| | As was the case at their moment of parting, Z. addresses L. by name, while L. refuses to reciprocate. |
| | Unlike most other conductors, virtuosos, and musical ensembles mentioned in DF, the Schaffgosch Quartet is fictional. |
| | The Lydian is one of the church modes already mentioned on 84/115. |
| “I drain that cup at every feast” | An allusion to Gretchen’s song in Goethe’s Faust I. L. is clearly telling the truth, for when he later composes a violin concerto of his own, he will quote from Beethoven’s Op. 132. |
| tempered […] “pure” scales | “Pure scales” are ones in which the intervals between notes are determined by the ratios of whole numbers. Tempered scales divide the octave into a certain number of equivalent intervals. While many musicians and theoreticians have argued for the superiority of pure scales, L.’s justification doesn’t make much sense, as tempered scales were invented precisely to simplify modulation. |
| Pythagoras’ theory of cosmic harmony | |
| | Because of his wild appearance and preternatural playing, the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) was sometimes rumored to have made a pact with the devil. |
| | Schildknapp’s last name translates as “shield bearer,” and thereby alludes to Dürer’s engraving Knight, Death, and Devil. In all other regards, however, the character was inspired by TM’s friend Hans Reisiger (1884–1968), who was not amused by the less-than-flattering portrait (TM privately called the depiction a “literary murder”). The introduction of Schildknapp marks an important turning point in DF: henceforth, many more characters inspired by real people will appear, as L.’s life becomes more intertwined with the events and the social circles of the early twentieth century. |
| | Comedy (1598) by William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Early editions of DF have Love’s Labour Lost, and this spelling is adopted in the GKFA. The play revolves around a pact between the main characters, who swear an oath to renounce all contact with women to focus on their studies of philosophy. The theme foreshadows the conditions outlined by the devil in XXV. |
| | Two of the three main divisions of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The one not mentioned here is, of course, the Inferno. |
| man in a parable from the Purgatorio | The reference is to the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE). The theme of the artist whose achievements benefit only those who come after him will recur in DF. |
| music and speech, he insisted | Besides Kierkegaard, the following reflections are obviously influenced by Kretzschmar’s lecture on Johann Conrad Beissel. |
| | “Absolute” music is music that is non-representational, i.e., not explicitly “about” anything. In nineteenth-century German music, there were long-standing theoretical disputes about whether the future of the art form lay with “programmatic” or absolute music. Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) were commonly seen as the figureheads of the respective camps. |
| | Italian: “comic opera.” More specifically, a genre of opera most closely associated with Italian music of the eighteenth century. |
| | Characters from Love’s Labour’s Lost. |
| | The humor in German rests on the distinction between the formal demonstrative pronoun jenes and the informal demonstrative das. As such, Schildknapp’s joke points back to L.’s struggles with formal and informal personal pronouns. |
| Any luck they had with him | The description of Schildknapp is suffused with subtle suggestions that he might be gay (as was his real-life model Hans Reisiger). This perhaps explains Z.’s obvious jealousy of him. |
| | “Squire” is indeed the most literal translation of Schildknapp; I’ve chosen “shield bearer” instead to draw attention to the “shield” in Rüdiger’s name, which parallels the “sword” in Rudi Schwerdtfeger. In the German, TM builds a further pun into this sentence by incorporating the rarely used term reisig (“errant”): a subtle reference to Schwerdtfeger’s real-life model Hans Reisiger. Reisiger was not pleased by the allusion and convinced TM to change it in later printings. |
| | The German is Krippenreiter, a term for an impoverished knight, which continues the semantic games of the previous lines. |
| His eyes were exactly the same color as Adrian’s | |