal connection between music and
politics in the populist anti-Semitic hostility against Bruno
Walter. "Munich's Wagner-tradition in the hands of a Jew!" - that
was the tenor of it. The conductor was accused of "un-Aryan
interpretation." The Nazis and Hitler himself succeeded in driving
him out. In 1923, he announced his resignation. Later the populist
press wrote of the conductor's banishment: it was a "victory" that
"for the first time in Germany, the great power wrestled Jewry to
the ground."
Nazism used the dominant Wagnerian culture as a gateway into the
educated bourgeois classes. Thomas Mann's major essay "The
Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner" was an attempt to offer
an alternative to the official Bayreuth version of Wagner as
"patron saint of the what-is-German solipsism." Mann tried to take
an artistic, psychological, cosmopolitan view of the composer.
Richard Wagner Richard Wagner
Words like "dilettantism" were enough to shake up the Wagner
establishment. In March 1933, there was a "Protest of the Wagner
City Munich" in which Thomas Mann was accused of muddying the
reputation of "upright German cultural giants." It was initiated by
Bruno Walter's successor Hans Knappertsbuch and was signed among
others by Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss. It was Munich's
cultural bourgeois and not the Nazi authorities that drove Thomas
Mann out of Germany (and that in the name of Wagner!) The Nazis
praise the "folk's will" with sardonic joy. The "national
Ex-communication" was a mortifying trauma, the worst that the
writer ever experienced from the German public, and, like the story
of Bruno Walter, a significant motivation for "Doctor Faustus," the
novel on the connection between music and politics.
Music, more than any other art form, served the cultural image of
the Nazis. The Bayreuth Festival was a showcase for the Third
Reich. Concerts by Wilhelm Furtwängler reached listeners all over
the world. Even Thomas Mann the emigrant clung to his radio
although not without qualms: "we shouldn't have listened, shouldn't
have loaned our ears to the swindle," he wrote in his journal after
a broadcast of "Lohengrin" in 1936. For him, Wilhelm Furtwängler
was the most powerful example of an artist who thought he could
maintain his culture in a political vacuum. And the embodiment of
German musical arrogance, expressed in comments such as "a real
symphony" has "never been written by a non-German."
Hans Rudolf Vaget argues that the mediocre writer Frank Thiess
should not be presented as the antipode to Thomas Mann in the
discussion of "inner emigration" but rather Furtwängler, as the
"emblematic protagonist" of all those who stayed behind. While he
inwardly opposed the regime, the conductor identified with the
fighting and "tragically" falling Germany. At the same time, he
helped those being persecuted - and he maintained contact with
Thomas Mann's Jewish step-parents. He visited the Pringsheim
parents over the 1937/38 New Year after they had been driven from
their Munich palace; the "sweet Willi" just spent "an entire two
and a half hours" with us, Hedwig Pringsheim reported to her
daughter Katia in Zürich. But Thomas Mann was sceptical. He
considered the fifteen minute standing ovation that Furtwängler got
after his first postwar concert in Berlin as evidence of political
incorrigibility.
Music critic Joachim Kaiser asked, "Can Adrian Leverkühn's fate,
can the life and collapse of a fatefully-brilliant, paralysed
composer be said to represent, in any compelling or plausible way,
the collapse of Hitler's Germany?" And he asked in such a way that
the only possible answer was no.
Of course there is no allegoric analogy between Leverkühn and
National Socialist Germany. Hans Rudolf Vaget understands the
novel's depiction of the relationship between music and politics
more in the sense of "anticipation." Leverkühn's attempt to
"eliminate the unthematic from a composition" in a quest for a
"perfect organisation" of the musical material is a foreshadowing
of the totalitarian aspects of National Socialist rule. For Vaget,
"anticipation" means that the collective receptiveness to National
Socialism is already evident in the cultural developments of the
previous epoch the "mentality's incubation period."
In this sense, "Doktor Faustus" is about the deep crisis in German
music in the post-Wagnerian era. "Finis musicae" - the catchword
that was going around at the beginning of the 20th century -
expressed the concern that Germany's great musical tradition could
be nearing its end. When and how would an innovative leap on the
scale of "Tristan" would be possible again?
With its breakthrough into new forms, Mann's novel about musicians
also addresses the need to secure international world standing,
even if this means resorting to demonic means. Adrian Leverkühn
aims for musical "Führerschaft," or "leadership" - a
world-conquering act of genius. He wants to "break through the
encumbering difficulties of the era" and "defeat the future of the
march." Thomas Mann understood Schönberg better on this score than
his musical advisor Theodor Adorno, who considered the objective
tendencies of "musical material" to be crucial. But Schönberg spoke
in a totally Leverkühnian sense, with a certain degree of Faustian
hubris, about composing in the twelve-tone system: "I have made a
discovery that will ensure the dominance of German music for the
next hundred years." As little as a Leverkühn would have in common
with the proto-fascist discourses of Munich's intelligentsia, the
composer is a "master from Germany" (reference) who didn't only
take part in the musical superiority concept but also embodied it.
In 1948, listening again to the final act of "Rheingold," Thomas
Mann remarked: "For this part alone I would give up all of
Schönberg's music, all of Berg's, Krenek's and Leverkühn's." Small
wonder that the novel is charged with being somewhat insincere
Thomas Mann let Leverkühn compose music that deviated from his own
musical preferences! These kinds of objections are strange: why
assume that the depiction of medical operations in "Magic Mountain"
reflects Thomas Mann's own desire for treatment, and why evaluate
the other fields of knowledge presented in his novels based on a
subjective sense of credibility?
No, he did not particularly like listening to twelve-tone music,
but he did appreciate its aesthetic challenge, its intellectual
attraction and its literary usefulness. Thus he allowed himself to
be prompted by Adorno, who gives some passages in the novel a
strong shove in the direction of "negative dialectic," otherwise
rather foreign to Mann's understanding of music. The Kretzschmar
chapter on Beethoven's Piano Sonata Opus 111 was the first that was
influenced by Adorno, and Joachim Kaiser otherwise impressed by
Mann's talent for describing music - charged him with making
factual errors. The sanity of his "Secret Council" must have seemed
somewhat questionable to Mann himself. One could infer as much from
the way he finally includes Adorno in his novel as the embodiment
of the devil himself, "an intellectual who himself composes, as
long as his thinking allows him to do so." A malicious formulation,
that hit a nerve: Adorno's musical compositions never met his own
expectations.
Hans Rudolf Vaget's model of "anticipation" is convincing, but it
also conceals the conceptual gaps in "Doctor Faustus." Leverkühn
and Nazi Germany both sought to make a pact with the devil, but
Leverkühn is anything but a Wagnerian fascist. He is a composer
who, under Hitler, no doubt would have been ostracised as a
"cultural Bolshevist"; that befuddles even the cleverest critics.
Thomas Mann's parallelism of music- and Germany-novel remains
problematic and precisely for that reason interesting, because it
will never yield fully harmonious interpretations.

The article originally appeared in German in Literaturen magazine,
July/August 2007.

Wolfgang Schneider is a writer living in Berlin. He is author of
the book about Thomas Mann, "Lebensfreundlichkeit und Pessimismus.
Thomas Manns Figurendarstellung"

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