| | The description of Nikolaus L.’s house is modeled on the still extant residence of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) in Nuremberg. |
| straight-hanging […] unkempt hair | Nikolaus L.’s features were inspired by Dürer’s The Master-Builder Jerome of Augsburg (Fig. 3). |
| | The German employs the antiquated term Losament, which TM took from the Chapbook. |
| the warehouse […] mezzanine | TM composed the ensuing bravura passage describing Nikolaus L.’s warehouse with the help of Fritz Volbach’s 1921 reference work Das moderne Orchester, frequently excerpting passages directly into his manuscript. Like the description of Jonathan L.’s laboratory, the musical instrument store recalls a witch’s kitchen or alchemist’s workshop. TM also wove allusions to several musical compositions with a Faustian, macabre, or melancholic character into his description. |
| | Allusion to the opening of the third act of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1865), an influential depiction of melancholy. |
| | Allusion to the opera La Damnation de Faust (1864) by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869). |
| graveyard dance of skeletons | Allusion to the Danse macabre (1874) by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921). |
| | Cimabue’s disquisitions can be read as a sly commentary on modern literature. Like the “sage authorities” discussed by Cimabue, TM was convinced that what ultimately mattered in a literary work was the form and not the nature of the raw materials, which he frequently (as in this passage) copied word-for-word from mundane sources in an act of literary montage. |
| just how immaterial and secondary | L. displays the cardinal sin of pride, closely associated with the Faust myth. |
| | A central pillar of L.’s musical aesthetics and also of the political allegory that lurks behind them. |
| | A somewhat free translation of Romans 13:1 that Mann took directly from the Malleus Maleficarum. |
| | A graphematic way of organizing the twelve pitches of an evenly tempered scale into a closed circle of perfect fifths. In DF, the circle of fifths functions as an elementary expression of musical “magic,” much like the pentagram (another grapheme that revolves around the number five and that, when traced, returns to its starting point) is a symbol of black magic. |
| | L. has taught himself how to modulate from one key to another by adding a minor seventh to a tonic chord, thereby changing it to the dominant of the key signature that is located one step further in counterclockwise direction along the circle of fifths. Woods introduces an error in this paragraph: the phrase “yielding the modulation from B major to A major” should read “from B major to E major.” The GKFA isn’t faultless either, however. Following the lead of the 1948 Vienna edition, it prints what Mann meant as key-signatures in lower-case letters and omits hyphens in the phrase: “und so kam er über a, d, und g nach C-Dur,” thereby confusing the names of notes with those of key signatures. |
| tertian harmony […] Neapolitan Sixth | “Tertian harmony” refers to the harmonic system that characterizes Western music from the late Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, in which chords are based on the interval of the third. A Neapolitan Sixth is a chord built on the subdominant of a major or (more usually) minor scale in which the fifth has been replaced with a minor sixth; it is an especially useful tool for modulation. L. is discovering some of the theoretical fundamentals that distinguish post-Renaissance music from that of the polyphonic era. |
| | This definition of music already figures in The Magic Mountain (1924), where it is voiced with some distaste by the arch-rationalist Settembrini. |
| | The practice of reading a tone in two different ways (for instance as C♯ and D♭), thereby enabling modulation into a different key. Enharmonic transposition is a direct consequence of even temperament. In perfect tuning, C♯ and D♭ would be different pitches. |
| cheeks had taken on a flush | The German reads Er hatte erhitzte Wangen and thereby draws attention to bodily heat rather than color. See also 8/15. |