Doctor Faustus (29 page)

My poor friend had been instructed one day, or rather one night, from frightful lips, by an awful ally, in more detail on the subject I here touch upon. The document is extant, I will report on it in its proper place. It first illuminated and clarified the instinctive fears which Adrian’s remarks aroused in me. But what I called above the “travesty of innocence”: how often, from early on, did it strangely stand out in his work! That work contains, on a developed musical plane, against a background of the most extreme tensions, “banalities”—of course not in a sentimental sense nor in that of a buoyant complacency, but banalities rather in the sense of a technical primitivism, specimens of naivete or sham naivete which Meister Kretschmar, in so gifted a pupil, let pass with a smile. He did so, certainly, because he understood them not as first—degree naivetes, if I may so express myself, but as something the other side of the new and cheap: as audacities dressed in the garment of the primitive. The thirteen Brentano songs are also to be regarded in this light. To them, before I leave the subject, I must certainly devote a few words; they often affect one like at once a mockery and a glorification of the fundamental, a painfully reminiscent ironic treatment of tonality, of the tempered system, of traditional music itself.

That Adrian in these Leipzig years so zealously devoted himself to the composition of lieder doubtless came about because he regarded this lyric marrying of music with words as a preparation for the dramatic composition he had in mind. Probably it was also connected with the scruples he felt on the score of the destiny, the historic situation of art itself, of the autonomous work. He misdoubted form, calling it pretence and play. Thus the small and lyric form of the lied might stand to him as the most acceptable, most serious, and truest; it might seem to him soonest to fulfil his theoretic demand for brevity and condensation. But it is not only that several of these productions, as for instance the “
O lieb Madel”
with the letter symbol, further the Hymns, the “
Lustigen Mimikanten
” the “Huntsman to the Shepherds,” and others, are quite long. Yet Leverkühn wanted them all regarded and treated together, as a whole, proceeding from one definite, fundamental stylistic conception, the congenial contact with a particular, amazingly lofty, and deeply dream-sunken poet soul. He would never permit the performance of single pieces, but always only the full cycle, a stern reservation, which in his lifetime stood very much in the way of their performance in public, especially since one of them, the “Jolly Musicians,” is written for a quintet of voices, mother, daughter, the two brothers, and the boy who “early broke his leg”; that is, for alto, soprano, baritone, tenor, and a child’s voice; these, partly in ensemble, partly solo, partly in duet (the two brothers) must perform No .4 of the cycle. It was the first one that Adrian orchestrated, or more correctly, he set it at once for a small orchestra of strings, woodwind, and percussion; for in the strange poem much is said of the pipes and tambourine, the bells and cymbals, the jolly violin trills, with which the fantastic, frightened little troupe, by night “when us no human eye does see” draws into the magic spell of its airs the lovers in their chamber, the drunken guests, the lonely maiden. In mood and spirit the piece, like a spectral serenade, the music at once lovely and tortured, are unique. And still I hesitate to award it the palm among the thirteen, several of which challenge music in a more inward sense and fulfil themselves more deeply in it than this one which treats of music in words. “Grossmutter Schlangenkochin” is another one of the songs, this “
Maria, wo bist du zur Stube gewesen?
” This seven times repeated “Oh woe, Frau Mother, what woe!” that with incredibly intuitive art actually calls up the unearthly thrills and shudders so familiar to us in the field of the German folk-song. For it is really the case that this music, wise and true and over-shrewd, here continually and painfully woos the folk-air. The wooing remains unrealized, it is there and not there, sounds fleetingly, echoes, fades into a style musically foreign to it, from which after all it constantly seeks to escape. The artistic effect is striking: it appears like a cultural paradox, which by inversion of the natural course of development, where the refined and intellectual grow out of the elementary, the former here plays the role of the original, out of which the simple continually strives to wrest itself free.

Wafteth the meaning pure of the stars Soft through the distance unto my ears—

that is the sound, almost lost in space, the cosmic ozone of another poem, wherein spirits in golden barks traverse the heavenly sea and the ringing course of gleaming songs wreathes itself down and wells up again: All is so gently and friendly combining, Hand seeketh hand in sympathy kind, Lights through the night wind trusting, consoling, All is in union for ever entwined.

Very rarely in all literature have word and music met and married as here. Here music turns its eye upon itself and looks at its own being. These notes, that consoling and trusting offer each other the hand; that weaving and winding of all things in likeness and change—of such it is, and Adrian Leverkühn is its youthful master.

Kretschmar, before he left Leipzig to become first Kapellmeister in the Lubeck State Opera House, saw to the publication of the Brentano songs. Schott in Mainz took them on commission; that is, Adrian, with Kretschmar’s and my help (we both shared in it) guaranteed the cost of printing and remained the owner, in that he assured the publishers of a share in the profits amounting to twenty per cent of the net receipts. He strictly supervised the piano reduction, demanded a rough, mat paper, quarto format, wide margins, and notes printed not too close together. And he insisted upon a note at the beginning to the effect that performances in clubs and concerts were only by the author’s permission and only permitted for all thirteen pieces as a whole. This was taken offence at as pretentious and, together with the boldness of the music itself, put difficulties in the way of their becoming known. In 1922, not in Adrian’s presence, but in mine, they were sung in the Tonhalle in Zurich, under the direction of the excellent Dr. Volkmar Andreae. The part in “
Die lustigen Musikanten
” of the boy who “early broke his leg” was sung by a boy unfortunately really crippled, using a crutch, little Jacob Nagli. He had a voice pure as a bell, that went straight to the heart.

In passing, the pretty original edition of Clemens Brentano’s poems which Adrian used in his work had been a present from me; I brought the little volume for him from Naumburg to Leipzig. Of course the thirteen songs were quite his own choice, I had no smallest influence upon that. But I may say that almost song for song they followed my own wish and expectations.—I do not mean they were my personal choice, nor will the reader find them so. For what had I, really, what had my culture and ethics to do with these words and visions of a romantic poet, these dreams of a child-world and folk-world which yet are for ever floating off, not to say degenerating, into the supernatural and spectral? I can only answer that it was the music of the words themselves which led me to make the gift—music which lies in these verses, so lightly slumbering that the slightest touch of the gifted hand was enough to awake it.

CHAPTER XXII

W
hen Leverkühn left Leipzig, in September 1910, at a time when I had already begun to teach in the gymnasium at Kaisersaschern, he first went home to Buchel to attend his sister’s wedding, which took place at that time and to which I and my parents were invited. Ursula, now twenty years old, was marrying the optician Johannes Schneidewein of Langensalza, an excellent man whose acquaintance she had made while visiting a friend in the charming little Salza town near Erfurt. Schneidewein, ten or twelve years older than his bride, was a Swiss by birth, of Bernese peasant stock. His trade, lens-grinding, he had learned at home, but he had somehow drifted into Germany and there opened a shop with eyeglasses and optical goods of all sorts, which he conducted with success. He had very good looks and had kept his Swiss manner of speech, pleasant to the ear, deliberate, formal, interspersed with survivals of old-German expressions oddly solemn to hear. Ursel Leverkühn had already begun to take them on. She too, though no beauty, was an attractive creature, resembling her father in looks, in manner more like her mother, brown-eyed, slim, and naturally friendly. The two made a pair on whom the eye rested with approval. In the years between 1911 and 1923 they had four children born to them: Rosa, Ezekiel, Raimund, and Nepomuk, pretty creatures all of them, and Nepomuk, the youngest, was an angel. But of that later, only quite at the end of my story.

The wedding party was not large: the Oberweiler clergyman, the schoolmaster, the justice of the peace, with their wives; from Kaisersaschern besides us Zeitbloms only Uncle Nikolaus; relatives of Frau Leverkühn from Apolda; a married pair, friend of the Leverkühns, with their daughter, from Weissenfels; brother George, the farmer, and the dairy manageress Frau Luder—that was all. Wendell Kretschmar sent a telegram with good wishes from Lubeck, which arrived during the midday meal at the house in Buchel. It was not an evening party. It had assembled betimes in the morning; after the ceremony in the village church we gathered round a capital meal in the dining-room of the bride’s home, bright with copper cooking-vessels. Soon afterwards the newly wedded pair drove off with old Thomas to the station at Weissenfels, to begin the journey to Dresden; the wedding guests still sat awhile over Frau Luder’s good fruit liqueurs.

Adrian and I took a walk that afternoon to the Cow Trough and up Mount Zion. We needed to talk over the text of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, which I had undertaken and about which we had already had much discussion and correspondence. I had been able to send him from Athens and Syracuse the scenario and parts of the German versification, in which I based myself on Tieck and Hertzberg and occasionally, when condensation was necessary, added something of my own in as adequate a style as possible. I was determined at least to put before him a German version of the libretto, although he still stuck to his project of composing the opera in English.

He was visibly glad to get away from the wedding party and out of doors. The cloud over his eyes showed that he was suffering from headache. It had been odd, in church and at the table, to see the same sign in his father too. That this nervous complaint set in precisely on festal occasions, under the influence of emotion and excitement, is understandable. It was so with the elder man. In the son’s case the psychical ground was rather that he had taken part only of necessity and with reluctance in this sacrificial feast of a maidenhead, in which, moreover, his own sister was concerned. At least he clothed his discomfort in words which recognized the simplicity, good taste, and informality of our affair, the absence of “customs and curtsyings” as he put it. He applauded the fact that it had all taken place in broad daylight, the wedding sermon had been short and simple, and at table there had been no offensive speeches—or rather, to avoid offence, no speeches at all. If the veil, the white shroud of virginity, the satin grave-shoes had been left out as well, it would have been still better. He spoke particularly of the favourable impression that Ursel’s betrothed, now her husband, had made upon him.

“Good eyes,” he said. “Good stock, a sound, clean, honest man. He could court her, look at her to desire her, covet her as a Christian wife, as we theologians say with justified pride at swindling the Devil out of the carnal concomitant and making a sacrament of it, the sacrament of Christian marriage. Very droll, really, this turning the natural and sinful into the sacrosanct just by putting in the word Christian—by which it is not fundamentally altered. But one has to admit that the domestication of sex, which is evil by nature, into Christian marriage was a clever makeshift.”

“I do not like,” I replied, “to have you make over the natural to evil. Humanism, old and new, considers that an aspersion on the sources of life.”

“My dear chap, there is not much there to asperse.”

“One ends,” I said undeterred, “by denying the works of God; one becomes the advocate of nothing. Who believes in the Devil, already belongs to him.”

He gave his short laugh.

“You never understand a joke. I spoke as a theologian and so necessarily like a theologian.”

“Never mind,” I said, laughing as well. “You usually take your jokes more seriously than your seriousness.” We carried on this conversation on the community bench under the maple trees on Mount Zion, in the sunshine of the autumn afternoon. The fact was that at that time I myself was going courting, though the wedding and even the public engagement had to wait on my being confirmed in my position. I wanted to tell him about Helene and of my proposed step, but his remarks did not precisely encourage me.

“And they twain shall be one flesh,” he began again: “Is it not a curious blessing? Pastor Schroder, thank God, spared himself the quotation. In the presence of the bridal pair it is rather painful to hear. But it is only too well meant, and precisely what I mean by domestication. Obviously the element of sin, of sensuality, of evil lust altogether, is conjured away out of marriage—for lust is certainly only in flesh of two different kinds, not in one, and that they are to be one flesh is accordingly soothing but nonsensical. On the other hand, one cannot wonder enough that one flesh has lust for another; it is a phenomenon—well, yes, the entirely exceptional phenomenon of love. Of course, love and sensuality are not to be separated. One best absolves love from the reproach of sensuality by identifying the love element in sensuality itself. The lust after strange flesh means a conquest of previously existing resistances, based on the strangeness of I and You, your own and the other person’s. The flesh—to keep the Christian terminology—is normally inoffensive to itself only. With another’s it will have nothing to do. Now, if all at once the strange flesh become the object of desire and lust, then the relation of the I and the You is altered in a way for which sensuality is only an empty word. No, one cannot get along without the concept of love, even when ostensibly there is nothing spiritual in play. Every sensual act means tenderness, it is a give and take of desire, happiness through making happy, a manifestation of love. ‘One flesh’ have lovers never been; and the prescription would drive love along with lust out of marriage.”