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[Tension between Wendell Kretschmar and Adrian’s mother, Elsbeth, described but not explained. Kretschmar moves to Leipzig and the State Music School.]
p129 ...”I fear,” he [Adrian to Kretschmar] wrote, “dear and beloved friend and master, I am a lost soul, a black sheep; I have no warmth. As the Gode Boke hath it, they shall be cursed and spewed out of the mouth who are neither cold nor warm but lukewarm. Lukewarm I should not call myself. I am cold out of all question; but in my judgement of myself I would pray to dissent from the taste of that Power whose it is to apportion blessings and cursing...”
p131 “Ye think me called to this art [music], and give me to understand that the ‘step aside’ to her [from theology] were no long one. My Lutheranism agrees, for it sees in theology and music neighbouring spheres and close of kin; and besides, music has always seemed to me personally a magic marriage between theology and the so diverting mathematics. Item, she has much of the laboratory and the insistent activity of the alchemists and nigromancers of yore, which also stood in the sign of theology, but at the same time in that of emancipation and apostasy; it was apostasy, not from the feith, that was never possible, but in the feith; for apostasy is an act of feith and everything is and happens in God, most of all the falling from Him.”
p132 ...”And yet, why does an inward voice [his daemon?] warn me: ‘O homo fuge’? [O man, fly. These words appear branded on Faustus's arm immediately after he signs the bargain with Lucifer in Christopher Marlowe's version of Doctor Faustus] I cannot give answer unto the question very articulately. Only this much I can say: I fear to make promises to art, because I doubt whether my nature -- quite aside from the question of a gift -- is calculated to satisfy her; because I must disclaim the robust naivete which , so far as I can see -- among other things, and not least among them -- pertaineth to the nature of the artist. In its place my lot is a quickly satisfied intelligence, whereof, I suppose, I may speak, because I can call heaven and hell to witness that I am not vain of it; it is that, together with the accompanying proneness to fatigue and disgust (with headake) , which is the ground of my fear and concern... I see it coming (for it lieth also in my nature, for good or ill, to look beyond) that I am embarrassed at the insipidness which is the supporting structure, the conditioning solid substance of even the work of genius, at the elements thereof which are training and common property, at use and wont in achieving the beautiful; I blush at all that, weary thereof, get head-ake therefrom, and that right early.
p133 ...”It goes like this, when it is beautiful: the cellos intone by themselves, a pensive, melancholy theme, which questions the folly of the world, the wherefore of all the struggle and striving, pursuing and plaguing -- all highly expressive and decorously philosophical. The cellos enlarge upon this riddle awhile, head-shaking, deploring, and at a certain point in their remarks, a well-chosen point, the chorus of wind instruments enters with a deep full breath that makes your shoulders rise and fall, in a choral hymn, movingly solemn, richly harmonized, and produced with all the muted dignity and mildly restrained power of the brass. Thus the sonorous melody presses on up to nearly the height of a climax, which, in accordance with the law of economy [I would have said the laws of seduction] it avoids at first, gives way, leaves open, sinks away, postpones, most beautifully lingers; then withdraws and gives place to another theme, a songlike, simple one, now jesting, now grave, now popular, apparently brisk and robust by nature but sly as you make them, and for someone with some subtle cleverness in the art of thematic analysis and transformation it proves itself amazingly pregnant and capable of utter refinement. For a while this little song is managed and deployed, cleverly and charmingly, it is taken apart, looked at in detail, varied, out of it a delightful figure in the middle register is led up into the most enchanted heights of fiddles and flutes, lulls itself there a little, and when it is at its most artful, then the mild brass has again the word with the previous choral hymn and comes into the foreground. The brass does not start from the beginning as it did the first time, but as though its melody had already been there for a while; and it continues, solemnly, to that climax from which it wisely refrained the first time, in order that the surging feeling, the Ah-h-effect, might be the greater; now it gloriously bestrides its theme, mounting unchecked, with weighty support from the passing notes on the tuba, and then, looking back, as it were, with dignified satisfaction on the finished achievement, sings itself decorously to the end.”
I have quoted this passage in full as it will be used in a rather surprising (at least to me) way later. How I will capture the other end I have no idea at the moment.
“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 leave me humbly to tarry with God and theology?”
[1905, Adrian goes to Leipzig and Zeitblom joins the Field Artillery for a year of service at Naumburg]
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