10: Music Theory and Political Allegory: Leverkühn as Fascist
No other aspect of Doctor Faustus is likely to vex the contemporary reader as much as Thomas Mann’s decision to turn his protagonist into a composer of avant-garde music. The lengthy digressions on music history and theory that this entailed would have been taxing for most people even during Mann’s lifetime, when classical music played a far more prominent role in American cultural life than it does today. For contemporary readers, who may have only the murkiest ideas about who Palestrina was, or about how a major scale relates to its relative minor, the obstacles are great indeed.
It may therefore come as a relief to know that Mann himself was not a musical expert and had to rely on outside guidance for even fairly trivial questions of music theory and history. He consulted a large number of sources for this purpose: introductory volumes by Paul Bekker and Ernest Newman as well as an instrument guide by Fritz Volbach, the Theory of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg, the letters and memoirs of a number of different composers, perhaps most importantly those of Igor Stravinsky. He also conversed with friends and family. His youngest son, Michael, was a violist with the San Francisco Symphony, his brother-in-law Klaus Pringsheim conducted the Tokyo Chamber Symphony, and the world-renowned conductor Bruno Walter was his neighbor. Most importantly, he was able convince the philosopher, sociologist, and music theorist Theodor W. Adorno to serve as an informal consultant on the novel.
Even if his knowledge of musical theory was limited, however, Mann, like most educated Germans of his generation, was a great and omnivorous lover of classical music itself.
1In October 1948, Mann submitted a list of his twelve “Favorite Recordings” to the Saturday Review of Literature; included were eleven musical records chronologically ranging from Mozart to Alban Berg, plus Roosevelt’s “A Prayer for the Nation on D-Day.” See GKFA 19.1: 407. He also firmly believed that the musical arts were central to the intellectual life of the West.
2The secondary literature on Thomas Mann’s lifelong obsession with classical music is vast, and includes, in German, Hans Rudolf Vaget’s Seelenzauber and, in English, John A. Hargraves, Music in the Works of Broch, Mann, and Kafka (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002). Doctor Faustus, then, is a novel about music in roughly the same sense that
The Magic Mountain is a novel about tuberculosis: it focuses on this topic not as an end in itself, but rather to pose far larger questions about the modern condition, and especially about politics. As he put it in a May 1948 letter to his admirer Jonas Lesser: “No matter how much the book is also a novel about music, [music] is nevertheless only a paradigm.”
3Mann, Selbstkommentare, 195.