Georg Conrad Beissel

Unlike Dürer, Luther, and Beethoven, Beissel is a largely forgotten figure, so that Kretzschmar is forced to include the salient biographical details in his lecture. We learn that Beissel was born in the Holy Roman Empire and emigrated to North America as a young man, where he founded an anabaptist community named Ephrata in what is now Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. During his years as a leader of this community, Beissel became increasingly interested in music, eventually beginning to write hymns in a musical system of his own invention. As Kretzschmar summarizes it: “He decreed that there should be ‘masters’ and ‘servants’ in every scale. Since he had decided to treat the triad as the melodic center of every given key, he called the notes that belonged to that chord ‘masters’ and all other notes on the scale ‘servants.’ Every accented syllable in a text, then, would always have to be represented by a master and the unaccented ones by a servant” (73/100).

Thomas Mann discovered Beissel entirely by accident, through a magazine article that he stumbled upon shortly after beginning Doctor Faustus.1See Hans Theodore David, “Hymns and Music of the Pennsylvania Seventh-Day Baptists,” American-German Review 9 (1943): 4–6, 36. Unlike the other historical figures discussed in this chapter, Beissel was not originally central to the author’s understanding of German history or the German national character. It’s therefore perhaps not surprising that there are no overt biographical or physical links between Leverkühn and the American religious leader—no external similarities, no evidence of syphilitic infection on Beissel’s part, nor even a comparable lifespan, since Beissel lived to ripe old age. There can be no question, however, that Mann recognized he was onto something significant when he first read about Beissel, and a couple of years later he showed himself deeply moved when he was given the opportunity to examine some of the preacher’s manuscripts in the Library of Congress.2Mann, The Story of a Novel, 121.

Beissel, in fact, became a key figure for Doctor Faustus and a self-conscious point of identification for Leverkühn. We can already see this at the conclusion of chapter VIII, where Mann’s protagonist defends the anabaptist against a skeptical Zeitblom: “At least he had a sense of order, and even foolish order is always better than none at all” (75/104), Leverkühn argues there, and “every law has a chilling effect, and music has so much warmth of its own […] that it can use all sorts of lawful means for chilling things down” (76/104). Leverkühn’s “strict” style will become just such a law, satisfying the intellect more than it does the senses and stripping music of the emotional appeal that Mann’s character derides as a symptom of the homophonic age.

Beissel’s significance for the novel reaches deeper than this, however. In his lecture on “Beethoven and the Fugue,” Kretzschmar argues that Beethoven “had been the grand master of a profane epoch of music, in which that art had emancipated itself from the cultic to the cultural” (64/918). The Ninth Symphony, in which the concept of spiritual liberation is translated from the religious into the secular sphere, is the great example of this. Beethoven’s fundamental distance from all things cultic is further indicated by the fact that according to Kretzschmar, he mastered counterpoint, the musical language of early modern religious music, in only one composition, the Missa solemnis. Beissel, however, created his eccentric musical system for explicitly “cultic” rather than “cultural” purposes. In this sense, he is an antipode to Beethoven, and Leverkühn, too, will pursue his “strict style” in the attempt to restore a cultic dimension to a modern life that he feels to be under the unhealthy sway of the “cultural.”