iv. Music and Culture

Tobias Boes

Doctor Faustus is perhaps most famous as a novel about twelve-tone music, but in truth its artistic reach is far wider and Mann spends at least as much time talking about early modern polyphony as he does discussing avant-garde compositions. What is the larger narrative that he is trying to construct, and how does it comment on artistic and intellectual life more generally? What do the extremely detailed discussions of fictional musical pieces add to the story?

I analyze Mann’s discussion of music in greater detail in chapter 10, “Music Theory and Political Allegory,” and offer an account of how Leverkühn relates to the German cultural tradition in chapter 9, “Five Masters from Germany.”

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A Reader's Guide to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-298283

Provides the English-speaking reader with the tools needed to appreciate Thomas Mann's most ambitious novel, one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, now timely once again.

In 1938, the great German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann emigrated to the United States. There, he became a figurehead for the intellectual opposition to Nazism, giving more than 150 public lectures and recording more than fifty anti-Nazi radio addresses that the BBC broadcast into Germany. His political activities also left a profound mark on his fiction, most importantly on the 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Ostensibly the biography of a fictional modern composer, Doctor Faustus also serves as a post-mortem of Nazism and a reckoning with five centuries of cultural history that led to dazzling heights but failed to prevent Germany's ultimate fall.

Doctor Faustus is an astonishingly complex novel, both because of the range of its intellectual references and because of its stylistic inventiveness, which has provoked comparisons with Joyce. And yet, at a time when democracy around the world once again seems in retreat and the forces of irrationalism are in advance, it is also an extremely timely book. This guide will equip English-speaking readers with all the tools necessary to appreciate one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.

On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Author

Tobias Boes

PublisherCamden House

Print publication date Jun, 2025

Print ISBN 9781640141803

EISBN 9781805437154

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iv. Music and Culture

A Reader's Guide to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

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