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p452 My tale is hastening to its end -- like all else today. Everything rushes and presses on, the world stands in the sign of the end -- at least it does for us Germans. Our “thousand-year” history, refuted, reduced ad absurdum, weighted in the balance and found unblest, turns out to be a road leading nowhere, or rather into despair, an unexampled bankruptcy, a descensus Averno [facilis descensus Averno = "The descent to Avernus is easy." From Virgil's Aeneid, with reference to Avernus, a metonym for the underworld and to Lake Avernus in Italy, a volcanic crater lake reputed to emit deadly vapors. -Wiki] lighted by the dance of roaring flames. If it is true, as we say in Germany, that every way to the right goal must also be right in each of its parts, then it will be agreed that the way that led to this sinful issue -- I use the word in its strictest, most religious sense -- was everywhere wrong and fatal, at every single one of its turns, however bitter it may be for love to consent to such logic. To recognize because we must our infamy is not the same thing as to deny our love. I, a simple German man and scholar, have loved much that is German. My life, insignificant but capable of fascination and devotion, has been dedicated to my love for a great German man and artist. It was always a love full of fear and dread, yet eternally faithful to this German whose inscrutable guiltiness and awful end had no power to affect my feeling for him -- such love it may be as is only a reflection of the everlasting mercy.
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p453 The Apocalypsis cum figuris, that great and piercing prophecy of the end, was performed at Frankfurt on the Main in February 1926, about a year after the frightful events that I chronicled in my last chapter. It may have been due in part to the disheartenment they left in their wake that Adrian could not bring himself to break through his usual retirement and be present at the performance, a highly sensational event, also one accompanied by much malicious abuse and shallow ridicule. he never heard the work, one of the two chief monuments of his proud and austere life; but after all he used to say about “hearing” I do not feel entitled to lament the fact...
Adrian’s father, Jonathan, and Max Schweigestill -- the patriarch of the family he lived with in Pfeiffering -- at the same age and almost the same day, both die. Adrian is not well enough to travel so he only attends the funeral of his surrogate father.
p455 That was after Christmas; the two fathers, their faces already half-turned away, half-estranged from earthly things, had still been present at the Christmas feast. [This is very well put. My dad was very similar his last Christmas and he passed away in March.] Now, as the light waxed, in the beginning of the new year, Adrian’s health markedly improved, the succession of harassing attacks came to an end. He seemed psychologically to have overcome the shipwreck of his life-plans and all the damage bound up with it, his mind rose up, a giant refreshed -- indeed, his trouble might now be to keep his poise in the storm of ideas rushing upon him. This (1927) was the year of the high and miraculous harvest of chamber music...
p457 ...The tendency to the hybrid, to mixing and exchanging, as it showed itself already in the treatment of the vocal and instrumental elements in the Apocalypse, was growing on him. “I have learned in my philosophy courses, that to set limits already means to have passed them. I have always stuck to that.” What he meant was the Hegel-Kant critique, and the saying shows how profoundly his creative power sprang from the intellect -- and from early impressions.
This is entirely true of the Trio for violin, viola, and cello: scarcely playable, in fact to be mastered technically only by three virtuosos and astonishing as much by its fanatical emphasis on construction, the intellectual achievement it exhibits, as by the unexpected combinations of sound, by which an ear coveting the unknown has won from the three instruments a combinational fantasy unparalleled. “Impossible, but refreshing,” so Adrian in a good mood characterized the work, which he had begun to write down even during composition of the ensemble piece, carried in his mind and developed, burdened as it was with the work on the quartet, of which one would have thought it alone must have consumed a man’s organizing power for long and to the utmost. It was an exuberant interweaving of inspirations, challenges, realizations, and resummonings to the mastery of new tasks, a tumult of problems which broke in together with their solutions -- “a night,” Adrian said, “where it doesn’t get dark for the lightnings,”
p458 “A rather sharp and spasmodic sort of illumination,” he would add. “What then -- I am spasmodic myself, it gets me by the hair like the devil and goes along me so that my whole carcass quivers. Ideas, my friend, are a bad lot, they have hot cheeks, they make your own burn too, in none too lovesome a way. When one has a humanist for a bosom friend, one ought to be able to make a clear distinction between bliss and martyrdom. . . .” He added that sometimes he did not know whether the peaceful incapacity of his former state were not preferable in comparison with his present sufferings.
...This was what, as he fancifully put it, his familiar friend Mr. Alkercocke told him to do and demanded of him. In one breath, or rather in one breathlessness, he wrote down the three pieces, any one of which would have been enough to make memorable the year of its production... “it goes,” he once wrote to me... “as though I had studied in Cracow.” I did not understand the allusion until I recalled that at Cracow, in the sixteenth century, courses were publicly given in magic.
...It is beyond all doubt that the year of the chamber music, 1927, was also the year when the Lamentation of Dr Faustus was conceived. Incredible as it sounds, while his mind was wrestling with problems so highly complicated that one can imagine their being mastered only by dint of the sheerest, most exclusive concentration, he was already looking ahead, reaching out, casting forward, with the second oratorio in view: the crushing Lamentation...
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