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[This is the oddest chapter. Its subject is the visit to Pfeiffering of Herr Saul Fitelberg, an impresario, “‘...Arrangements musicaux. Représentant de nombreux artistes prominents’” keen to present Adrian to Paris society. He arrives by way of Munich in a hired automobile (with driver) and makes his pitch to Adrian while Zeitblom looks on. The scene is vivid and fun, he is thwarted, of course, in all that he wishes to do for Adrian, but what is the point of all this? I’m going to include a few passages but he is really a mystery to me. I should explain that only his side of the conversation is recorded. He seems to have, for the most part, read in their faces their responses and voiced those as well.] p400 “...I have come to tempt you away, to betray you to a temporary unfaithfulness, [to Pfeiffering] to bear you on my mantle through the air and show you the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them -- or even more, to lay them at your feet. . . . [now this sounds quite like the traditional Mephisto. And wasn’t he always a kind of impresario?] Forgive my pompous way of talking. It is really ridiculously exaggere, especially as far as the ‘glories’ go. It is not so grand as that, nothing so very thrilling about these glories; I am saying that who after all am the son of little people, living in humble circumstances, really miese, you know, from Lublin in the middle of Poland; of really quite little Jewish parents -- I am a Jew, you must know, and Fitelberg is a very ordinary, low-class, Polish-German-Jewish name; only I have made it the name of a respected protagonist of avant-garde culture, whom great artists call their friend...”
“Thank God, that lousy Lublin [but also here] lies far behind me. More than twenty years I have been living in Paris -- will you believe it, for a whole year I attended philosophy lectures at the Sorbonne! But à la longue [over time] they bored me. Not that philosophy couldn’t be a best-seller too. It could. But for me it is too abstract. And I have a vague feeling that it is in Germany one should study metaphysics...”
[He opened a theatre called Theatre des fourberies gracieuses. Which I think could be translated as Theatre of Graceful Deceit. The Dartmouth Guide prefers "Theater of the Graceful Deceptions".]
p401 “...The way to fame, in Paris, leads through notoriety -- at a proper premiere people jump up several times during the evening and yell ‘Insulte! Impudence! Bouffonerie ignorminieuse!’ [Ignomious buffoonery] while six or seven initiates, Erik Satie, [Gymnopédies] a few surrealists, Virgil Thomson, [Four Saints in three acts] shout from the loges: ‘Quelle précision! Quel esprit! C’est divin! C’est suprême! Bravo! Bravo!’
“I fear I shock you, messieurs -- if not Monsieur Le Vercune, [the way he pronounces Leverkuhn] then perhaps the Herr Professor. But in the first place I hasten to add that a concert evening never yet broke down in the middle; that is not what even the most outraged want at bottom; on the contrary they want to go on being outraged, that is what makes them enjoy the evening, and besides, remarkable as it is, the informed minority always commands the heavier guns...”
Clearly, this is in large part Mann commenting on French culture.
p402 “...Naturellement, you think I have in mind [why he thinks Adrian will be a sensation in Paris] your ferocious discipline, and que vous enchainez votre art dans un systeme de règles inexorables et néoclassiques, [And how you subject your art to a system of inexorable and neoclassical rules] forcing it to move in these iron bands -- if not with grace, yet with boldness and esprit. But if it is that that I mean, I mean at the same time more than that when I speak of your qualité d’Allemand; I mean -- how shall I put it? -- a certain four-squareness, rhythmical heaviness, immobility, grossièreté, [roughness] which are old-German -- en effect, entre nous, [indeed, between you and me] one finds in Bach too... Your theses -- they consist almost throughout of even note values, minims, crotchets, quavers; true enough, they are syncopated and tied but for all that they remain clumsy and unwieldy, often with a hammering, machinelike effect. C’est ‘boch’ dans un degré fascinant. Don’t think I am finding fault, it is simply énormément caractéristique, and in the series of concerts of international music which I am arranging, this note is quite indispensable. . . .”
“You see, I am spreading out my magic cloak. I will take you to Paris, to Brussels, Antwerp, Venice, Copenhagen. You will be received with the intensest interest...”
p403 “But that is the condition -- ah non! You cannot inflict upon me the performance of your works in absentia. Your personal appearance is indispensable, particulierement a Paris, where musical renown is made in three or four salons...”
[He tries to interest Adrian in “stimulating contacts among your brothers in Apollo”] p404 “Is it possible that I read in your manner a certain resistance even to that? But here, chere Maître, every shyness, every embarras is really quite out of place... there must be some peculiar and interesting psychological association: I do not ask... Is that any reason for embarras, in a sphere where there reigns unlimited freedom from prejudice? A freedom from prejudice which for its part has its own good reasons too? Oh, la, la! Such a circle of arbiters elegantiarum and society cheer-leaders is usually an assortment of demi-fous excentriques, [half-crazy eccentrics] expended souls and elderly crapsules [?] -- un impresario, c’est us espece d’infirmier, voila! [a kind of nurse, there you have it!]
Why do I have the feeling Mann was having a blast writing this chapter?
“...You abhor all generalizing, classifying, subsuming, as a derogation of your dignity. You insist on the incomparableness of the personal case. You pay tribute to an arrogant personal uniqueness -- maybe you have to do that. ‘Does one live when others live?’ I have read that question somewhere, I am not sure precisely where, but in some very prominent place. Privately or publicly you all ask it; only out of good manners and for appearance’ sake do you take notice of each other -- if you do take notice of each other...
p405 “Tragique, messieurs. I call it that, because in my opinion the unhappiness of the world rests on the disunity of the intellect, the stupidity, the lack of comprehension, which separates its spheres from each other. Wagner poured scorn on the picturesque impressionism of his time, calling it all ‘daubs’ -- he was sternly conservative in that field. But his own harmonic productions have a lot to do with impressionism, they lead up to it and as dissonances often go beyond the impressionistic. Against the Paris daubers he set up Titian as the true and the good...
p406 “Gentlemen, I have been rambling frightfully. I mean I have wandered from my subject and my purpose. Take my garrulity as an expression of the fact that I have given up the idea that brought me here. I have convinced myself that it is not possible. You will not step foot on my magic cloak...
“You probably do not realize, cher Maître, how German is your repugnance, which, if you will permit me to speak en psychologue, I find characteristically made up of arrogance and a sense of inferiority, of scorn and fear. I might call it the ressentiment of the serious-minded against the salon world... In Germany the superstition prevails that there is nothing but valse brillante [“brilliant waltz” (title of Chopin’s opus 18)] outside its borders and nothing but serious-minded inside them. And still, as a Jew one feels skeptical towards the world, and leans to German serious-mindedness -- at the risk, of course, of getting kicked in the pants for one’s pains. To be German, that means above all to be national -- and who expects a Jew to be nationalistic? Not only that nobody would believe him, but everybody would bash his head in for having the impudence to try it on. We Jews have everything to fear from the German character, qui est essentiellement antisemitique; [which is essentially anti-Semitic] and that is reason enough, of course, for us to plump for the worldly side and arrange sensational entertainments. It does not follow that we are windbags, or that we have fallen on our heads. We perfectly well know the difference between Gounod’s Faust and Goethe’s, even when we speak French, then too. . . .
p407 “...Gounod’s Faust, gentlemen -- who turns up his nose at it? Not I, and not you, I am glad to know. A pearl -- a marguerite, full of the most ravishing musical inventions...
[M. Fitelberg describes the painstaking process Bruckner put his students through before they were allowed to compose anything on their own.]
“Comme c’est respectable! Pas précisément humain, mais extrêmement respectable. [How respectable that is. Not exactly human, but extremely respectable] Why should we Jews, who are a priestly people, even when we are minaudering [maundering? meandering?] about in Parisian salons, not feel drawn to the Germans and let ourselves lean to the German side and an ironic view, as against the world, against art for the little friend? [“little friend” relates to a music student’s love interest from a story I skipped about Massenet] In us nationalism would be impertinent enough to provoke a pogrom. We are international -- but we are pro-German, like nobody else in the world, simply because we can’t help perceiving the role of Germany and Judaism on earth. Une analogie frappante! [a striking analogy] In just the same way they are both hated, despised, feared, envied, in the same measure they alienate and are alienated. People talk about the age of nationalism. But actually there are only two nationalisms, the German and the Jewish, and all the rest is child’s play. -- Is not the downright Frenchness of an Anatole France the purest cosmopolitanism alongside German isolation in the subjective and the Jewish conceit of the chosen race. . . . France -- a nationalistic pseudonym. A German writer could not well call himself Germany, such a name one gives to a battleship. He has to content himself with German -- and that is a Jewish name, oh la, la. [I hadn't previously noticed that "German" or "Germann" was a Jewish name.]
p408 “...The Germans should leave it to the Jews to be pro-German. With their nationalism, their pride, their foible of ‘differentness,’ their hatred of being put in order and equalized, their refusal to let themselves be introduced into the world and adopted socially, they will get into trouble, real Jewish trouble, je vous le jure. [I assure you] The Germans should let the Jew be the mediateur between them and society, be the manager, the impresario. He is altogether the right man for it, one should not turn him out, he is international, and he is pro-German. Mais c’est en vain. Et c’est tres dommage! [But it is in vain. And that is a great
pity.]...
Have you noticed that when Mann gets to the point he tends to make it in French? This was truly an amazing analogy to make in the mid-'40s. I started by saying this was an odd chapter but now I'm thinking it is exceptional. He finds just the right voice to skewer both the the French and the Germans. And the person who is most similar to the traditional Mephisto, in what he offers to do for Adrian, is not only not demonic but is in fact a German-Polish-Jew. And Adrian has no interest in what he offers.
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