| vestiges of an older German | The German uses the compound adjective stehen geblieben-altdeutsch (“a static old German”) aligning Schneidewein’s speech more closely with the nunc stans, or “static now” of Kaisersaschern. |
| | Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) and Wilhelm Hertzberg (1813–1879) both translated Shakespeare into German. TM owned the Hertzberg edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost. |
| | An unusual way to describe marriage, but congruent with a theme in Z.’s narration that we first observed on 6/12. |
| | Another occurrence of the motif of eyes. Schneidewein’s “good eyes” contrast with the “veiled cast” of L.’s own eyes mentioned in the previous paragraph. Eyes, of course, are traditionally regarded as windows to the soul. |
| | The original uses the archaic term wegpaschen, an allusion to the scene “Entombment” in Goethe’s Faust II (1832). L.’s thoughts about marriage as a Christian sacrament that wards off the devil also allude to the Chapbook. |
| “And shall be one flesh.” | Matthew 19:5. L.’s subsequent commentary on this passage is heavily influenced by both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. |
| | Z., currently at work condensing Love’s Labour’s Lost, uses a Shakespearean phrase, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There may also be an ironic allusion to 1 Pet. 5:8, where the devil is referred to as a “roaring lion.” |
| “But if thou […] greasily” | Quotes from Love’s Labour’s Lost (IV.1). |
| freedom that has begun to coat talent | L.’s arguments in favor of an “archaic restorative” revolution that would seek to counteract an excess of “freedom” do not seem confined to the realm of music. The passage anticipates the so-called Conservative Revolution of the Weimar Republic. |
| Freedom […] dialectic reversal | A central idea of DF, and one that TM would have found explicated in great detail in the works of his musical advisor Theodor W. Adorno. |
| moreover, that’s a political song | A quotation from the “Auerbach’s Cellar” scene in Goethe’s Faust I. Woods translates the German übrigens as “moreover”; a more literal translation would be “however”: L. is trying to distance art from politics. This rhetorical move will recur in the coming chapters, where L. will repeatedly claim to speak only about art, but will do so in vague terms that permit a much broader interpretation. |
| You’re thinking of Beethoven | The following paragraphs recap and develop Kretzschmar’s Beethoven lectures in VIII, but also summarize Adorno. The gist of L.’s argument is that once freedom (typified here by the development section of the sonata form) becomes absolute, it will inevitably revert into its opposite. |
| | By reading Brahms as an even more extreme exponent of Beethoven, L. is preparing the way for TM’s argument that all of nineteenth-century German music stands in the shadow of Beethoven’s Op. 111. |
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| both the horizontal and vertical | By “horizontal” L. means the melody, which in the logic of DF is associated with polyphony and the fugue. By “vertical” he refers to harmony, associated with homophony and the sonata. TM’s manuscript shows that he initially even used the terms “melody” and “harmony” here. The substitution of “vertical” and “horizontal” strengthens the link to the magic square. |
| twelve steps of the tempered semitone alphabet | In the remainder of this paragraph and the next few, L. describes the twelve-tone technique that in real life was developed by Arnold Schoenberg in 1923, and which TM knew via Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. This arguable act of plagiarism caused a public rift between Mann and Schoenberg (who were basically neighbors in Pacific Palisades) and caused TM to add an acknowledgment of Schoenberg’s “intellectual property” to all editions of the novel beginning with the third in 1948. Also noteworthy here is L.’s equation of tone rows with words, and of the chromatic scale with the alphabet. This continues his general tendency to fuse musical with lexical expression. |
| | Schoenberg did indeed borrow contrapuntal devices to add flexibility and variation to his tone rows. In an “inversion,” the tone row occurs back-to-front. In a “crab canon,” the intervals are inverted. An inverted crab canon combines the two techniques. |