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Subtle visual clues above signal that the division of this chapter into two parts is my decision and not Mann’s. His tendency to lead with the then current state of affairs in the 3rd Reich, hit the wall, in my opinion, in this chapter. Now we have to deal, for the last time, with Adrian’s latest music, in this case The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus. As usual, I’m keen to cut this to the bone, and yet there’s material here that I really can’t skip.
p482 Yet how strangely the times, these very times in which I write, are linked with the period that forms the frame of this biography! For the last years of my friend’s rational existence, the two years 1929 and 1930, after the shipwreck of his marriage plans, the loss of his friend, the snatching away of the marvellous child -- those years were part and parcel of the mounting and spreading harms which then overwhelmed the country and now are being blotted out in blood and flames...
p485 ...For a decade and a half now it [Adrian’s music] has been a buried, forbidden treasure, whose resurrection may come about through the destructive liberation we now endure. There were years in which we children of the dungeon dreamed of a hymn of exultation, a Fidelio, [also here] a Ninth Symphony, to celebrate the dawn of a freed Germany -- freed by herself. Now only this can avail us, only this will be sung from our very souls: the Lamentation of the son of hell, the lament of men and God, issuing from the subjective, but always broadening out and as it were laying hold on the Cosmos; the most frightful lament ever set up on this earth.
Woe, woe! A De Profundis, which in my zeal and love I am bound to call matchless. Yet has it not -- from the point of view of creative art and musical history as well as that of individual fulfillment -- a jubilant, a highly triumphant bearing upon this awe-inspiring faculty of compensation and redress? Does it not mean the “break-through,” of which we so often talked when we were considering the destiny of art, its state and hour? We spoke of it as a problem, a paradoxical possibility: the recovery, I would not say the reconstitution -- and yet for the sake of exactness I will say it -- of expressivism, of the highest and profoundest claim of feeling to a stage of intellectuality and formal strictness, which must be arrived at in order that we may experience a reversal of this calculated coldness and its conversion into a voice expressive of the soul and a warmth and sincerity of creature confidence. Is that not the “break-through”?
I put in the form of a question what is nothing more than the description of a condition that has its explanation in the thing itself as well as in its artistic and formal aspect. The Lamentation, that is -- and what we have here is an abiding, inexhaustible accentuated lament of the most painfully Ecce-homo kind -- the Lamentation is expression itself; one may state boldly that all expressivism is really lament; just as music, so soon as it is conscious of itself as expression at the beginning of its modern history, becomes lament and “lasciatemi morire,” [music here] the Lament of Ariadne, [back to the labyrinth, again] to the softly echoing plaintive song of nymphs. It does not lack significance that the Faust cantata is stylistically so strongly and unmistakably linked with the seventeenth century and Monteverdi, whose music -- again not without significance -- favoured the echo-effect, sometimes to the point of being a mannerism. The echo, the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, and the revelation of it as nature-sound, is essentially a lament: Nature’s melancholy “Alas!” in view of man, her effort to utter his solitary state. Conversely, the lament of the nymphs on its side is related to the echo. In Leverkuhn’s last and loftiest creation, echo, favourite device of the baroque, is employed with unspeakably mournful effect.
p486 ...This giant “lamento” (it lasts an hour and a quarter) is very certainly non-dynamic, lacking in development, without drama, in the same way that concentric rings made by a stone thrown into water spread ever farther, without drama and always the same. A mammoth variation-piece of lamentation -- as such negatively related to the finale of the Ninth Symphony with its variations of exultation -- broadens out in circles, each of which draws the other resistlessly after it...
p487 We recall that in the old chap-book which tells the story of the arch-magician’s life and death, sections of which Leverkuhn with a few bold adaptations put together as the basis of his movements, Dr. Faustus, as his hour-glass is running out, invites his friends and familiars, “magistros, Baccalaureos and other students,” to the village of Rimlich near Wittenberg, entertains them there hospitably all day long, at night takes one more drink of “Johann’s wine” with them, and then in an address both dignified and penitential announces and gives them to know his fate and that its fulfillment is now at hand. In this “Oratio Fausti ad Studiosos” [earnest prayer for prosperity?] he asks them, when they find him strangled and dead, charitably to convey his body into the earth; for he dies, he says, as a bad and as a good Christian: a good one by the power of his repentance, and because in his heart he always hopes for mercy on his soul; a bad one in so far as he knows that he is now facing a horrible end and the Devil will and must have his body. These words: “For I die as a good and as a bad Christian,” form the general theme of the variations. If you count the syllables, there are twelve, and all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are set to it, with all the thinkable intervals therein. It already occurs and makes itself felt long before it is reintroduced with the text, in its place as a choral group -- there is no true solo in the Faustus -- rising up until the middle, then descending, in the spirit and inflexion of the Monteverdi Lamento...
p489 ...Purely orchestral is the end: a symphonic adagio, into which the chorus of lament, opening powerfully after the inferno-galop, gradually passes over -- it is, as it were, the reverse of the “Ode to Joy,” the negative, equally a work of genius, of that transition of the symphony into vocal jubilation. It is the revocation.
p490 My poor, great friend! How often, reading in this achievement of his decline, his posthumous work, which prophetically anticipates so much destruction, have I recalled the distressing words he uttered at the death of the child. It is not to be, goodness, joy, hope, that was not to be, it would be taken back, it must be taken back! “Alas, it is not to be!” How the words stand, almost like a musical direction, above the choral and orchestral movements of “Dr Fausti Wehe-klag” [Lamentation]; how they speak in every note and accent of this “Ode to Sorrow”! He wrote it, no doubt, with his eye on Beethoven’s Ninth, as its counterpart in a most melancholy sense of the word. But it is not only that it more than once formally negates the symphony, reverses it into the negative; no, for even in the religious it is negative -- by which I do not at all mean it denies the religious. A work that deals with the Tempter, with apostasy, with damnation, what else could it be but a religious work? What I mean is a conversion, a proud and bitter change of heart, as I, at least, read it in the “friendly plea” of Dr. Faustus to the companions of his last hour, they that should betake themselves to bed, sleep in peace, and let naught trouble them. In the frame of the cantata one can scarcely help recognizing this instruction as the conscious and deliberate reversal of the “Watch with me” of Gethsemane... But linked with it is an inversion of the temptation idea, in such a way that Faust rejects as temptation the thought of being saved: not only out of formal loyalty to the pact and because it is “too late,” but because with his whole soul he despises positivism of the world for which one would save him, the lie of its godliness. [Is this a slap at the ending of Goethe’s Faust? I think it is.] This becomes clearer still... in the scene with the good old doctor... who invites Faust to come see him, in order to make a pious effort to convert him. In the cantata he is clearly drawn in the character of a tempter; and the tempting of Jesus by Satan is unmistakably suggested; as unmistakably also is the “Apage!” by the profoundly despairing “No!” uttered to false and flabby middle-class piety.
But another and last, truly the last change of mind must be thought on, and that profoundly. At the end of this work of endless lamentation, softly, above the reason and with the speaking unspokenness given to music alone, it touches the feelings. I mean the closing movement of the piece, where the choir loses itself and which sounds like the lament of God over the lost state of His world. like the Creator’s rueful “I have not willed it.” Here, towards the end, I find that the uttermost accents of mourning are reached, the final despair achieves a voice, and -- I will not say it, it would mean to disparage the uncompromising character of the work, its irremediable anguish to say that it affords, down to its very last note, any other consolation than what lies in voicing it, in simply giving sorrow words; in the fact, that is, that a voice is given the creature for its woe. [Something the little sea-maid did not have.] No, this dark tone-poem permits up to the very end no consolation, appeasement, transfiguration. But take our artist paradox: grant that expressiveness -- expression as lament -- is the issue of the whole construction: then may we not parallel with it another, a religious one, and say too (though only in the lowest whisper) that out of the sheerly irremediable hope might germinate? It would be but a hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair -- not betrayal to her, but the miracle that passes belief. For listen to the end, listen with me: one group of instruments after another retires, and what remains, as the work fades on the air, is the high G of a cello, the last word, the last fainting sound, slowly dying in a pianissimo-fermata. Then nothing more: silence, and night. But that tone which vibrates in the silence, which is no longer there, to which only the spirit hearkens, and which was the voice of mourning, is so no more. It changes its meaning; it abides as a light in the night.
This is the way a good and a bad German would have this piece end, but I would alter it just a bit. Instead of the high G of the cello dying to silence, I would have a characteristic Klezmer chord or note rise behind that G and sustain to the end. Maybe even a Klezmer clarinet and a Roma fiddle.
And since I can't give you Adrian's negation of the "Ode to Joy," I can at least give you, again, the original Here. Since this includes the lyrics, in both English and German, you can clearly see what is meant by "...it must be taken back! 'Alas, it is not to be!'"
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