| a pronounced taste for quotes | L.’s taste for parody, pastiche, and quotations has been shaped by Kretzschmar’s lectures on Beethoven in VIII, and will later also come to characterize his musical compositions. TM thought about his own works (and specifically DF) along similar lines. |
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| Friday after The Purification, 1905 | Candlemas, celebrated annually on February 2. The dating makes no sense; L. did not arrive in Leipzig until the fall of 1905. Perhaps TM intended to write “1906,” although this would mean that roughly four months passed between the incident in the brothel and the composition of the letter, not “weeks” as Z. will claim on 156/214. |
| | Someone who operates a siege weapon; a reference to Z.’s service in the artillery. The German ballisticus has an even more mocking ring to it. |
| | In the study of poetry, a “foot” is a metrical unit that in turn is comprised of one or more morae. For instance, an Iambic foot is comprised of an unstressed and a stressed mora. |
| “In God shalt thou believe” | A folk saying that dates back to the seventeenth century. |
| Pleisse, Parthe, and Elster | The description of the city in the following paragraphs, like that of Halle in the previous chapters, was heavily influenced by the relevant entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. |
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| its fairs, the autumnal variety | The great fair of Leipzig does indeed take place in the autumn, which cements the dating of L.’s arrival. |
| | A quotation from the “Auerbach’s Cellar” scene in Goethe’s Faust I, which takes place in Leipzig. |
| | Latin: “center of music.” Leipzig is famous, among other things, for being the city of Johann Sebastian Bach. |
| | The Gewandhaus is a famous concert hall in Leipzig. The Jewish composer and conductor Felix Mendelssohn, who among other things was responsible for the Bach revival of the nineteenth century, directed it from 1835 to 1841. |
| | Cembalo (an ancestor of the piano). |
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| | 1725 textbook on counterpoint by Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741). |
| somewhat like our Schleppfuss | The porter’s external appearance, his pronunciation, and his servile demeanor all mark him as another devil figure. |
| | Famous tavern in Leipzig; the setting for one of the scenes in Goethe’s Faust. |
| | Red lanterns are a traditional identifying mark of brothels. |
| | L.’s adventures in the brothel were heavily influenced by a similar episode that TM found in a 1901 biography of Friedrich Nietzsche by Paul Deussen (1845–1919). |
| morphos, clearwings, esmeraldas | The comparison of the prostitutes to butterflies links this chapter to chapter III. |
| behold opposite me a piano | L. has already displayed similar behavior on 122/167. |
| hermit’s prayer […] Freischütz | The “hermit’s prayer” concludes Carl Maria von Weber’s opera about a devil’s pact, Der Freischütz, and functions as a kind of musical exorcism, in which demonic influences are dissolved by the musical purity of C major. |
| | Latin: “the art of meter.” |
| “comprehensive worldview” | TM appears to have invented this quote as a way of setting up the subsequent discussion of Romanticism. |
| later Beethoven and his polyphony | This phrase owes a lot to Adorno’s unconventional use of the term “polyphony” in both “Late Style in Beethoven” and Philosophy of New Music. The idea will be developed more fully in chapter XXV. |
| | See Kretzschmar’s second lecture in VIII, which L. is here combining with some of his own reflections from 82/931. |
| | A reference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1842) by Felix Mendelssohn. |
| J’espère vous voir ce soir | French: “I hope to see you tonight, although that moment might possibly drive me mad.” The hint of queer longing that we can detect in this phrase possibly alludes to the quite similar desires Z. seems to project onto L. |
| | Latin: “Look at the letter [I have written]!” A reference both Nietzsche, who wrote a book called Ecce Homo, and to Jesus Christ, to whom these words traditionally refer. |