Polyphony and Political Culture
In order to understand these consequences, and thus also the larger allegorical stakes of Doctor Faustus, we need to talk about the ways in which Mann connects music to politics. Chapter XXVIII, devoted to a description of the Munich salon society in which Leverkühn and Zeitblom move prior to the outbreak of the First World War, can be particularly helpful in this regard. There, the cultural philosopher Chaim Breisacher, whom we have already encountered on several previous occasions in this guide, gets into a debate about musical history with the dull-witted and easily swayed Baron von Riedesel. The larger context for this debate concerns the true nature of political conservatism. Riedesel, besides being an amateur music-lover who likes to plonk around on the piano and gaze up the skirts of ballerinas, is a royalist and classical nationalist. His basic political position, to the extent that we can discern it, is very similar to that of a member of the German National People’s Party, or of one of the other conservative parties that would dominate the political discourse in the early years of the Weimar Republic, but which then increasingly lost out to Nazism. Musically speaking, he loves everything that has been hallowed by tradition, and he hates music that he conceives as being too modern.
Breisacher, on the other hand, is a very different animal. He conceives of conservatism not as a passive resistance to all that is new, but rather as an active force with which to oppose “progress,” a word that he hates more than any other. Zeitblom informs us that “he had a scathing way of saying it, and one indeed sensed that he understood the conservative scorn he devoted to progress to be […] the badge of his presentability” (295/406). Breisacher opposes progress because he actually understands it as a form of retrogression, a process by which deeper values—specifically the ability to derive contentment and inner rest from willful ignorance—become lost. Tellingly, while Riedesel will vanish into the maelstrom of history that grabs hold of Germany following the First World War, Breisacher will reappear as a member of the proto-fascist Kridwiss Circle in chapter XXXIV.
Over the course of their conversation in chapter XXVIII, Riedesel shows himself no match for Breisacher. Instead, the philosopher ties ropes around him politically, with the help of an extended segue into the musical history of the Roman Empire. The defining musical event of late antiquity, so Breisacher claims, was the displacement of the monophonic musical textures that the Romans had inherited from the Greeks by polyphonic textures that had been pioneered by so-called “barbarians” at the fringes of the Empire, in what is now France and England. (This, too, is an idea taken straight from Bekker). The term “monophony” refers to music in which there is only a single melodic line, with neither any form of counterpoint nor a chordal accompaniment. On the other hand, “polyphony,” as we already learned in earlier chapters, refers to the simultaneous layering of multiple independent melodic lines. Breisacher’s purpose in turning to such a musical example is twofold. First, he wants to ridicule the notion of teleological progress, stressing instead that “so-called higher development, musical complexity, progress—sometimes those are the achievement of barbarism” (295/407). Secondly, he applies dialectical logic to argue that “polyphonic vocal music, that invention of progressive barbarism, had become the object of conservative protection as soon as the historical transition from it to the principle of harmonic chords […] had taken place” (296/408).
Breisacher is, in other words, using a musical allegory to dismiss the efforts of conventional conservatives who oppose the modern in the name of tradition, as Riedesel does when he privileges nineteenth-century operas and ballets over the fruits of modern music. For to attack modernism as mere “barbarism,” as conservatives like Riedesel are likely to do, is to ignore the fact that barbarism can be a productive cultural force in its own right. And to treat the harmonic traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an unalloyed good, in turn, means to already have succumbed to the progressive logic of modernity. Breisacher instead advocates for what he calls a “post- and counterrevolutionary” (294/405) cultural program, a program that would turn the clock back to a state before the victory march of the homophonic chordal logic set into motion in the eighteenth century. He calls, in other words, for a return to polyphony.
Twenty-first-century readers might be excused if they find the relevance of all this talk about ancient music elusive. For Mann’s contemporaries, however, or at least for those who like him had lived through the German culture wars of the early twentieth century, the allegorical resonance would have been clear. The clue is that Breisacher repeatedly stresses the origins of polyphonic music in the “raw-throated north” (295/407). Bekker, in the corresponding section of
The Story of Music, was actually thinking of the great monastic centers of Metz and St. Gallen, but in Breisacher’s reformulation, it sounds as if the new music arose as the
vox populi of the barbarian invaders who defeated Rome in late antiquity. For Breisacher is clearly meant to be an intellectual mouthpiece of
völkisch nationalism, the movement that took hold of conservative German thought in the years prior to the First World War and extolled everything Germanic, declaring the “barbarism” of the Huns and the Goths to be immeasurably superior to the “decadence” of the Mediterranean world.
1For a still standard description of the rise of völkisch nationalism and of its infatuation with “Germanic barbarism,” see Mosse’s chapter on “Ancient Germans Rediscovered,” in The Crisis of German Ideology, 69–88. It’s probably not a coincidence that when Mann introduces Breisacher in chapter XXVIII, he describes him with the adjective rassig (294/405). John E. Woods correctly translates this as thoroughbred, but the term literally means “racially pure,” the words for “race” and “breed” being the same in German. The description becomes all the more ironic, of course, by virtue of the fact that Breisacher is the quintessential literary archetype of a self-hating Jew.Leverkühn, of course, is no
völkisch nationalist. He is not motivated by adherence to any particular tribe, and as recent criticism has stressed, he is in some respects quite cosmopolitan in outlook.
2See in this context Vaget, ”Kaisersaschern als geistige Lebensform”; Goebel, Esmeralda; and Todd Kontje, “Saul Fitelberg’s Failed Seduction: Worldliness in Doktor Faustus,” German Life and Letters 75, no. 1 (2022): 78–97. He does, however, seem to pine for a scene of original wholeness as well. The primal moment of his musical education, we need to remember, is the barnyard scene at the end of chapter IV, during which the “floppy bosomed” (26/39) milkmaid Hanne led him in the singing of rounds, a genre of music that moves “on a comparatively high plane of musical culture, a branch of imitative polyphony” (32/49). Years later, in conversation with Zeitblom following Wendell Kretzschmar’s lecture on the Ephrata brethren, Leverkühn will invoke the “bovine warmth” (76/105—the German original has
Stallwärme, or “stable warmth”) of vocal music, contrasting it with “inorganic instrumental sound” on one hand, and associating it with “genitalia” on the other.
What is the meaning of this strange final comparisons? And does it matter that the name of Hanne’s immediate superior in the Buchel hierarchy, the dairy manager Frau Luder, translates as “Ms. Hussy”? Or that Hanne’s equivalent on the farm of Pfeiffering is called “Waltpurgis,” nominally linking her with the orgiastic rituals of Walpurgis Night, the witch’s sabbath? Or that Leverkühn emerges from his barnyard experiences with a strange somatic response, a laugh that “did not suit his young years at all” while his eyes “registered a special look” with the “dusk of their metallic flecks” retreating “deeper into shadow” (32/49)? Does it matter that this retreat of the pupils into shadow is a symptom also of syphilis that Leverkühn himself will display during the final years of his life, starting with the disastrous performance of The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus in chapter XLVII?
The question of what, precisely, happened in that barnyard at Buchel is not one that can be resolved in the present context. What is clear, however, is that this early encounter with vocal polyphony deeply imprints itself upon Leverkühn, to the point that his conscious decision to contract syphilis might even be interpreted as a willful attempt to repeat this primal moment. The hours spent with Hanne in the barnyard form the state of innocence to which Mann’s protagonist will long to return for the rest of his musical life, the treasure for which he is willing to overthrow centuries’ worth of musical tradition. In this, they correspond to the tribal and völkisch ideals advocated by Breisacher, the state of barbarism for which the cultural philosopher, in turn, is willing to sacrifice the values of the Enlightenment and the achievements of political liberalism.
Leverkühn’s increasingly audacious experiments with polyphonic form, along with his interest in seemingly outdated genres and instruments such as the oratorio or the corno di bassetto, span the entirety of what we might call his compositional “middle period,” from the devil’s pact to the outbreak of tertiary syphilis in 1918. The grand summation of this period is the oratorio Apocalypsis cum figuris, one of the defining characteristics of which is the heavy use of choral glissandi, or slides between pitches. Such slides, in turn, highlight the “untampered” nature of early modern music, in which pitches also needed to be constantly readjusted. Leverkühn’s compositions, much like Breisacher’s völkisch rhetoric, can therefore be read as attempts to break out of the pentagram-like regime of compromises by which Western civilization assured several centuries of musical and political harmony.