Jump to Introduction + Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Doctor Faustus - chapter XXVI
[The score of Love’s Labour’s Lost is completed. From a letter to Adrian from the man who had written it down for him,] p262 ...He could not, so he told its author, express how it took his breath away with its boldness, the novelty of its ideas. Not enough could he admire the fine subtlety of the workmanship, the versatile rhythms... Here [in “the free and more than free, the rebel parts, disdaining tonal connection, of the work”] it often amounted to a rigidity, a more academic than artistic speculation in notes, a mosaic scarcely any longer effective musically, seeming rather more to be read than to be heard...
We laughed.
“When I hear of hearing!” said Adrian, “in my view it is quite enough if something has been heard once; I mean when the artist thought it out.” [Ackerman would like that]
After a while he added: “as though people ever heard what had been heard then! Composing means to commission the Zapfenstosser orchestra to execute an angelic chorus. And anyhow I consider angelic choruses to be highly speculative.”
p263 ...That Wendell Kretschmar should have it to read was the important thing to him [Adrian]. He sent it to Lubeck, where the stutterer still was, and the latter actually produced it there, in a German version, a year later, after war had broken out -- I was not present -- with the result that during the performance two thirds of the the audience left the theatre. Just as it is supposed to have happened six years before at the Munich premiere of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande.... The local critics agreed to a man with the judgement of the lay audience and jeered at the “decimating” music which Herr Kretschmar had taken up with. Only in the Lubeck Borsenkurier an old music-professor named Immerthal -- doubtless dead long since -- spoke of an error of justice which time would put right, and declared in crabbed, old-fashioned language that the opera was a work of the future, full of profound music, that the writer was of course a mocker but a “god-witted man.”This striking expression, which I had never before heard or read, nor ever since, made a peculiar impression on me...
I almost passed over the titles of some of Adrians shorter works, written at this time, but -- of course -- there is a reason behind everything here. The first piece is based on “Silent, Silent Night” by William Blake which concludes with:.
But an honest joy
Does itself destroy
For a harlot coy.
And then there are two poems by Keats written in 1819: “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on Melancholy.” Wiki has this to say about “Nightingale:”
"Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem that describes Keats's journey into the state of Negative Capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems and explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly personal to Keats.
The nightingale described within the poem experiences a type of death but does not actually die. Instead, the songbird is capable of living through its song, which is a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life. In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination.
p264 ...Adrian in Italy had never displayed much gratitude or enthusiasm about the consolations of a sunny world, which make one forget “the weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.” Musically the most priceless, the most perfect, beyond doubt, is the resolution and dissipation of the vision at the end,
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
.......................................................
Fled is that music: -- do I wake or sleep?
And this about “Melancholy”:
The use of the “droop-headed flowers” (line 13) to describe the onset of an ill-temper, according to Bloom, represents a "passionate" attempt by the poet to describe the proper reaction to melancholy. In the original first stanza, the “Gothicizing” of the ideal of melancholy strikes Bloom as more ironical and humorous, but with the removal of that text, the image of the “droop-headed flowers” loses the irony it would otherwise contain, and in doing so subverts the negative capability seen in "Ode to a Nightingale", yet Bloom states that the true negativity becomes clear in the final stanza's discussion of Beauty. The final stanza begins:
She dwells with Beauty-- Beauty that must die (line 21)
which he suggests supplies the ultimate case of a negative relationship because it suggests that the only true beauty is one that will die.[6]
...
Murray suggests that the poem instructs the reader to approach melancholy in a manner that will result in the most pleasurable outcome for the reader.[11] The words “burst Joy’s Grape” in line 28 lead Daniel Brass to state:
The height of the joy, the moment when the world can improve no further, is both the end of joy and the beginning of melancholy. A climax implies a dénouement, and ‘bursting Joy’s grape’ involves both the experience of ultimate satisfaction, with the powerful image of the juice bursting forth from a burst grape, and the beginning of a decline.[12]
In The Masks of Keats, Thomas McFarland suggests that Keats's beautiful words and images attempt to combine the non-beautiful subject of melancholy with the beauty inherent in the form of the ode. He too writes that the images of the bursting grape and the "globèd peonies" show an intention by the poet to bring the subject of sexuality into the discussion on melancholy.[10]
[Back to Mann,] ...in the third stanza of the “Ode on Melancholy,” the image of the “sovran shrine” which veiled Melancholy has in the temple of delight, though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine -- all that is so brilliant that it scarcely leaves the music anything to say...
I’m also going to include a Wiki quote about “negative capability” in case you didn’t follow the links above:
Negative capability describes the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts.[citation needed] The term has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the ability of the individual to perceive, think, and operate beyond any presupposition of a predetermined capacity of the human being. It further captures the rejection of the constraints of any context, and the ability to experience phenomena free from epistemological bounds, as well as to assert one's own will and individuality upon their activity. The term was first used by the Romantic poet John Keats to critique those who sought to categorize all experience and phenomena and turn them into a theory of knowledge... [Wouldn't this be similar to limit-experience`?]
p265 It was Klopstock’s Spring Festival, the famous song of the “Drop to the Bucket,” which Leverkuhn, with but few textual abbreviations, had composed for baritone, organ, and string orchestra...
“Klopstock!” Exclaims Lotte in a central scene of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). No more is required for Werther to be “swept away” by “the stream of emotions that she poured over me with this password,” and he weeps... -Source
“Die Fruhlingsfeier,” translated here as “Spring Festival” but other places as “Rite of Spring” was written in 1759 after Klopstock’s heart was broken by the death of his wife in 1758. The poem begins:
I will not throw myself into the ocean
Of all the worlds, nor will I float
Where the first created, the joyful choirs of the sons of light
Pray, pray deeply, and die in rapture.
Only round the drop in the bucket,
Round the earth alone will I float and pray.
Halleluia! Halleluia! The drop in the bucket
Also flowed from the Almighty's hand...
[Back again to Mann] p265 ...I have never understood the work in its real spiritual sense, its inward necessity, its purpose, informed by fear, of seeking grace in praise. Did I at that time know the document, which my readers now know too, the record of the “dialogue” in the stone-floored sala? Only conditionally could I have named myself before that “a partner in your sorrow’s mysteries,” as it says in the “Ode on Melancholy”; only with the right of a general concern since our boyhood days for his soul’s health; but not through actual knowledge, as it then stood. Only later did I learn to understand the composition of the Spring Festival as what it was: a plea to God, an atonement for sin, a work of attritio cordis, composed, as I realized with shudders, under the threat of that visitor insisting that he was really visible.
p266 But in still another sense did I fail to understand the personal and intellectual background of this production based on Klopstock’s poem. For I did not, as I should have done, connect it with conversations I had with him at this time or rather he had with me, when he gave me, quite circumstantially, with great animation, accounts of studies and researches in fields very remote from my curiosity or my scientific comprehension: thrilling enrichments, that is, of his knowledge of nature and the cosmos. And now he strongly reminded me of the elder Leverkuhn’s musing mania for “speculating the elements.”
[Adrian tells Zeitblom about trips to the bottom of the sea in a diving-bell; and about our position in the cosmos -- again allegedly viewed in person with the assistance of a Professor Akercocke. (I had forgotten that the notion of an ever quickening expansion of the universe went back so far)] p271 “Admit,” said I to him, “that the horrendous physical creation is in no way religiously productive. What reverence and what civilizing process born of reverence can come from the picture of a vast impropriety like this of the exploding universe? Absolutely none. Piety, reverence, intellectual decency, religious feeling, are only possible about men and through men, and by limitation to the earth and human. Their fruit should, can, and will be a religiously tinged humanism, conditioned by feeling for the transcendental mystery of man, by the proud consciousness that he is no mere biological being, but with a decisive part of him belongs to an intellectual and spiritual world, that to him the Absolute is given, the idea of truth, of freedom, of justice; that upon him the duty is laid to approach the consummate. In this pathos, this obligation, this reverence of man for himself, is God; in a hundred milliards of Milky Ways I cannot find him.”
This was Naphtha’s argument in The Magic Mountain but, interestingly, also the same problem Sartre was trying to deal with in Being and Nothingness at the time Mann was writing this.
“So you are against the works,” he answered, “and against physical nature, from which man comes and with him his incorporeal part, which in the end does occur in other places in the cosmos. Physical creation, this monstrosity of a world set-up, so annoying to you, is incontestably the premise for the moral, without which it would have no soil, and perhaps one must call the good the flower of evil -- une fleur du mal. But your homo Dei [human god or man as God’s creation] is after all -- or not after all, I beg your pardon, I mean before all -- a part of this abominable nature -- with a not very generous quantum of potential spirituality. Moreover it is amusing to see how much your humanism, and probably all humanism, inclines to the medieval geocentric -- as it obviously must. In the popular belief, humanism is friendly to science; but it cannot be, for one cannot consider the subjects of science to be devil’s work without seeing the same in science itself. That is Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were geocentric and anthropocentric. The Church, in which they survived, as set itself to oppose astronomical knowledge in the humanistic spirit, out of humanity has insisted on ignorance. You see, your humanism is pure Middle Ages. Its concern is a cosmology proper to Kaisersaschern and its towers: it leads to astrology, to observation of the position of the planets, the constellation and its favourable or unfavorable indications -- quite naturally and rightly, for nothing is clearer than the intimate interdependence of the bodies of a cosmic little group so closely bound together as our solar system, and their near neighborly mutual reference.”
Since he mentioned “une fleur du mal,” I’m going to include some interesting Wiki quotes about Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire:
Gustave Flaubert, recently attacked in a similar fashion for Madame Bovary (and acquitted), was impressed and wrote to Baudelaire: "You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism... You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist".[17]
...
The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalous. He also touched on lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living, and wine. Notable in some poems is Baudelaire's use of imagery of the sense of smell and of fragrances, which is used to evoke feelings of nostalgia and past intimacy.[18]
“We have already talked about astrological conjuncture,” I broke in. “It was long ago, we were walking around the Cow Pond, and it was a musical conversation. At that time you defended the constellation.”
“I still defend it today,” he answered. “Astrological times knew a lot. They knew, or divined, things which science in its broadest scope is coming back to. That diseases, plagues, epidemics have to do with the position of the stars was to those times an intuitive certainty. Today we have got so far as to debate whether germs, bacteria, organism which, we say, can produce an influenza epidemic on earth come from other planets -- Mars, Jupiter, or Venus.”
p274 Contagious disease, plague, black death, were probably not of this planet; as, almost certainly indeed, life itself has not its origin on our globe, but came hither from outside. He, Adrian, had it on the best authority that it came from neighboring stars which are enveloped in an atmosphere more favourable to it, containing much methane and ammonia, like Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. [Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune would have been a better example] From them, or from one of them -- he left me the choice -- life had once, borne by cosmic projectiles or simply by radiation pressure, arrived upon our formerly sterile and innocent planet. My humanistic homo Dei, that crowning achievement of life, was together with his obligations to the spiritual in all probability the product of the marsh-gas fertility of a neighboring star.
“The flower of evil,” I repeated, nodding.
“And blooming mostly in mischief,” he added.
Thus he taunted me, not only with my kindly view of the world, but also by persisting in the whimsical pretence of a personal, direct, and special knowledge about the affairs of heaven and earth. I did not know, but I might have been able to tell myself, that all this meant something, meant a new work: namely, the cosmic music which he had in his mind, after the episode of the new songs. It was the amazing symphony in one movement, the orchestral fantasy that he was working out during the last months of 1913 and the first of 1914, and which very much against my expressed wish bore the title Marvels of the Universe. I was mistrustful of the flippancy of that name and suggested the title Symphonia cosmologica. But Adrian insisted, laughing, on the other, mock-pathetic, ironic name, which certainly better prepared the knowing for the out-and-out bizarre and unpleasant character of this work, even though often these images of the monstrous and uncanny were grotesque in a solemn, formal, mathematical way. This music has simply nothing in common with the spirit of the Spring Celebration, which after all was in a certain way the preparation for it: I mean with the spirit of humble glorification. If certain musical features of the writing peculiar to Adrian had not indicated the author, one could scarcely believe that the same mind brought forth both. Nature and essence of that nearly thirty-minute-long orchestral world-portrait is mockery, a mockery which all too well confirms my opinion expressed in conversation, that preoccupation with the immeasurable extra-human affords nothing for piety to feed on: a luciferian sardonic mood, a sneering travesty of praise which seems to apply not only to the frightful clockwork of the world-structure but also to the medium used to describe it: yes, repeatedly with music itself, the cosmos of sound. The piece has contributed not a little to the reproach levelled at the art of my friend, as a virtuosity antipathetic to the artist mind, a blasphemy, a nihilistic sacrilege...
A different view, by Diane Ackerman
p285 ...Most of all, the twentieth century will be remembered as the time when we first began to understand what our address was. The “big, beautiful, blue, wet ball” of recent years is one way to say it. But a more profound way will speak of the orders of magnitude of that bigness, the shades of that blueness, the arbitrary delicacy of beauty itself, the ways in which water has made life possible, and the fragile euphoria of the complex ecosystem that is Earth, an Earth on which, from space, there are no visible fences, or military zones, or national borders. We need to send into space a flurry of artists and naturalists, photographers and painters, who will turn the mirror upon ourselves and show us Earth as a single planet, a single organism that’s buoyant, fragile, blooming, buzzing, full of spectacles, full of fascinating human beings, something to cherish. Learning our full address may not end all wars, but it will enrich our sense of wonder and pride. It will remind us that the human context is not tight as a noose, but large as the universe we have the privilege to inhabit. It will change our sense of what a neighborhood is. It will persuade us that we are citizens of something larger and more profound than mere countries, that we are citizens of Earth, her joyriders and her caretakers, who would do well to work on her problems together. The view from space is offering us the first chance we evolutionary toddlers have had to cross the cosmic street and stand facing our own home, amazed to see it clearly for the first time.
No comments:
Post a Comment