Ludwig van Beethoven
Many first-time readers will probably miss the majority of the references to Dürer and Luther that are scattered throughout the novel. The presence of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) is impossible to overlook, however, for Leverkühn’s childhood mentor Wendell Kretzschmar devotes the first two of his four public lectures in chapter VIII to the great composer. Nor is it particularly hard to see that Leverkühn and Beethoven are typologically linked to one another. Zeitblom draws repeated comparisons to Beethoven’s works when discussing Leverkühn’s oeuvre, the total output of which can also be divided into three main periods following the schema that Kretzschmar, in large parts channeling Mann’s musical advisor Theodor W. Adorno, outlines for Beethoven. There is an early period characterized by more or less faithful adherence to inherited conventions (for Leverkühn, this period encompasses his musical efforts prior to his syphilitic infection, with the 1906 symphonic fantasy
Phosphorescence of the Sea as the most important work), a middle period characterized by ever-increasing innovation (from the syphilitic infection to the outbreak of tertiary syphilis and the composition of Leverkühn’s chef-d’oeuvre, the 1919 oratorio
Apocalipsis cum figuris), and then a complex late period characterized by a self-conscious and even parodic return to musical conventions, during which Leverkühn produces his 1924 violin concerto as well as his final work, the terrifying
Lamentation of Dr. Faustus. The
Lamentation, furthermore, is directly connected to the outstanding work of Beethoven’s own late period, the Ninth Symphony, becoming its negative inverse when Leverkühn grimly declares his intention to Zeitblom that “I shall take it back […] The Ninth Symphony” (501/692). The
Lamentation is also described as a “symphonic cantata,” making it the formal inverse of the Ninth, which is a choral symphony.
1Leverkühn’s oration in that chapter also contains similarities to Beethoven’s so-called “Heiligenstädter Testament,” an 1802 letter in which the composer bemoans his progressing deafness. See Edward Engelberg, “Thomas Mann’s Faust and Beethoven,” Monatshefte 47, no. 2 (1955): 112–16.Mann also strives to make us see biographical correspondences between Beethoven and Leverkühn. Kretzschmar, in his lecture on “Beethoven and the Fugue,” describes the final years of the composer in terms that recall the final days of Christ, and especially the events in the Garden of Gethsemane. Beethoven is described as isolated and irritable, followed by an entourage of disciples who dote upon him but do not really understand his predicament. Indeed Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s earliest biographer whose writings Mann consulted extensively, frequently comes across as just such a disciple. Leverkühn, in the final chapters of Doctor Faustus, undergoes a similar Passion in the bucolic isolation of Pfeiffering, surrounded, in Chapter XLVII, by a group of uncomprehending hangers-on, of whom one, Zeitblom, even fulfills an Apostolic function. In the same lecture, meanwhile, Kretzschmar emphasizes Beethoven’s late-life deafness, describing how the composer would tunelessly hiss and hum to himself in a manner that made him seem stark raving mad. Several of Beethoven’s biographers, most notably Ernest Newman, whose The Unconscious Beethoven Mann studied carefully, attributed this deafness to syphilis. Beethoven, finally, was fifty-six years old when he died, closely approximating both Leverkühn and Dürer.
The biographical parallels also extend to the social plane. Beethoven lived during a pivotal period of Western social and political history. He was born into the Old Regime and was nineteen years old when the French people stormed the Bastille, thirty-four when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, forty-five when the Congress of Vienna brought an end to the revolutionary era with its graveyard peace. Some of the most important works of Beethoven’s “middle period” (generally dated from 1802 to 1812) are marked by the revolutionary fervor of these tumultuous times.
2William Kinderman, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024). There’s the
Eroica symphony of 1803–1804, for example, originally called the
Bonaparte symphony. Or the 1805 opera
Fidelio, which dramatizes the struggle for individual liberties and is repeatedly alluded to in
Doctor Faustus. (Mann once remarked about
Fidelio: “What amount of apathy was needed [by audiences] to listen to
Fidelio in Himmler’s Germany without covering their faces and rushing out of the hall!”
3Letter to Walter von Molo, September 7, 1945. In Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955, Volume II: 1943–1955, 482.) Beethoven’s later works, however, depart in a different direction. He never wrote another opera following
Fidelio, thereby turning his back on the musical form in which instrumental composition and human voices are most readily conjoined with dramatized political action. And while the greatest work of his final period, the choral Ninth Symphony, celebrates joy and human brotherhood, it does so in general and apolitical terms, a fact that has made it vulnerable to various reappropriations over the centuries, including by the Nazis.
4Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The “Ode to Joy” that concludes the piece is an encomium to spiritual freedom rather than a call to action in the streets. In this sense Beethoven might be accused of repeating the fatal development Mann diagnosed in Martin Luther.
5In The Story of a Novel, Mann confesses that he could “summon up no affection” for the “Ode to Joy,” calling the piece “disjointed.” Mann, Story of a Novel, 224.Leverkühn lives through a similarly eventful period of European history. Like Beethoven, he is born into an “old regime” (the Wilhelmine Empire), and he witnesses the birth of a new world (the Weimar Republic, the first democracy on German soil) from the pangs of war and revolution. The ultimate outcome of these events is much more ambivalent and tragic than was the case with Beethoven, however. The French Revolution, for all the terror that it spawned, undeniably set the world on a new course, and all efforts to put the genie back into the bottle at the Congress of Vienna were doomed to failure from the start. By contrast, the abortive German revolution of 1918/1919 was a farcical affair, the only lasting effects of which were to strengthen the forces of reaction.
Leverkühn’s trajectory as a composer reflects this important difference. While Beethoven, even after turning away from the direct depictions of political action, continued to seek an outlet for the spirit of his age by vastly expanding the expressive range of the symphony, giving this secular form the grandeur and urgency once only commanded by religious compositions, Leverkühn instead turns to the antiquated and constrained forms of the oratorio and the cantata. These are the genres in which he writes his masterpiece Apocalipsis cum figuris and his final work, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Like the Ninth Symphony, the Lamentation might be called a spiritual work, though as its inverted double it turns inwards, towards self-doubt and the question of personal salvation, rather than outwards, towards the confident celebration of brotherhood and communal redemption.