Ludwig van Beethoven and Homophony

Zeitblom, in one of his most lucid moments in the novel, gives an even grander interpretation of these events, however. Writing at the beginning of chapter XXXIV, Mann’s narrator describes his uneasy feeling that:

In the chapter called “Five Masters from Germany,” I already pointed out how Doctor Faustus is structured as an extended typological allegory in which Adrian Leverkühn takes on aspects of earlier figures from German history. In the present context, the most important such figure is Ludwig van Beethoven, not only because his life overlapped with the beginning of an important new phase in the history of “bourgeois humanism” (the French Revolution and its aftermath) but also because his compositions represent everything that Leverkühn will ultimately rebel against in his own musical struggles. Mann once again took a great deal of what he has to say about Beethoven from Paul Bekker, but an even more important influence on his thinking about the great composer was his musical advisor Theodor W. Adorno.1Adorno’s relationship with Mann has always been a topic of keen interest for literary scholarship, especially in America, where the Frankfurt School cast an outsized shadow on the development of German Studies. Important publications in English include Evelyn Cobley, “Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music,” New German Critique 86 (2002): 43–70; Eberhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 242–64; Justice Kraus, “Expression and Adorno’s Avant-Garde: The Composer in Doktor Faustus,” The German Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2008): 170–84. We first detect this influence in Wendell Kretzschmar’s two Beethoven lectures in chapter VIII.

Leverkühn’s future music teacher devotes his opening lecture to the question “Why didn’t Beethoven write a third movement for his last piano sonata Opus 111?” (55/78) The answer to this turns out to be deceptively simple. Kretzschmar essentially affirms that Beethoven was too great an artist to be bound by traditional strictures on the sonata form, which would have required him to compose a third movement. This thought is already present in Bekker, who declared Beethoven’s essential novelty to lie in the fact that “dependent upon himself alone, growing only from within, he interprets life through his own vision and his own feeling.”2Bekker, The Story of Music, 183–84. But Mann takes the matter considerably further, in sentences that are greatly influenced by Adorno’s 1937 essay “Late Style in Beethoven.”3It’s not known whether Mann ever discussed Bekker with Adorno. If he did, Adorno’s reaction would almost certainly have been less than charitable, for he was fairly skeptical about Bekkers socio-historical approach. For an examination of the relationship between the two music theorists, see Nanette Nielsen, Paul Bekker’s Musical Ethics (London: Routledge, 2018), 63–67. There, Adorno gives a dialectical interpretation to Beethoven’s musical development. Instead of merely viewing him as a Romantic genius who “interprets life through his own vision,” Adorno identifies three distinctive periods in the composer’s musical development. He further links these to a corresponding argument about cultural advance more generally, thus turning Beethoven into a cipher for the modern condition. In the first period, Beethoven’s compositions more or less accord with established formal patterns. Kretzschmar, summarizing Adorno, talks about “snug regions of tradition” (56/81). In the middle period, which more than any other is responsible for shaping the image of Beethoven that most of us have today and which produced works such as the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony, individual genius liberates itself from social convention. “Beethoven’s own artistry,” so Kretzschmar claims, “had outgrown itself […] and, as humanity gazed on in horror, climbed to spheres of the totally personal, the exclusively personal (56–57/80–81). Adorno similarly talks about the middle-period Beethoven as the “purported representative of a radically personal stance” who “transformed [musical conventions] through his intentions.”4Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 565.

Adorno’s radical innovation comes with his description of Beethoven’s late period, however. In these works, so he argues, “even where [they] avail themselves of such a singular syntax as in the last five piano sonatas, one finds formulas and phrases of convention scattered about […]. Often convention appears in a form that is bald, undisguised, untransformed.”5Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” 565. Mann quotes these lines almost verbatim: “Beethoven’s late work—the five last piano sonatas for instance—had a quite different, much more forgiving and amenable relation to convention. Untouched, untransformed by the subjective, the conventional often emerged in the late works with a baldness […] that, in turn, had an effect more terrifyingly majestic than any personal indiscretion” (57/81–82).

Mann’s use of the word “subjective” (rather than simply “personal”), which he also takes from Adorno, points us to what is ultimately at stake in this analysis. For Adorno, Beethoven’s various stylistic periods illustrate not only a biographical narrative but rather the larger shape of historical development in the West. A pre-modern “objective” stage, in which individual lives are largely subordinated to, and in harmony with, social circumstances is followed by a modern “subjective” stage in which individual freedom is prized above all else. The fruits of this subjective stage are humanist education, political liberalism, and bourgeois self-development. Where other music historians see Beethoven simply as the Romantic apotheosis of this subjective tendency, however, Adorno instead detects in his late work a dialectic synthesis, a return of conventions. And his assessment of what this portends is less than rosy: Adorno speaks of a tendency towards the “primitive” in the late sonatas, declares that the “formal law” of the late works “is revealed precisely in the thought of death,” and finishes his essays with the magisterial (if slightly mysterious) pronouncement, “in the history of art late works are the catastrophes.”6Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” 565, 566, 567.

When Mann read Adorno’s essay, he was undoubtedly struck by the fact that the philosopher’s description of this dialectic employed some of the same terms and concepts with which he was already familiar from Bekker, but put them to unorthodox ends. Although Beethoven’s late sonatas are unquestionably homophonic in texture, Adorno speaks of them as a field of battle between a “polyphonically objective construction” and the “monophony” of a “subjectivity that […] fills the dense polyphony with its tensions.”7Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” 566–67. What he means by this is never made entirely clear in the essay, though, as we will see shortly, Adorno provided a more satisfactory account in his later Philosophy of New Music. What is undeniable, however, is that Adorno reinterprets the terms “monophony,” “polyphony,” and “homophony,” which Bekker treated simply as the characteristic musical textures of successive periods in Western musical history, dialectically. He approaches them as expressive tendencies that never entirely vanish but recur in sublated form.

For Mann, the encounter with Adorno provided an opportunity for a far deeper engagement with modern music than would ever have been possible through Bekker alone. It also shaped his depiction of Leverkühn’s career, which, like Beethoven’s, can be divided into three main stages. The first, which encompasses the years prior to the devil’s pact and culminates with the symphonic fantasy Phosphorescence of the Sea, is, much like Beethoven’s early period, characterized by an adherence to “objective” conventions, which in Leverkühn’s case means to the chromaticism of the 1890s. Following the devil’s pact, Leverkühn during his middle period embarks upon an intensely personal quest for a repeat of his primal scene, the barnyard lessons with Hanne. The ultimate product of this “subjective” phase, the Apocalipsis cum figuris, is unquestionably his most daring work to date, but it is also his most eccentric. Zeitblom, in his extended description of the Apocalipsis in chapter XXXIV mentions “choruses […] that move through all the shades of graduated whispering, antiphonal speech, and quasi-chant on up to the most polyphonic song” (393/543) along with “loudspeakers […] whose use the composer specified at various points to produce directional and acoustic gradations that had never been achieved before” (396/547) and with “jazz sounds for purely infernal purposes” (296/547). It is almost as though the Apoalipsis combines musical advances that in real life were carried out by composers as diverse as Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Darius Milhaud. Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that the oratorio fails to win over a devoted audience when it premieres under the baton of Otto Klemperer. Tellingly, even Zeitblom accuses his friend of succumbing to “aestheticism,” that is, to an exaggeratedly subjective stance (392/541).