Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann novel)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Doctor Faustus (in German, Doktor Faustus) is a German novel written in the United States by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde ("Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by a friend").

Contents 1 Outline 2 Plot 3 Allusions and sources 3.1 Models for the composer-legend 3.2 Allusive naming; title 3.3 Other composite elements 3.4 Guidance 4 Themes 5 Adaptations 6 English translations 7 Notes 8 Sources

[edit] Outline

The novel is a re-shaping of the Faust legend in the context of the first half of the twentieth century and the intellectual, moral and spiritual destiny of Germany and Europe in that period. This is embodied in the life of the hero, a fictional German composer named Adrian Leverkühn (meaning 'living audaciously') as told by his friend from childhood Serenus Zeitblom (meaning 'Serene Flowering (or metaphor) of the Age'). Leverkühn's early creative, musical and metaphysical explorations and training, in which he displays brilliance, lead to a personal career and life-drama in which he is increasingly preoccupied with the Apocalypse and the Judgement of his soul. The narrator, Zeitblom (a Catholic teacher and humanist, who has resigned his Kaisersaschern professorship through disagreement with the Nazi policy towards the Jewish population), writes in the present (1943-1946) in Germany, witnessing the terrible fate of his country. Leverkühn, born in 1885, leaves writings which show that he had formed a spiritual contract with a Mephistophelean manifestation, in exchange for twenty-four years of great achievement as a composer. This arose from an episode when as a young man he contracted venereal disease after visiting a brothel (coinciding, c1906, with the early production of Richard Strauss's opera Salome). His brilliant career develops through the years leading up to 1930 when, as he is introducing his final masterpiece to a group of friends, a vast cantata entitled 'The Lamentation of Doctor Faust', he makes an apparently insane confession of his demonic history, and descends into brain disease leaving him without a trace of his previous mental faculties. The collapse lasts until his death ten years later in 1940, completely infantilised in the care of his elderly mother. The period of his complete mental decay therefore corresponds to the historic period of the rise of Nazism, though Zeitblom comments on the political circumstances only in the context of the period of writing, 1943-1947. (Moreover, the author explicitly mentions certain events of World War II, e.g. the allied invasion, June 1944, but never Auschwitz.) Nevertheless the novel closes with Zeitblom's prayer, 'God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland!' (Gott sei euerer armen Seele gnädig, mein Freund, mein Vaterland.) Hence Leverkühn and his music are not merely parallel to, but intended actually as an embodiment of, the soul of Germany, because to Zeitblom (or Mann?) his love for his friend and his fatherland are the same thing.

[edit] Plot

The origins of the narrator and the hero in the (fictitious) small town of Kaisersaschern on the (Thuringian) Saale, the name of Zeitblom's apothecary father (Wohlgemut, 'Joyful'), and the description of Jonathan Leverkühn as an old-fashioned German type, with a cast of features 'from a time before the Thirty Years War', evokes the old post-medieval Germany: in their respective Catholic and Lutheran origins, and theological studies, they are heirs to the German Renaissance and the world of Kant and Bach, but sympathetic to, and admired by, the 'keen-scented receptivity of Jewish circles.' They are awakened to musical knowledge by Wendell Kretzschmar, a German-American lecturer and musicologist who visits Kaisersaschern. After schooling together, both boys study theology at Halle, but Adrian becomes absorbed in musical harmony, counterpoint and polyphony as a key to metaphysics and mystic numbers, and follows Kretzschmar to Leipzig to study with him.

Zeitblom describes 'with a religious shudder' Adrian's embrace with the woman ('Esmeralda') who gave him syphilis, how he worked her name in note-ciphers into his compositions, and how the medics who sought to heal him were all prevented from effecting a cure by mysterious circumstances. Zeitblom begins to perceive the demonic, as Adrian develops other friendships, first with the translator Rüdiger Schildknapp ('Shield-bearer') (a loyal friend), and then after his move to Munich with the handsome young violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger ('Sword-polisher', i.e. swordsmith), Frau Rodde and her doomed daughters Clarissa and Inez, Dr. Kranich ('crane') the numismatist, Leo Zink and Baptist Spengler (two artists). Zeitblom insists, however, on the unique closeness of his own relationship to Adrian, who addresses only him as 'du' (rather than the more formal 'sie'). Adrian also meets the Schweigestill ('silence-peace') family at Pfeiffering, in the country an hour from Munich, which later becomes his permanent home and retreat. He lives at Palestrina in Italy with Schildknapp (as in reality Thomas Mann did 15 years earlier, with his brother Heinrich) in 1912, and Zeitblom visits them there. And it is there that Adrian, working on music for Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, has his long dialogue with a Mephistopheles figure who appears either objectively or out of his own afflicted soul. These are the central pages of the novel, corresponding also to its central part.

Zeitblom transcribes Adrian's manuscript of the conversation, in which the demon claims Esmeralda as the instrument of his entrapment of Adrian's vainglory, ingenium and memoriam, and offers him twenty-four years of genius-time, high-flying time (geniale Zeit, hochtragende Zeit) from the date of his sexual embrace, if he will now renounce the warmth of love. This dialogue reveals the anatomy of Leverkühn's thought.

Adrian then moves permanently to Pfeiffering, and in conversations with Zeitblom reveals a darker view of life than his. Figures of a demonic type appear, such as Dr. Chaim Breisacher ('Pulp-musher') 'a racial and intellectual type of reckless development and fascinating ugliness,' to cast down the idols of the older generation. In 1915 Inez Rodde marries, but forms an adulterous love for Rudi Schwerdtfeger. Adrian begins to experience illnesses of retching, headaches and migraines, but is producing new and finer music, preparing the way for his great work Apocalypsis cum figuris. Schwerdtfeger woos himself into Adrian's solitude, asking for a violin concerto that would be like the offspring of their platonic union. By August 1919 Adrian has completed the sketch of Apocalypse. There is also a new circle of intellectual friends, including Sextus Kridwiss ('bankrupt knowledge') the art-expert, Chaim Breisacher, Dr. Egon Unruhe ('Dr Unrest') the palaeo-zoologist, Georg Vogler ('prattler') (literary historian), Dr. Holzschuher ('Dr Clogs') (a Dürer scholar), and the saturnine poet Daniel zur Höhe. In their 'torturingly clever' discussions they declare the need for the renunciation of bourgeois softness and a preparation for an age of pre-medieval harshness. Adrian writes to Zeitblom that collectivism is the true antithesis of Bourgeois culture: Zeitblom observes that aestheticism is the herald of barbarism.

Apocalypse is performed in Frankfurt in 1926 under Otto Klemperer with Erbe (an allusion to Karl Erb, the famous Evangelist of Bach's St Matthew Passion) as the St John narrator. (As a music reviewer Thomas Mann had been witness to Erb's oratorio debuts in around 1916.) Zeitblom describes the work as filled with longing without hope, with hellish laughter transposed and transfigured even into the searing tones of spheres and angels. Adrian attempts to obtain a wife by employing Rudi (who gets his concerto) as the messenger of his love, but she prefers Rudi himself, and not Adrian. Soon afterwards Rudi is shot dead in a tram by Inez, because of jealousy. As Adrian begins to plan the second oratorio The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, in 1928 his sister's child Nepomuk is sent to live with him. This beautiful boy, who calls himself 'Echo', is beloved by all. As the work of gigantic dimensions develops in Adrian's mind, the child falls ill and dies, and Adrian, despairing, believes that by gazing at him with love (contrary to his contract) he has killed him with poisonous and hellish influences. The score of the Lamentation is completed in 1930, Adrian summons his friends and guests, and instead of playing the music he relates the story of his infernal contract, and descends into the brain disease which lasts until his death ten years later. Zeitblom visits him occasionally, and survives to witness the collapse of Germany's 'dissolute triumphs' as he tells the story of his friend.

[edit] Allusions and sources

Doctor Faustus is constructed in richly allusive and symbolic terms. H.T. Lowe-Porter refers to the three strands of the book:

'the German scene from within, and its broader, its universal origins; the depiction of an art not German alone but vital to our whole civilization; music as one instance of the arts and the state in which the arts find themselves today [sc. 1949]; and, finally, the invocation of the daemonic.' (Translator's note, vi.)

Mann wrote a book about the writing of this novel, 'The Genesis of Doctor Faustus' (1949).

[edit] Models for the composer-legend

The apparent model for Leverkühn's oratorio on the theme of the Apocalypse is Franz Schmidt's Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln, completed in 1936-37, and first performed in Vienna with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra on 15 June 1938 with Rudolf Gerlach as Evangelist, conducted by Oswald Kabasta. Mann's description of the high tenor as Evangelist coldly and prophetically narrating the events of the destruction of the world is exactly paralleled in this work. The premiere, occurring a short time after the Anschluss, provided the new regime with a triumphant and apocalyptic occasion. The exploitation of the politically-naive Schmidt (who died in 1939), the illness of his wife (murdered in her asylum under the Euthanasia programme) and death of his daughter all resonate strongly with the book's themes. In naming Leverkühn's projected work The Lamentation of Dr Faustus, Mann was echoing Ernst Krenek's Lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae, an oratorio of 1941-1942 which combines the Schoenbergian 12-tone technique with modal counterpoint.

Mann had himself worked as Music critic in Munich around the time of World War I, when he shared in the appreciation of Karl Erb's performance in the St Matthew Passion. Although Leverkühn's visit to Palestrina with Schildknapp fully evokes the great early polyphonist named for this birthpace, (and Adrian's absorption in polyphonic theory), it also alludes to the opera Palestrina, premiered at Munich in 1917 by Erb, and written by Hans Pfitzner. That opera is (outwardly) precisely about polyphonic music in relation to political environment, and Palestrina's attempt to hold together the diverging worlds of the Reformation epoch. Mann described Erb's 1917 debut as Palestrina in almost exactly the terms used for 'Erbe' in Apocalypse. Mann therefore also had Pfitzner in mind.

Palestrina is one of three characteristic German-language operas of the early 20th century, outside the main stream of opera, which deal with the isolation of the creative individual,^[1] two others being Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler (about Matthias Grünewald), completed 1935,^[2] and the Berlin-based Ferruccio Busoni's Doktor Faust, which was left unfinished in 1924. All are concerned with the German Protestant Reformation, as the root point leading to the ethical, spiritual and artistic crises confronting early 20th century creativity . Mann's Doctor Faustus strongly reflects this theme in German musical theatre.

[edit] Allusive naming; title

Names are important throughout. 'Serenus' Zeitblom may hint at 'Seraphicus', one of Schubert's forenames, and his father Wohlgemut echoes the artist Michael Wohlgemuth, teacher of Albrecht Dürer. The name of Wendell Kretzschmar is probably borrowed from that of Hermann Kretzschmar, a founder of interpretative musical analysis, whose essays 'Guides to the Concert Hall' were widely read. Kretzschmar is half-American to indicate the world-historic context of musical culture. The names of other key characters reflect their roles, as in a morality play like Everyman, a mannerism suited to the Faust genre and its allegorical purposes.

The doomed child's name, Nepomuk (middle name of the composer Hummel), is that of a town in the Czech republic and of a Christian martyr who died there. In Latin, nepos means grandson or nephew, and there may be a word-play on German Mucke, a caprice. But this is also an allusion to the high rococo, the 're-echoing of movement', in the St John Nepomuk Church architecture by the Asam brothers in Munich (as described and interpreted by Heinrich Wölfflin^[3]). The child's nick-name 'Echo' refers both to the blank sheet of the child's innocence upon which the fatal morbidity in Adrian's soul will be imprinted, and also to the re-echoing, 'impalpable not-surface' of the Faustian post-Renaissance gloom and the refusal of Adrian's psyche to resolve within clearly linear parameters. Just as the harmonic limits of the polyphony dissolve, so (in visual terms) the devil is in the chiaroscuro, and this is 'echoed' in the multi-layered meaning in the name.

Finally, the title of the novel should not be overlooked; it reminds of course to the most famous work, Faust I and Faust II, of the German poet Goethe. The relation with this work is indirect, mainly the Faustian character of Adrian Leverkühn, Faustian through his abnormal ambition. Moreover, the abnormality of Adrian Leverkühn is related to that of the German culture in view of Nazism.

[edit] Other composite elements

Mann's characters are composites, not specific counterparts to individuals. Where names do seem to allude to real persons (such as Spengler, presumably to Oswald Spengler, or Kridwiss, perhaps to Ernst Kris?) Mann is echoing in their names the philosophies and intellectual standpoints of their time (of which he was a part) without intending portraits or impersonations of the real persons. The homoerotic character of the violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger is modelled on Paul Ehrenberg of Dresden, an admired friend of Thomas Mann's.

In preparation for the work, Mann studied musicology and biographies of major composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Hugo Wolf, Franz Schreker and Alban Berg. He communicated with living composers, including Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg (see below), and Hanns Eisler. He also made a study of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose career including the supposed contracting of syphilis followed by complete mental collapse in 1889 at the height of his creative life prophesying the 'Anti-Christ', and his death in 1900, do present a pattern imitated in Leverkühn. The illnesses of Delius and Wolf also resonate here. In the death of the child there is an echo (appropriately) of the death of Mahler's daughter, after he had (in Alma's opinion) tempted fate by setting the Kindertotenlieder.

In Chapter XXII Leverkühn develops the twelve-tone technique or row system, which was actually invented by Arnold Schoenberg. Schönberg lived near Mann in Los Angeles as the novel was being written. He was very annoyed by this appropriation without his consent, and later editions of the novel included an Author's Note at the end acknowledging that the technique was Schönberg's intellectual property, and that passages of the book dealing with musical theory are indebted in many details to Schönberg's Harmonielehre.

[edit] Guidance

A most important and direct contribution came from the philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno, who acted as Mann's adviser and encouraged him to rewrite large sections of the book. Mann also read chapters to groups of invited friends (a method also used by Kafka) to test the effect of the text. He wrote, "Zeitblom is a parody of myself. Adrian's mood is closer to my own than one might – and ought to – think."

[edit] Themes

As a re-telling of the Faust myth, the novel is concerned with themes such as pride, temptation, the cost of greatness, loss of humanity and so on. Another concern is with the intellectual fall of Germany in the time leading up to World War II. Leverkühn's own moods and ideology mimic the change from humanism to irrational nihilism found in Germany's intellectual life in the 1930s. Leverkühn becomes increasingly corrupt of body and of mind, ridden by syphilis and insanity. In the novel, all of these thematic threads – Germany's intellectual fall, Leverkühn's spiritual fall, and the physical corruption of his body – directly correspond to the national disaster of fascist Germany. In Mann's published version of his 1938 United States lecture tour, The Coming Victory of Democracy, he said, "I must regretfully own that in my younger years I shared that dangerous German habit of thought which regards life and intellect, art and politics as totally separate worlds." He now realised that they were inseparable. In Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn's personal history, his artistic development, and the shifting German political climate are tied together by the narrator Zeitblom as he feels out and worries over the moral health of his nation (just as he had worried over the spiritual health of his friend, Leverkühn).

[edit] Adaptations

• Franz Seitz’s 1982 adaptation of the novel for West German television starred Jon Finch as Adrian Leverkühn.
• Mann's novel was adapted for the stage in 1999 by Polish theatre director Grzegorz Jarzyna (using the pseudonym "Das Gemüse"). It premiered in October 1999 at the Teatr Polski (Polish Theatre) in Wroclaw, in co-operation with the Hebbel-Theater in Berlin. The play surprised the audience with its traditionality, but did not convince the German critics who described it as a "disaster".

[edit] English translations

• H. T. Lowe-Porter translated many of Mann's works, including Doctor Faustus, almost contemporaneously with their composition. Mann completed Doctor Faustus in 1947, and in 1948 Alfred A. Knopf published Lowe-Porter's English translation (referenced below). The translator in her note remarked 'Grievous difficulties do indeed confront anyone essaying the role of copyist to this vast canvas, this cathedral of a book, this woven tapestry of symbolism.' She described her translation as 'a version which cannot lay claim to being beautiful, though in every intent it is deeply faithful.' She found a linguistic spirit comparable to Mann's intended authorial 'voice', and employed medieval English vocabulary and phrasing to correspond with those sections of the text in which characters speak in Early New High German.
• John E. Woods' translation of 1997 is in a more modern vein, and does not attempt to mirror the original in this way.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Sources

1. Mann, Thomas. Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde (S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1947).
2. Mann, Thomas; translation by Lowe-Porter, H.T. (Helen Tracy). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. ISBN 0-679-60042-6.
3. Mann, Thomas. The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus (Alfred Knopf, New York 1961).
4. Mann, Thomas; translation by Woods, John E. (John Edwin). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. ISBN 0-375-40054-0.
5. Reed, T.J. (Terence James). Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1974. ISBN 0-19-815742-8 (cased). ISBN 0-19-815747-9 (paperback).