Jump to Introduction + Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXII
This chapter begins with a detailed description of the concerto Adrian finally composed for Rudi. I’m positive Mann is doing something cunning here with the music representing relationships... or something, but I don’t have it yet, so I’m not going to go into that degree of detail. I will give you some interesting passages and see where it goes from there.
p410 ...I know that Leverkuhn, before composing the piece, studied very carefully the management of the violin in Beriot, Vieuxtemps, and Wieniawski and then applied his knowledge in a way half-respectful, and half caricature and moreover with such a challenge to the technique of the player -- especially in the extremely abandoned and virtuoso middle movement, a scherzo, wherein there is a quotation from Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata -- [a lovely piece. In country/bluegrass music also the devil is thought to be a great fiddler, see here] that the good Rudi had his work cut out to be equal to the demands upon him. Beads of sweat stood out beneath his blond locks every time he performed it, and the whites of his pretty azure eyes were bloodshot. But how much he got out of it, how much opportunity for “flirtation” in a heightened sense of the word, lay in a work which I to the Master’s very face called “the apotheosis of salon music”! I was, of course, certain beforehand that he would not take the description amiss, but accept it with a smile.
p411 ...I remarked again with unspoken amusement the involuntary attention and more or less timid reverence paid to him. [Adrian at a dinner in town at the grand house of Bullinger.] After all, he was only thirty-nine years old, and besides, but few of the guests present possessed enough musical knowledge for such an attitude on any rational grounds. It amused me, I say; yet gave me a pang at my heart as well. For the behaviour of these people was really due to the indescribable atmosphere of aloofness which he carried about wherever he went. In increasing degree, more and more perceptible and baffling as the years went by, it wrapped him round and gave one the feeling that he came from a country where nobody else lived.
[After listening to “Delilah’s D-sharp major aria from Samson by Saint-Saens” on the gramophone] p413 They were moved. One lady wiped an eye with her embroidered party handkerchief. “Crazy beautiful!” said Bullinger, using a phrase now in favour among stricter connoisseurs, who rejected the sentimental “lovely,” It might be said to be used here exactly in its right and proper place, and perhaps that was what amused Adrian.
“Well, there!” he said laughing. “You understand now how a serious man can be capable of adoring the thing. Intellectual beauty it has not, of course, it is typically sensual. But after all one must not blush for the sensual, nor be afraid of it.”
“And yet, perhaps,” Dr. Kranich [the numismatist] was heard to say. He spoke as always, very clearly, with distinct articulation, though wheezing with asthma. “Perhaps, after all, in art. In this realm in fact one may, or one should, be afraid of the nothing but sensual; one should be ashamed of it, for, as the poet said, it is the common, the vulgar: ‘Vulgar is everything that does not speak to the mind and spirit and arouses nothing but a sensual interest.’”
“A noble saying,” Adrian responded. “We shall do well to let it echo for a bit in our minds before we think of anything to dispute it.”
“And what would you think of then?” the scholar wanted to know.
Adrian had made a grimace, shrugged a shoulder, as much as to say: “I can’t help the facts.” Then he replied:
“Idealism leaves out of count that the mind and spirit are by no means addressed by the spiritual alone; they can be most deeply moved by the animal sadness of sensual beauty. They have even paid homage to frivolity. Philine, [or here] after all, is nothing but a little strumpet, but Wilhelm Meister, who is not so very different from his creator, pays her a respect in which the vulgarity of innocent sensuality is openly denied.”
“His complaisance, his toleration of the questionable,” returned the numismatist, “have never been looked on as the most exemplary traits of our Olympian’s [Goethe's] character. And one may see a danger to culture when the spirit closes its eyes to the vulgar and sensual, or even winks at them.”
“Obviously we have different opinions as to the danger.”
“You might as well say I am a coward, at once!”
“God forbid! A knightly defender of fear and censure is no coward, he is simply knightly. For myself, I would only like to break a lance for a certain breadth of view in matters of artistic morality. One grants it, or allows it, it seems to me, more readily in other arts than in music. That may be very honorable but it does seriously narrow its field. What becomes of the whole jingle-jangle if you apply the most rigorously intellectual standards? A few ‘pure spectra’ of Bach. Perhaps nothing else audible would survive at all.”
p415 ...To me, and very likely to some other guests, the exchange was a duel suddenly struck up between uncompromising mediocrity and painful depth of experience. But I have interpolated this scene, not only because I feel the close connection between it and the concerto upon which Adrian was then at work, but also because even then both concerto and conversation directed my attention to the person of the young man upon whose obstinate insistence the piece had been written and for whom it represented a conquest in more than one sense of the word. Probably it is my fate to be able to speak only stiffly, dryly, and analytically about the phenomenon of love: of that which Adrian had one day characterized to me as an amazing and always somewhat unnatural alteration in the relation between the I and the not-I. Reverence for the mystery in general, and personal reverence as well, combine to close my lips or make me chary of words when I come to speak of the transformation, always in the sign of the daemonic, the phenomenon in and for itself half miraculous which negatives the singleness of the individual soul. Even so, I will show that it was a specific sharpening of my wits through my classical scholarship, an acquirement which otherwise tends rather to take the edge off one’s reactions toward life, which put me in a position to see or understand as much as I did.
There remained no doubt -- I say it in all calmness -- that tireless, self-confident perseverance, put off by nothing, had won the day over aloofness and reserve. [Similar to Inez and even Hans. If I understand the rest of this paragraph and the next one correctly, Rudi’s seduction of Adrian worked better than he had anticipated and, after a declaration by Adrian, he had to put things back on a platonic footing.]
p416 It [the concerto dedicated to Rudi] took Adrian to Vienna. It took him, with Rudi Schwerdtfeger, to the estate in Hungary. When they returned, Rudolf rejoiced in the prerogative that up to then, from our childhood on, had been mine alone: he and Adrian were per du.
No comments:
Post a Comment