30. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXVIII

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This chapter, I’m afraid, is going to be even harder for me than was the last. Let’s see how tight I can crop it.  

Zeitblom now writes about the society he and Adrian mixed with in Munich after the latter settled in Pfeiffering. Zeitblom, at first, focuses on the rather tepid demand for his viola d’amore playing -- still, it flattered his vanity that he “was almost always obliged to bring my instrument with me to the Briennerstrasse.” This was the location of the salon of “Frau Dr. Schlaginhaufin, nee von Plausig.” Zeitblom’s music from the 17th or 18th centuries was especially pleasing to the General-Intendant, Excellency von Riedesel who is here introduced. 

And is it just me or does Mann seem to go out of his way to use distinctively "German" names, and by that I mean polysyllabic Teutonic tongue twisters? I don't think I'm imagining this as the German names I run into in history and literature are rarely as difficult as the ones I'm finding here. All I can imagine is that he missed them, in his idyllic California retreat, and as a result populated his novel with the sorts of names most immigrants to the U.S. probably changed. My German family names are good and proper (southern) German names, but nothing like the ones populating these pages.

p277 ...This courtier, a former cavalry colonel, who had been appointed to his present post simply and solely because it had been well known that he played piano a little (how many centuries ago it seems, that one could become a General-Intendant solely because one was “noble” and played the piano a little!) Baron Riedesel, then, saw in everything old and historic a bulwark against the new and subversive, a sort of feudal argument against it, and supported it in this sense, without in fact understanding anything about it...

Well, there was much Wagner played at the Schlaginhaufens’, since the dramatic soprano Tania Orlanda, tremendous woman, and the heroic Harald Kioeielund, a man already stout, with a pince-nez and brazen voice, were frequent guests. But without Wagner’s work, loud and violent as it was, Herr Riedesel and his Hoftheater could not have existed, so it was received, more or less, into the kingdom of the feudal and “graceful” and respect was paid it, the more readily because there were already newer works which went still further, so that one could reject them, and play off Wagner against them as a conservative...

p278 It was very strange, partly painful and partly comic, to observe Riedesel’s conservatism in contact with another brand of the same thing. Here it was a matter not so much of “still” as “again”; for this was an after- and anti-revolutionary conservatism, a revolt against bourgeois liberal standards from the other end, not from rear but from the front; not from the old but from the new. Such a contact was encouraging as well as bewildering to the simple old conservatism... [This “new” conservatism is represented here by] ...the private scholar Dr. Chaim Breisacher, a racial and intellectual type in high, one might almost say reckless development and of a fascinating ugliness. Here, obviously with a certain malicious pleasure, he played the role of ferment and foreigner... the man’s scent for the intellectual weather of the times, his nose for the newest views, I have never denied, and some of all that I met for the first time in his person and his conversation in society.

p279 He was a polyhistor, who knew how to talk about anything and everything; he was concerned with the philosophy of culture, but his views were anti-cultural, in so far as he gave out to see in the whole history of culture nothing but a process of decline. The most contemptuous word on his lips was the word “progress”; he had an annihilating way of pronouncing it; and one felt that the conservative scorn which he devoted to the idea was regarded by himself as the true legitimation [I feel I need to make clear just here that, while I'm sure there are errors of transcription in these posts (similar to the ones that, over time, distorted the text of books copied and recopied by scribes) most of the oddities are in the original text] of his presence in this society, the mark of his fitness for it. He had wit, but of no very sympathetic kind; as when he poured scorn on the development of painting from the primitive flat to the presentation of perspective. To condemn as incapacity or ignorance, even as clumsy primitivism, the rejection of perspective eye-deception by pre-perspective art... this he declared to be the peak of silly modern arrogance. Rejection, renunciation, disdain were not incapacity, nor uninstructedness, nor evidence of poverty. As though illusion were not the cheapest principle in art, the most suited to the mob; as though it were not simply a sign of elevated taste to wish to know nothing of it! The gift of wanting to know nothing of certain things was very close to wisdom, was even a part of it; but it had unfortunately been lost, and ordinary, impudent know-nothings called themselves progressive.

p280 The guests of Frau Sclaginhaufen nee von Plausig somehow found themselves very much at home listening to these remarks. They may have felt that Breisacher was not quite the right person to make them, but scarcely that they might not be the right people to applaud them.

It was the same thing, he said, with the change-over of music from monody to part-music, to harmony, which people liked to think of as cultural progress, when actually it had been just an acquisition of barbarism.

“That is . . . pardon, barbarism?” croaked Herr von Riedesel, who was of course accustomed to see in the barbaric a form, if a slightly compromising one, of the conservative.

“Yes indeed Excellence. The origins of polyphonic music -- that is, of singing simultaneously in fifths and fourths -- lie remote from the centre of musical civilization, far from Rome, where the beautiful voice and the cult of it were at home. They lie in the raw-throated north and seem to have been a sort of compensation for the rawness. They lie in England and France, particularly in savage Britain, which was the first to accept the third into harmony. The so-called higher development, the complication, the progress are thus sometimes the achievement of barbarism. I leave it to you whether this is to be praised or not. . . .”

...Obviously he did not feel comfortable so long as any of his audience knew what they were to think. Of course polyphonic vocal music, this invention of progressivist barbarism, became the object of his conservative protection so soon as the historical transition from it to the harmonic-choral principle and therewith to instrumental music of the last two centuries was complete. This, then, was the decline, namely the deterioration of the great and only true art of counterpoint, the cool and sacred play of numbers, which , thank God, had had nothing to do with prostitution of feeling or blasphemous dynamic; and in this decline, right in the middle of it, belonged the great Bach from Eisenach [sample music (now this is music for the eye.) Also, I had almost forgotten I spent most of the '70s addicted to organ music, primarily Bach. (I also ran into some other visual presentations of music: Beethoven, Sonata 29; Beethoven, 5th Symphony; Stravinsky, Rite of Spring. There is one more I'm saving for chapter XXXI)], whom Goethe quite rightly called a harmonist. A man was not the inventor of the well-tempered clavichord, accordingly of the possibility of understanding every note ambiguously and exchanging them enharmonically, and thus of the newer harmonic romanticism of modulation, without deserving the hard name which the wise one of Weimar gave him. Harmonic counterpoint? There was not such a thing. It was neither fish nor flesh. The softening, the effeminizing and falsification, the new interpretation put on the old and genuine polyphony understood as a combined sounding of various voices into the harmonic-choral, had already begun in the sixteenth century, and people like Palestrina [sample music], [I think I previously missed the connection with this composer and the town where Adrian was summering] the two Garielis, and our good Orlando di Lasso [sample music] here on the spot had already played their shameful part in it. These gentlemen brought us the conception of the vocal polyphonic art, “humanly” at first, oh yes, and seemed to us therefore the greatest masters of this style. But that was simply because for the most part they delighted in a purely chordal texture of phrase, and their way of treating the polyphonic style had been miserably weakened by their regard for the harmonic factor, for the relation of consonance and dissonance.

I’m going to try to link some (hopefully) relevant music to this, but I really wish I could find something similar by someone who actually understands what Mann is talking about here. This is a book I wish I could study in a class given by a school of music.

I almost passed over the term "harmonist" above, but on perhaps my 3rd or 4th pass I submitted the word to Wikipedia... alas! I did not get anything musical but instead a reference to the Harmony Society. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but I don't trust you to follow the link -- how hard is it really to click and learn something? -- so here is the crucial information:

The Harmony Society was a Christian theosophy and pietist society founded in Iptingen,Germany, in 1785. Due to religious persecution by the Lutheran Church and the government in Württemberg, the group moved to the United States,[1] where representatives initially purchased land in Butler County, Pennsylvania. On February 15, 1805, the group of approximately 400 followers formally organized the Harmony Society, placing all their goods in common.

Under its founder and spiritual leader, Johann Georg Rapp (1757–1847); Frederick (Reichert) Rapp (1775–1834), his adopted son who managed its business affairs; and their associates, the Society existed for one hundred years; roughly from 1805 until 1905. Members were known as Harmonists, Harmonites, or Rappites. The Society is best known for its worldly successes, most notably the establishment of three model communities, the first at Harmony, Pennsylvania; the second, also called Harmony, in the Indiana Territory, now New Harmony, Indiana; and the third and final town at Economy, now Ambridge, Pennsylvania.

And there's more:

The Indiana settlement was sold to Robert Owen and was renamed New Harmony. Ten years after the move to Indiana the commune moved again, this time returning to western Pennsylvania, and named their third and final town Economy ('Ökonomie' in German).[18] The Harmonists lived in Economy until the Society was dissolved in 1905.[17]

In the context of this novel, this reminds us of the passage (I've skipped, but alluded to) about the Pennsylvania German religious enthusiast who reinvented music with "master" and "servant" notes -- we will run into this again. But personally, this reminds me that Robert Owen and New Harmony was one of the Utopian societies I studied as a senior in high school (while in exile from my civics class). Also, at least half my German relatives originated in Württemberg, though I think they were Catholic.


...von Riedesel... was a prey to sheer confusion.

“Pardon me,” he said, “permit me . . . Bach, Palestrina . . . “

These names wore for him the nimbus of conservative authority, and here they were being assigned to the realm of modernistic disintegration. He sympathized -- and at the same time found it all so unnatural that he even took his monocle out of his eye, thus robbing his face of every gleam of intelligence... [Breisacher goes on to attack King David and King Solomon in the bible for replacing the traditional] “old and genuine Hebraic actuality of Jahve, ["The name may have originated as an epithet of the god El, head of the Bronze Age Canaanite pantheon ('El who is present, who makes himself manifest')" -Source] the Elohim of the people; and... the rites with which at the time of genuine folkishness they served this national god or rather forced him to physical presence...”

p282 Of Solomon he says, “The man was an aesthete unnerved by erotic excesses and in a religious sense a progressivist blockhead, typical of the back-formation of the cult of the effectively present national god, the general concept of a metaphysical power of the folk, into the preaching of an abstract and generally human god in heaven; in other words, from the religion of the people to the religion of the world...” [There is more about the actuality of the traditional Jewish god, but I’m going to skip it for now as I don’t see how it is central to the story. However I will include the following.]

p283 ...David, indeed, was quite as ignorant of origins and quite as besotted, not to say brutalized, as Solomon his son. He was too ignorant, for instance, to realize the dynamic dangers of a general census of the population; and by instituting one had brought about a serious biological misfortune, an epidemic with high mortality; a reaction of the metaphysical powers of the people, which might have been foreseen. For a genuine folk simply could not stand such a mechanizing registration, the dissolution by enumeration of the dynamic whole into similar individuals. . . . [well that sounds like a lesser instance of a “fall” from grace]

It merely gratified Breisacher when a lady interposed and said she had not known that a census was such a sin.

“Sin?” he responded, in an exaggeratedly questioning tone. No, in the genuine religion of a genuine folk such colourless theological conceptions as sin and punishment never occurred, in their merely ethical causal connection. What we have here was the causality of error, a working accident. Religion and ethics represented the decline of religion. All morality was “a purely intellectual” misunderstanding of the ritual. Was there anything more god-forsaken than the “purely intellectual”? It had remained for the characterless world-religion, out of “prayer” -- sit venia verbo -- to make a begging appeal for mercy, an “O Lord,”  “God have mercy,” a “Help” and “Give” and “be so good.” Our so-called prayer . . . “Pardon!” said von Riedesel, this time with real emphasis. “Quite right, of course, but ‘Head bare at prayer’ was always my --”

Yesterday I was researching something unrelated to this blog and ran across this from a very condescending Jewish site:

How do we know how to pray? Most of the guidelines for prayer, we learned from a lady named Chana who lived about three thousand years ago, before the First Temple was built. That's right, Chana was a woman. Chana came to the Tabernacle in Shiloh -- the precursor of the Temple in Jerusalem -- and prayed for a child. She prayed quietly, her lips moving but her voice audible only to her own ears. She poured out her heart and demanded from G-d that He change the natural order of things for her sake. That He grant her not just any son, but a very righteous one, a special one. In return, she would dedicate his life to holy things.

All along, the High Priest of the Tabernacle -- his name was Eli -- kept an eye on this lady. Then he went over to her and accused her of attending Temple service while inebriated.

(Imagine that: A woman performs the ultimate prayer which becomes the model and ideal for all future generations, and a man who spends his day in holy activities surrounded by spiritual rituals and filled with spiritual wisdom mistakes her for a drunk! We'll deal with this later.)

At any rate, Chana tells him off quite respectfully by describing the bitterness of her soul that she is "pouring out before G-d." Eli takes her words seriously, blesses her, and a year later, Shmuel the prophet is born.

From the story of Chana, the sages of the Talmud learn many things. Including:

1) Prayer is a quiet act.

2) You still have to move your lips (and hear yourself).

3) Prayer is done by pouring out your soul.

4) Crying could only help matters.

5) You can make deals with the Boss.

6) If you beg hard enough, He may even break the rules for you.

7) Don't drink and pray.

In fact, the sages were so enamored with Chana's prayer, they composed the Amidah (also called Shmoneh Esreh or "Eighteen Blessings"-- the mainstay Jewish prayer) using 113 words for all the blessings, just because there were 113 words in Chana's prayer. Now if that isn't gilding it in gold, what is?

Do you get it? All those guidelines of prayer are to teach men how to pray like a woman!

After all, why did Chana look to Eli (a man) like a drunk? Because her emotions poured out unconstrained. Men have a hard time with that, much harder than women, even when those men really are drunk. The whole modality of prayer is a female thing: Men don't like to cry, to admit helplessness, to express their inner selves and discuss their true needs. These are things we generally associate with women. And, by the way, men especially don't do these things when there are women around. So the guidelines of prayer have to create a framework in which men can do all this.

-ChabadDotOrg

p284 “Prayer,” finished Dr. Breisacher relentlessly, “is the vulgarized and rationalistically watered-down late form of something very vital, active and strong; the magic invocation, the coercion of God.”

I really felt bad for the Baron. Here was his aristocratic conservatism outbid by the frightfully clever playing of atavistic cards; by a radical conservatism that no longer had anything aristocratic about it, but rather something revolutionary; something more disrupting than any liberalism, and yet, as though in mockery, possessing a laudable conservative appeal. All that must bewilder  the very depths of his soul... [Zeitblom points out a flaw in Breisacher’s logic involving Moses’ attitude toward sacrifices and then says] But a sensitive man does not like to disturb another; it is unpleasant to break in on a train of thought with logical or historical objections; even in the anti-intellectual such a man respects and spares the intellectual. Today we see, of course, that it was a mistake of our civilization to have practiced all so magnanimously this respect and forbearance. For we found after all that the opposite side met us with sheer impudence and the more determined intolerance.

...it was at the Schlaginhaufens’, and through this very Breisacher, that I first came in touch with the new world of anti-humanity, of which my easy-going soul till then had known nothing at all.

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