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Begins with a description of Adrian’s new lodgings in Munich. It was my intention to skip this as not really being important but there was one, seemingly minor, detail that sent me to Wiki and which now compels me to revise my plan. Near the end of the description of his new rooms we find this,
p195 There was indeed one rather pointless decoration, relic of some past enthusiasm, framed in nut wood, on the left-hand wall: Giacomo Meyerbeer at the piano, with the inspired gaze attacking the keys, surrounded by the hovering forms of characters from his operas. However, the apotheosis did not too much displease the young maestro [Adrian], and when he sat in the basket-chair at his work-table, a simple green-covered extension-table, he had his back to it. So he let it stay.
The name Meyerbeer meant nothing to me except that I was sure this was intended to be dismissive of the man and I had a vague notion that he was an artist whose reputation had been “popular” but was later looked down upon by more refined tastes. Yes and No, as it turns out.
As you review his career (here) you notice that he largely represented the liberal German tradition, especially in the years before 1848, and that his reputation was eventually undermined by the anti-Semitic attacks of Wagner. But the names of two of his best known operas caught my eye and I went a little deeper. Les Huguenots is about the Protestant opposition in France leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and involves the House of Navarre -- as does Love’s Labour’s Lost. And then there's Robert Le Diable...
Here are a few choice quotes from Wiki about the opera Robert Le Diable,
The libretto was fabricated on the basis of old legends about Duke Robert the Magnificent of Normandy, the father of William the Conqueror, alleged in some versions to have been the son of the Devil. The librettists padded out this outline with a variety of melodramatic incidents. The plot reflected 'the fantastic legendary elements which fascinated the opera public of 1830', a taste which had evolved from the 1824 Paris production of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz (in its French version Robin des bois), which also features a doubtful hero befriended by a demon promising him success...
Robert and his mysterious friend Bertram are among a group of knights who are preparing to compete in a tournament for the hand of Princess Isabelle. They all praise wine, women and gambling (Versez à tasses pleines). Robert's attendant Raimbaut sings a ballad about a beautiful princess from Normandy who married a devil; the princess had a son, Robert, known as 'le diable'. Robert indignantly reveals that he is the son in question and condemns Raimbaut to death. Raimbaut begs for pardon and tells Robert that he is engaged to marry. Robert relents and relishes the thought of the droit du seigneur. Raimbaut's fianceé arrives; Robert recognizes her as his foster-sister Alice and pardons Raimbaut. Alice tells Robert that his mother has died and that her last words were a warning about a threatening dark force (Va! Va! dit-elle)...
Bertram meets Raimbaut, who has arrived for an assignation with Alice. He gives him a bag of gold and advises him not to marry Alice as his new wealth will attract plenty of women (Ah! l’honnête homme). Raimbaut leaves and Bertram gloats at having corrupted him. Bertram reveals that Robert, to whom he is truly devoted, is his son; he then enters an adjoining cave to commune with the spirits of hell. Alice enters and expresses her love for Raimbaut (Quand je quittai la Normandie). She overhears strange chanting coming from the cave and decides to listen; she learns that Bertram will lose Robert forever if he cannot persuade him to sign away his soul to the Devil by midnight. On emerging from the cave, Bertram realizes that Alice has heard everything (Mais Alice, qu’as-tu donc?). He threatens her and she promises to keep silent. Robert arrives, mourning the loss of Isabelle, and Bertram tells him that to win her he should seize a magic branch from the tomb of Saint Rosalia in a nearby deserted cloister. Although to take it is sacrilege, the branch will give Robert magical powers. Robert declares that he will be bold and do as Bertram instructs. Bertram leads Robert to the cloister. The ghosts of nuns rise from their tombs, beckoned by Bertram, and dance, praising the pleasures of drinking, gambling and lust. Robert seizes the branch and fends off the demons who surround him...
Isabelle is preparing for her marriage with the Prince of Granada. Alice rushes in to inform her of what she has learnt about Robert, but she is interrupted by envoys of the Prince who enter bearing gifts. Robert arrives and, using the power of the branch, freezes everyone except himself and Isabelle.
Unsettled by the power he's wielding, he confesses to Isabelle that he is using witchcraft, but begs her not to reject him. She expresses her love for him and implores him to repent (Robert, toi que j'aime). Robert breaks the branch and the spell it has created, and is taken into custody by Isabelle's attendants...
A group of monks extol the power of the Church. Bertram has freed Robert from the guards and the two arrive to prevent the marriage of Isabelle to the Prince of Granada. Bertram attempts to get Robert to sign a document in which he promises to serve Bertram for all eternity. He reveals to Robert that he is his true father and Robert decides to sign the oath from filial devotion. Before he can do so, Alice appears with the news that the Prince has been prevented from marrying Isabelle. Alice prays for divine help (Dieu puissant, ciel propice) and hands Robert his mother's will. Robert reads his mother's message, in which she warns him to beware the man who seduced and ruined her. Robert is wracked by indecision. Midnight strikes and the time for Bertram's coup is past. He is drawn down to hell. Robert is reunited with Isabelle in the cathedral, to great rejoicing...
The opera premiered on 21 November 1831 [Goethe died in March of 1832] at the Paris Opéra. The success owed much to the opera's star singers – Levasseur as Bertram, Nourrit as Robert — and to the provocative "Ballet of the Nuns" in the third act, featuring the great ballerina, Marie Taglioni.
The choreography for the ballet was elaborated by the ballerina's father, Filippo Taglioni. The audience's prurient delight in this scandalous scene is well conveyed by the reviewer for the Revue des Deux-Mondes:
A crowd of mute shades glides through the arches. All these women cast off their nuns' costume, they shake off the cold powder of the grave; suddenly they throw themselves into the delights of their past life; they dance like bacchantes, they play like lords, they drink like sappers. What a pleasure to see these light women. . .
The fortuitous timing of the opera's premiere, not long after the July Revolution, and its sensational and novel effects, meant that it was widely identified with the new, liberal, ideas of the July Monarchy. As Berlioz commented, Meyerbeer had "not only the luck to be talented, but the talent to be lucky." Honoré de Balzac (in his novella Gambara) and Heinrich Heine (in his poem Angélique) are just two of the contemporary writers to express their fascination with the opera. Alexandre Dumas set a chapter of The Count of Monte Cristo between two acts of Robert; and George Sand wrote about it at length in her Lettres d'un voyageur. It is the only nineteenth-century opera to have a rose named after it...
-Wiki
At a later time I may have to say more about the family and friends of the “Frau Senator” (the Senator’s widow), but it doesn’t seem necessary to me at the moment, though I will introduce a couple people.
p198 ...There were two friends, both painters belonging to the Secession group, Leo Zink and Baptist Spengler; one an Austrian from near Bozen, a jester by social techniques, an insinuating clown, who in a gentle drawl ceaselessly made fun of himself and his exaggeratedly long nose... The other, Spengler, from central Germany, with a flourishing blond mustache, was a skeptical man of the world, with some means, no great worker, hypochondriac, well-read, always smiling and blinking rapidly as he talked... Adrian said that he found Spengler intelligent and agreeable to talk to. He responded much less to the advances of another guest [of the Frau Senator], who really took pains to woo Adrian’s reserve and shyness. This was Rudolf Schwerdtfeger, a gifted young violinist, member of the Zapfenstosser Orchestra, which next to the Hoftheatre orchestra played a prominent role in the musical life of the town and in which he was one of the first violins. Born in Dresden, but in origin low-German, of medium height and neat build, and with a shock of flaxen hair, he had the polish, the pleasing versatility of the Saxon, and was in equal measure good-natured and desirous to please... For my part I had nothing against Schwerdtfeger, I even liked him sincerely, and his early, tragic death, which had for me its own private and peculiar horror, shook me to my depths. How clearly I still see the figure of this young man: his boyish way of shrugging up one shoulder inside his coat and drawing down one corner of his mouth in a grimace. It was further his naive habit to watch someone talking, very tense, as it were in a fury of concentration, his lips curled, his steel-blue eyes burrowing into the speaker’s face, seeming to fix now on one eye and now on the other What good qualities too did he not have quite aside from his talent, which one might reckon as one of his charms! Frankness, decency, open-mindedness, an artistic integrity, indifferent to money and possessions -- in short, a certain cleanness; all these looked out of his -- I repeat it -- beautiful steel-blue eyes and shone in a face full of youthful attractiveness if just slightly like a pug dog’s...
I must admit that, while I think I should have quoted this in any case, my main reason for wanting to do so was the hilarious twist at the end of this otherwise glowing description.
I will skip most of the introduction of the Scheurl household, for now, except for a little about Jeanette, for reasons.
p201 Jeanette was a writer of novels. Grown up between two languages, she wrote ladylike and original studies of society in a charmingly incorrect idiom peculiar to herself alone. They did not lack psychological and melodic charm and were definitely a literary achievement...
I have a feeling something similar could be said of Martha Grimes’ Richard Jury mysteries by a British-English speaker. I say that as a great admirer of Grimes.
...She noticed Adrian at once, and took to him; he, in his turn, felt at home in her presence and conversation. She was aristocratically ugly and good form, with a face like a sheep, where the high-born and the low-born met, just as in her speech her French was mingled with Bavarian dialect. She was extraordinarily intelligent and at the same time enveloped in the naively inquiring innocence of the spinster no longer young. Her mind had something fluttering and quaintly confused about it, at which she herself laughed more heartily than anyone else... She was very musical, a pianist, a Chopin enthusiast, a writer on Schubert... Her first conversation with Adrian had been a gratifying exchange upon the subject of Mozart’s polyphony and his relation to Bach. He was and remained her attached friend for many years.
p202 But no one will suppose that the city he had chosen to live in really took him to her bosom or ever made him her own. The beauty of the grandiose village under the melting blue of the alpine sky, with the mountain stream rushing and rippling through it: that might please his eye; the self-indulgent comfort of its ways, the suggestion it had of all-the-year-round carnival freedom, might make even his life easier. But his spirit -- sit venia verbo! [if you will pardon the expression] -- its atmosphere, a little mad and quite harmless; the decorative appeal to the senses, the holiday and artistic mood of this self-satisfied Capua: [?] all that was of course foreign to the soul of a deep, stern nature like his. It was indeed the fitting and proper target for that look of his I had so long observed: veiled and cold and musingly remote, followed by the smile and averted face.
The Munich I speak of is the Munich of the late Regency, with only four years between it and the war, whose issue was to turn its pleasantness to morbidness and produce it it one sad and grotesque manifestation after another; this capital city of beautiful vistas, where political problems confined themselves to a capricious opposition between a half-separatist folk-Catholicism and the lively liberalism professed by the supporters of the Reich; Munich, with its parade concerts in the Feldherrenhalle, its art shops, its palaces of decorative crafts, its recurring exhibitions, its Bauern-balls in carnival time, its seasonal “Marzbrau” carouses and week-long monster fair on the “Oktoberweise,” where a stout and lusty folkishness, now long since corrupted by modern mass methods, celebrated a saturnalia; Munich, with its residuary Wagnerism, its esoteric coteries performing their aesthetic devotions behind the Siegestor; its Bohemia, well bedded down in public approval and fundamentally easy-going. Adrian looked on all that, moved in it, tasted of it, during the nine months that were spent at this time in Oberbayern -- an autumn, a winter, and a spring...
Already we come to the introduction of Pfeiffering, a small village an hour outside Munich where Adrian will next alight. Aside from an uncanny resemblance our narrator would have us see to the house and vicinity of Adrian’s boyhood home, I don’t think I need to include anything about the place and its inhabitants now. Except... there is a story recounted by his landlady-to-be about a previous guest at the place (a former monastery) that will become his future home,
p208 ...a Frauline from the best social circles who had here brought her child into the world... the girl’s father was a judge of the high court, up in Bayreuth, and had got himself an electric automobile and that had been the beginning of all the trouble, for he had hired a chauffeur too, to drive him to his office, and this young man, not a bit out of the common run, only very smart in his braided livery, had made the girl lose her head altogether, she had got with child by him...
...She was entirely reasonable about her own guilt and did not pretend that she had been seduced -- on the contrary, Carl, the chauffeur, had even said: “It’s no good, Frauline, better not,” but it had been stronger than she was, and she had always been ready to pay with death, and would do, and being ready for death, so it seemed to her, made up the whole thing, and she had been very brave when her time came, and her child, a girl, was brought into the world with the help of good Dr. Kurbis, the district physician, to whom it was all one how a child come, if everything was otherwise in order and no transverse positions, but the girl had remained very weak, despite good nursing and the country air, she had never stopped holding her mouth open and her eyebrows up, and her cheeks seemed hollower than ever and after a while her little high-up father came to fetch her away and at the sight of her, tears came in his eyes behind the gold eye-glasses. The infant was sent to the Grey Sisters in Bamberg, but the mother was from then on only a very grey sister herself, with a canary-bird and a tortoise which her parents gave her out of pity, and she had just withered away in her room in a consumption, which the seeds of had probably always been in her. Finally they sent her to Davos, but that seemed to have been the finishing touch, for she died there almost at once, just as she had wished and wanted it, and if she had been right in her idea that everything had been evened up by the readiness for death, then she was quits and had got what she was after.
This is just tossed in as part of the introduction of the place, yet it contains so many elements central to this Faustus, Goethe’s Faust, and also The Magic Mountain. I don’t even know where to start on this and am also reluctant to begin since I wonder if there will not be a denouement to this story perhaps involving that by-blow daughter sent off to the “Grey Sisters.” (I almost missed this, "Grey Sisters" is another term for the Graeae, who feature in the Classical portion of Goethe's Faust part 2.) Not only would Mann and Goethe be intrigued by a self-sacrificial story like this but (I’m bound to note) so would Michel Foucault. Her courting death in a polite (or rather impolite, but fairly tame) sort of limit-experience -- the best a girl from a good bourgeois family could do under the circumstances. It would be like Mann to give us a nameless “Gretchen” motivated not by love but by death.
The fictional Pfeiffering would have been located somewhere around the Starnberger See (then the Würmsee). I just noticed that the work camps where Viktor Frankl spent much of World War 2 were about 50 to 100 miles to the west.
The chapter ends with Adrian and Rudiger Schildknapp setting off for a prolonged visit to Italy.
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