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Chapter VII
It’s interesting that Mann starts with math and music here since they are so close to magic for me. Adrian now lives on Parochialstrasse. (Parochialism.)
[Luca Cimabue - Italian apprentice to Adrian’s uncle.]
p 44 ...he [Adrian] easily mastered the [scholarly] demands made on him -- though the word “mastered” is not well chosen, for it cost him nothing to satisfy them. And if his excellence as a pupil did not earn for him the affection of his masters, for it did not, as I often observed -- one saw instead a certain irritation, a desire to trap him -- it was not so much that they found him conceited, though they did. They did not, however, think him proud of his achievements; the trouble was, he was not proud enough, just therein lay his arrogance. He obviously looked down on all this that was so easy for him: that is, the subject-matter of the lessons, the various branches of study, the purveying of which made up the dignity and the livelihood of the masters. It was only too natural that they should not enjoy seeing these things so competently and carelessly dismissed.
...he on every occasion made it clear... how indifferent and so to speak unimportant to him the whole of his education was... I asked myself what was not indifferent and unimportant to him. I did not see the “main thing,” and really it was not there to see... Bad pupils there are in plenty. But Adrian presented the singular phenomenon of a bad pupil as the head of the form. I say that it distressed me, but how impressive, how fascinating, I found it too! How it strengthened my devotion to him, mingling with it -- can one understand why? -- something like pain, like hopelessness!
p 45 ... Mathesis, as applied logic, which yet confines itself to pure and lofty abstractions, holds a peculiar middle position between humanistic and the practical sciences, and from the explanations which Adrian gave me of the pleasure he took in it, it appeared that he found this middle position at once higher, dominating, universal, or, as he expressed it, “the true.” It was a genuine pleasure to hear him describe anything as “the true,” ... It turned out that he was religious.
p 47 ... In short, in principle he showed himself aware of enharmonic changes and not unaware of certain tricks by which one can by-pass keys and use the enharmonic changes for modulations.
This is too short to stand alone and the next chapter, as “Zietblom” admits, is too long. You will have to bear with me and accept his apology in the following chapter.
Chapter VIII
[Wendell Kretschmar, German piano teacher from Pennsylvania.]
p 50 ...Wendell Kretschmar honoured the principle, which we repeatedly heard from his lips, first formed in the English tongue, that to arouse interest was not a question of the interest of others, but of our own; it could only be done, but then infallibly was, if one was fundamentally interested in a thing oneself, so that when one talked about it one could hardly help drawing others in, infecting them with it, and so creating an interest up to then not present or dreamed of. And this was worth a great deal more than catering to one already existent. [this could be my motto]
p51 What did he talk about? Well, the man was capable of spending a whole hour on the question: Why did Beethoven not write a third movement to the Piano Sonata Opus 111? It is without doubt a matter worth discussing. But think of it in the light of the posters outside the hall of Activities for the Common Weal, or inserted in the Kaisersaschern Railway Journal, and ask yourself the amount of public interest it could arouse...
p52 ...one would usually connect with the conception of the merely personal, ideas of limitless subjectivity and of radical harmonic will to expression, in contrast to polyphonic objectivity (Kretschmar was concerned to have us impress upon our minds this distinction between harmonic subjectivity and polyphonic objectivity)... As a matter of fact, Beethoven had been far more “subjective,” not to say far more “personal,” in his middle period than in his last, had been far more bent on taking all the flourishes, formulas, and conventions, of which music is certainly full, and consuming them in the personal expression, melting them into the subjective dynamic. The relation of the later Beethoven to the conventional, say in the last five piano sonatas, is, despite all the uniqueness and even uncanniness of the formal language, quite different, much more complaisant and easy-going. Untouched, untransformed by the subjective, convention often appeared in the late works, in a baldness, one might say exhaustiveness, an abandonment of self, with an effect more majestic and awful than any reckless plunge into the personal. In these forms, said the speaker, the subjective and the conventional assumed a new relationship, conditioned by death.
p53 ...Where greatness and death come together, he declared, there arises an objectivity tending to the conventional, which in its majesty leaves the most domineering subjectivity far behind, because therein the merely personal -- which had after all been surmounting of a tradition already brought to its peak -- once more outgrew itself, in that it entered into the mythical, the collectively great and supernatural.
He did not ask if we understood that, nor did we ask ourselves. When he gave it as his view that the main point was to hear it, we fully agreed. It was in the light of what he had said, he went on, that the work he was speaking of in particular, Sonata Op. 111, was to be regarded... [Another motto]
p55 [After playing the Sonata while shouting commentary]...He sat on his revolving [piano] stool... and in a few words brought to an end his lecture on why Beethoven had not written a third movement to Op. 111. We had only needed, he said, to hear the piece to answer the question ourselves, A third movement? A new approach? A return after this parting -- impossible! It had happened that the sonata had come, in the second, enormous movement, to an end, an end without any return. And when he said “the sonata,” he meant not only this one in C minor, but the sonata in general, as a species, as traditional art-form; it itself was here at an end, brought to its end, it had fulfilled its destiny, reached its goal, beyond which there was no going, it cancelled and resolved itself, it took leave -- the gesture of farewell of the D G G motif, consoled by the C sharp, was a leave-taking in this sense too, great as the whole piece itself, the farewell of the sonata form.
p57 [about another lecture this time on “Beethoven and the Fugue”] I interrupt myself in my reproduction to remark that the lecturer was talking about matters and things in the world of art, situation that had never come within our horizon and only appeared now on its margin in shadowy wise through the always compromised medium of his speech [he had a bad stutter]. We were unable to check up on it except through his own explanatory performances on the cottage piano, and we listened to it all with the dimly excited fantasy of children hearing a fairy-story they do not understand, while their tender minds are none the less in a strange, dreamy, intuitive way enriched and advantaged. [Just like any of you who have not read The Magic Mountain or Faust... I hope] Fugue, counterpoint, “Eroica,” “confusion in consequence of too strongly coloured modulations,” “strict style” -- all that was just magic spells to us, but we heard it as greedily, as large-eyed, as children always hear what they do not understand or what is even entirely unsuitable -- indeed, with far more pleasure than the familiar, fitting, and adequate can give them. Is it believable that this is the most intensive, splendid, perhaps the very most productive way of learning: the anticipatory way, learning that spans wide stretches of ignorance? As a pedagogue I suppose I should not speak in its behalf; but I do know that it profits youth extraordinarily. And I believe that the stretches jumped over fill in of themselves in time.
Thomas Mann based Kretzschmar's lecture on a demonstration that the sociologist/ philosopher/ musicologist Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) gave during a dinner party at Mann's house in Pacific Palisades. When Kretzschmar describes the D-G-G motif, he substitutes some words and phrases for the notes, including "meadowland". That is John Woods's translation of "Wiesengrund," which also happens to be
Adorno's middle name.
p59 What principally impressed him [Adrian], as I heard while we were walking home, and also next day in the school courtyard, was Kretschmar’s distinction between cult epochs and cultural epochs, and his remark that the secularization of art, its separation from the divine service, bore only a superficial and episodic character. The pupil of the upper school appeared to be struck by the thought, which the lecturer had not expressed at all but had kindled in him, that the separation of art from the liturgical whole, its liberation and elevation into the individual and culturally self-purposive, had laden it with an irrelevant solemnity, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering, which was imaged in Beethoven’s frightful apparition in the doorway [while trying to write a fugue], and which did not need to be its abiding destiny, its permanent intellectual constitution... Still almost without any real or practical experience in the field of art, he [Adrian] speculated in the void and in precocious language on the probably imminent retreat from its present role to a more modest, happier one in the service of a higher union, which did not need to be, as it once was, the Church. What it would be he could not say. But that the cultural idea was a historically transitory phenomenon, that it could lose itself again in another one, that the future did not inevitably belong to it, this thought he had certainly singled out from Kretschmar’s lecture.
It is impossible to read this paragraph without thought of The Magic Mountain and The Birth of Tragedy coming to the fore. The metaphysical basis of music, or better, the musical basis of metaphysics. The secular vs the religious or nationalistic.
“But the alternative,” I [Zeitblom] threw in, “to culture is barbarism.”
“Permit me,” said he. “After all, barbarism is the opposite of culture only within the order of thought which it gives us. Outside of it the opposite may be something quite different or no opposite at all.”
...our stage is that of civilization -- a very praiseworthy state no doubt, but also neither was there any doubt that we should have to become very much more barbaric to be capable of culture again. Technique and comfort -- in that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization -- in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture?
p61 [another lecture on “Music and the Eye” or the appearance of written music] ...When... the Dutch masters of polyphony in their endless devices for the crossing of parts had so arranged them contrapuntally that one part had been like another when read backwards; that could not be perceived by the way they actually sounded, and he would wager that very few people would have detected the trick by ear, for it was intended rather for the eye of the guild...
He produced several... Pythagorean jests, intended more for the eye than the ear, which music had now and again been pleased to make and came out roundly with the statement that in the last analysis he ascribed to the art a certain inborn lack of the sensuous, yes an anti-sensuality, a sacret [sic probably sacred] tendency to asceticism. Music was actually the most intellectual of all the arts, as was evident from the fact that in it, as in no other, form and content are interwoven and absolutely one and the same. We say of course that music “addresses itself to the ear”; but it does so only in a qualified way, only in so far, namely, as the hearing, like the other senses, is the deputy, the instrument, and the receiver of the mind. Perhaps, said Kretschmar, it was music’s deepest wish not to be heard at all, nor even seen, nor yet felt; but only -- if that were possible -- in some Beyond, the other side of sense and sentiment, to be perceived and contemplated as pure mind, pure spirit. But bound as she was to the world of sense, music must ever strive after the strongest, yes, the most seductive sensuous realization: she is a Kundry, who wills not what she does and flings soft arms of lust round the neck of the fool. Her most powerful realization for the senses she finds in orchestral music, where through the ear she seems to affect all the senses with her opiate wand and to mingle the pleasures of the realm of sound with those of colour and scent. Here, rightly, she was the penitent in the garb of the seductress. But there was an instrument -- that is to say, a musical means of realization -- through which music, while becoming audible to the sense of hearing, did so in a half-unsensuous, an almost abstract way, audible, that is, in a way peculiarly suited to its intellectual nature, He meant the piano, an instrument that is not an instrument at all in the sense of the others, since all specialization is foreign to it... The piano, properly speaking, is the direct and sovereign representative of music itself in its intellectuality, and for that reason one must learn it. But piano lessons should not be -- or not essentially and not first and last -- lessons in a special ability, but lessons in... [music].
I do not at all understand what is meant here about the piano.
p62 But perhaps I may be pardoned for letting him appear once more. For I am concerned with a fourth lecture... since no other... made such a deep impression on Adrian.
I cannot recollect its exact title...In any case the elemental, the primitive, the primeval beginning, played the chief role in it, as well as the idea that among all the arts it was precisely music that... had never got rid of a religious attitude towards her own beginnings; a pious proneness to call them up in solemn invocation -- in short, to celebrate her elements. She thus celebrates, he said, her cosmic aptitude for allegory; for those elements were, as it were, the first and simplest materials of the world, a parallelism of which a philosophizing artist of a day not long gone by -- it was Wagner again of whom he spoke -- had shrewdly, perhaps with somewhat too mechanical, too ingenious cleverness, made use, in that in his cosmogonic myth of the Ring he made the basic elements of music one with those of the world. To him the beginning of all things had its music: the music of the beginning was that, and also the beginning of music...
p63 ...it lay in the very nature of this singular art that it was at any moment capable of beginning at the beginning, of discovering itself afresh out of nothing, bare of all knowledge of its past cultural history, and of creating anew. It would then run through the same primitive stages as in its historical beginnings and could on one short course, apart from the massif of its development, alone and unheeded by the world, reach most extraordinary and singular heights...
p67 ...In so young a person as Adrian then was, the presumption of this attitude [uncommon arrogance], it must be admitted, is disquieting; it was calculated to cause one concern for the health of his soul. Of course it is also very impressive to a companion with a simpler mental constitution, and since I loved him, I loved his arrogance as well -- perhaps I loved him for its sake. Yes, that is how it was: this arrogance was the chief motive of the fearful love which all my life I cherished for him in my heart.
Wendell Kretzschmar, AL’s music teacher. Gives lectures on Beethoven’s Piano sonata no. 32 and the composer’s relationship to the fugue. He also tells the story of Johann Conrad Beißel, of the Ephrata Cloister, and his system of musical composition, with “master” and “servant” notes. Kretzschmar characterizes the present age is one of homophonic-harmonic-melodic music, as opposed to the older (and superior) polyphonic-contrapuntal kind (a positive form of “barbarism”).
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