After the Apocalypse: Strict Style
A way out of this subjectivist dead end is provided in chapter XXV of
Doctor Faustus, in which the devil appears to Adrian Leverkühn in the guise of Theodor W. Adorno.
1Somewhat amusingly, Adorno didn’t recognize himself in Mann’s description of a “gentleman” with “white collar and a bow-tie, spectacles rimmed in horn atop his hooked nose, behind which somewhat reddened eyes shine moist and dark; the face a mingling of sharpness and softness; the nose sharp, the lips sharp, but the chin soft, with a dimple in it, and yet another dimple in the cheek above; pale and vaulted the brow, from which the hair indeed retreats upwards, whereas that to the sides stands thick, black, and woolly” (253/347). The devil begins his disquisition about musical matters by sketching out why exactly the subjective phase in cultural history must lead to an impasse. Music, we learn, like all other art ultimately depends for its commercial and public success on a certain proximity to convention, to the “objective” relations in society. Absent such a proximity, it labors under the “threat that production will cease” and risks a “lack of demand—so that, as in the preliberal era, the possibility of production greatly depends on the accident of a patron’s favor” (254/349). Subjective innovation, however, is defined precisely by the departure from convention, and by its own internal nature is forced to become ever more extreme. “The diminished seventh [chord] is right and eloquent at the opening of Opus 111,” the devil argues, thereby drawing a connection with the Kretzschmar lectures back in chapter VIII. But once it has been used, it loses this eloquence and becomes “defunct” through a “historical process no one can reverse” (255/349). In other words, it becomes a cliché. The only possible solution for the subjective composer is to continually push the boundaries of what is permissible in harmonic theory, adding dissonance, chromaticism, and ever more complex exceptions to the established rules of voice leading. The result are compositions that only experts can comprehend and that no longer present themselves as self-evident masterworks to the ordinary listener. “I am against works on the whole,” declares the devil rather cynically, and: “the prohibitive difficulties of the work lie deep within the [modern] work itself” (256/351).
These lines recall Mann’s lamentations about Joyce in
The Story of a Novel. There, Mann argues that “neither
A Portrait of the Artist nor
Finnegans Wake is a novel, strictly speaking, and
Ulysses is a novel to end all novels.” He also suggests that
Ulysses should be considered an epic, rather than a novel, and thus a return to premodern forms just like the fictional
Apocalipsis cum figuris.
2Mann, The Story of a Novel, 91. Far from merely making an argument about music history, the devil in
Doctor Faustus should therefore be understood as formulating a critique of modern art, and indeed modern intellectual labor more generally. As modernity advances, innovative art and thought by necessity become increasingly specialized, subject to their own jargon, disciplinary conventions, and historical references. This, in turn, estranges avant-garde intellectuals from the general population. “The claim to presume the general as harmonically contained within the particular is a self-contradiction [in modern art],” says the devil. “It is all up with conventions once considered prerequisite and compulsory, the guarantors of the game’s freedom” (257/352–53).
In chapter XXV, Leverkühn and the devil discuss two possible ways out of this social dilemma, both of which Mann’s protagonist will pursue during his musical compositions of the 1920s. The first is parody, that is, an art or thought that embraces cliché but does so knowingly, with a wink and a certain self-conscious cleverness. This would allow the intellectual to win the affection of the masses while simultaneously remaining on good terms with other initiates of his craft, who alone would recognize all the parodic elements. Leverkühn proposes such an approach: “One could raise the game to a yet higher power by playing with forms from which, as one knows, life has vanished” (257/353). His first truly major composition following the Apocalipsis, the violin concerto that he writes for Rudi Schwerdtfeger, represents an attempt to put this ambition into practice. Its most obvious purpose is to appease Schwerdtfeger, the innocent and somewhat simpleminded violinist who despite his talents is never quite capable of keeping pace with Leverkühn intellectually. But as we learn in the discussions surrounding the concerto that Zeitblom relates in chapter XXXVIII, Leverkühn is actually secretly contemptuous of all the musical platitudes that he has woven into it. Unsurprisingly, his relationship with Schwerdtfeger will take a dark turn soon after as well.
Mann, too, at various points of his life expressed the conviction that parody was the only remaining recourse for the modern artist. In
Doctor Faustus, however, he takes a more expansive vision. The devil already reacts dismissively to Leverkühn’s thought experiment: “I know, I know. Parody. It might be merry if in its aristocratic nihilism it were not so very woebegone” (257/353). Instead, he promises a very different kind of intellectual achievement to Leverkühn, one that will allow him to “break through the laming difficulties of the age” (259/355). In chapter XXV, the devil does not further expound what this new kind of intellectual achievement might look like but attentive readers have already encountered a basic description of it in chapter XXII, where Leverkühn, four years into his pact with the devil, first explains his idea for a “strict style” to Zeitblom.
3In music history, the term “strict style” refers to a particular form of polyphonic composition that was practiced in the early eighteenth century. The name is thus another indicator of Leverkühn’s affinity for pre-homophonic forms. It is this “strict style” that two decades later will become the basis for his final and most advanced composition, the symphonic cantata
The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus.
Leverkühn’s definition of the strict style is worth quoting at length:
“Just once, in the Brentano cycle,” he said, “in the song ‘Oh sweet maiden’ [did I achieve my vision of a strict style]. It all comes from one basic figure, from a row of intervals capable of multiple variation, taken from the five notes B–E–A–E–E-flat, both the horizontal and vertical lines are determined and governed by it, to the extent that is possible in a basic motif with such a limited number of notes. It is like a word, a key word that leaves its signature everywhere in the song and would like to determine it entirely. It is, however, too short a word, with too little flexibility. The tonal space it provides is too limited. One would have to proceed from here and build longer words from the twelve steps of the tempered semitone alphabet, words of twelve letters, specific combinations and interrelations of the twelve semitones, rows of notes—from which, then, the piece, a given movement, or a whole work of several movements would be strictly derived. Each tone in the entire composition, melodic and harmonic, would have to demonstrate its relation to this predetermined basic row. None would dare recur until all have first occurred. No note would dare appear that did not fulfill its motif function within the structure as a whole. Free notes would no longer exist. That is what I would call a strict style.” (205/279–80)
As readers of Doctor Faustus recognized even before the novel was actually published, the system of composition described in the second part of this paragraph—in which the twelve notes of “tempered semitone alphabet” are no longer arranged in scales but rather in “tone rows” or “words of twelve letters”—was actually pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and is generally known not as “strict style” but as “twelve-tone” or “dodecaphonic” music. This particularly egregious act of montage led to a quarrel between the two émigrés and ultimately resulted in the “Author’s Note” printed at the end of all subsequent editions of the novel.
In truth, however, Mann took most of what he had to say about dodecaphonic music not from Schoenberg directly, but from Theodor W. Adorno. In his
Philosophy of New Music Adorno returns to the problems of subjectivism he had already raised in his writings on Beethoven. There, he claims that, “subjective disposition over the material compels conventional language to speak anew.”
4Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 48. This return of the conventional, so Adorno explains, can already be seen in Wagner’s deployment of leitmotifs, which reinsert the eighteenth century’s affinity for musical motifs into a fundamentally Romantic and thus “subjective” musical texture. But it was Schoenberg who “was the first to detect the principles of universal unity and economy in the new, subjective, emancipated Wagnerian material.”
5Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 48. It was Schoenberg, in other words, who through the invention of twelve-tone music brought music history into the “late phase” that Adorno had already described in the Beethoven essay, a late phase in which the “objective” returns in sublated form amidst the “subjective.” And as in the Beethoven essay, Adorno once again describes this as an eruption of a polyphonic disposition amidst a fundamentally homophonic texture, claiming that “polyphony is the appropriate means for the organization of emancipated music […]. Schoenberg […] asserted the principle of polyphony as no longer heteronomous to an emancipated harmony but as, instead, a principle at every point awaiting reconciliation with it. He revealed polyphony as the essence of harmony.”
6Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 48.Leverkühn’s turn towards the “strict style” in his own personal “late period” must similarly be seen as a new approach to polyphony, an approach that would treat its usage in twentieth-century music no longer as a mere subjective fancy, but rather as something grounded in historical development, something more “objective.” Adorno, lecturing on dodecaphonic music, offers the following explanation for this: “[In twelve-tone music] the individual chord, which in the classical-romantic tradition—as a bearer of subjective expression—represents the antipode to polyphonic objectivity, is understood in its own polyphony. The means for this is none other than the extreme of romantic subjectivization: dissonance. The more a chord is dissonant […] the more it is polyphonic.”
7Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 48–49. In twelve-tone music, we need to remember, chords are liberated from the internal hierarchies imposed by the harmonic system that governed earlier classical music. Tonic and dominant are no longer tonal centers, and the other scale degrees are freed from their gravitational pull. Instead, each tone in a dodecaphonic chord is of equal value to all the others.
Unlike Leverkühn’s prior experimentation with polyphonic techniques in pieces such as the Apocalypsis, this emergence of polyphony in the midst of the strict style does not represent a mere subjective affectation, a return to antiquated forms out of disgust with modernity. It is, rather, the logical fulfillment of modernity itself, the “revelation of the essence of harmony,” as Adorno puts it, and thus also of homophony. For the subjective tendency in homophonic music expressed itself in the erosion of traditional tonality, and thus in an ever-greater move towards dissonance. Composers, seeking to avoid the kinds of clichés that Adorno castigates in his analysis of the diminished seventh chord in Beethoven, throughout the nineteenth century experimented with ever more daring exceptions and additions to the established rules of harmony, introducing chords that would have seemed unnecessary or impermissible to earlier generations into their tonal vocabulary. Schoenberg radicalizes this tendency, abandoning tonality categorically rather than incrementally, and thereby also preparing the way for the return of polyphony from within the midst of a homophonic era.
Adorno refers to the music created by Schoenberg as “emancipated.” By this he means the emancipation of music from the subjective stage of its development, but also its liberation from the fetters of harmony altogether. Because it is atonal, twelve-tone music no longer needs to care about Pythagorean commas or about the major thirds and perfect fifths of traditional harmony. It is mathematically perfect in a way that harmonic music never was. Mann seems to have also believed that dodecaphony introduced simplicity to a period of music history that sorely needed it.
8This is marked misunderstanding of Adorno, who in Philosophy of New Music explicitly states that “Schoenberg’s procedure has indeed made composition more difficult, not easier” (50). The rules of the strict style as Leverkühn describes it are indeed quite simple: the nascent composer is instructed take the twelve notes of the chromatic scale and arrange them in any order, thereby forming what Leverkühn calls a “key word.” These twelve notes may now be sounded successively (thus forming a melody) or simultaneously (thus forming dodecaphonic chords). To increase complexity, key words may also be read upside down (as an “inversion”) front-to-back (as a “retrograde”) or as a combination of both (“retrograde-inversion”). The only rule is that a note may not be repeated until the entire tone row has been used up.
This combination of mathematical perfection and radical simplicity fulfills Leverkühn’s resolution, in chapter VIII, to submit the laws of music to a “chilling effect” (76/104) brought about by a compositional system based not on emotions but on intellectual “interest,” or “a love that has been deprived of its animal warmth” (77/106). It also moves his music into the vicinity of that of Georg Conrad Beissel, whose Ephrata compositions are discussed in Kretzschmar’s final lecture in chapter VIII.
When Zeitblom attacks Beissel’s works as “absurdly decreed order, a piece of childish rationalism,” Leverkühn is dismissive, responding that “even foolish order is always better than none at all” (75/105). The devil, in chapter XXV, is somewhat more direct when he explains to Leverkühn the ultimate outcome of an eventual turn towards dodecaphonic composition: “You will lead, you will set the march for the future, lads will swear by your name, who thanks to your madness will no longer need to be mad” (258/355). The German original of the first phrase, du wirst führen, makes even clearer that Mann was drawing a not-so-subtle analogy between his syphilitic composer and the supreme leader of the German people, between Leverkühn and Hitler.
This is not to imply, of course, as Schoenberg falsely surmised in the 1940s, that Mann wants us to see an equivalence between the two. Leverkühn is not Hitler, and dodecaphony, which always remained a part of elite culture and never won any mass appeal, bears no self-evident relationship to the history of the Nazi movement. Mann’s reflections on the history of twentieth-century music, however, allowed him to develop a sophisticated commentary on problems that also afflict modern politics. Adorno’s notion of “romantic subjectivization,” so crucial to Mann’s narrative, refers not only to music but rather to any intellectual formation that is in the grip of overspecialization and that worships “progress” without any thought about those whom it leaves behind. The result of this tendency is the violent return of what Adorno calls “objectivity” and what Snyder would call the “politics of eternity.” Twelve-tone music as Leverkühn describes it is characterized by predetermination (the key word is chosen before the actual act of composition begins, and may not be altered) and endless recurrence (it starts anew every twelve notes). Contemporary authoritarian politics are similarly characterized by the appeal to seemingly eternal categories (ethnic identity, patriarchal gender norms, the precedence of biological sex over socially constructed gender, to name just a few) and by the repetition of ever-identical outrage cycles to keep the populace distracted. When Leverkühn, upon the completion of the Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, describes his aim to take back the Ninth Symphony, he is therefore describing not only an artistic ambition to undo homophony, but also a spiritual and political program to reverse the progressive and universalist aspirations that Beethoven’s choral symphony expresses. Leverkühn’s ambition is esoteric indeed, but our contemporary tragedy is that it manifests itself in tangible forms the world over.