Doctor Faustus (66 page)

I know that Leverkühn, before composing the piece, studied very carefully the management of the violin in Beriot, Vieuxtemps, and Wieniawski and then applied his knowledge in a way half-respectful, half caricature and moreover with such a challenge to the technique of the player—especially in the extremely abandoned and virtuoso middle movement, a scherzo, wherein there is a quotation from Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata—that the good Rudi had his work cut out to be equal to the demands upon him. Beads of sweat stood out beneath his blond locks every time he performed it, and the whites of his pretty azure eyes were bloodshot. But how much he got out of it, how much opportunity for “flirtation” in a heightened sense of the word, lay in a work which I to the Master’s very face called “the apotheosis of salon music”! I was, of course, certain beforehand that he would not take the description amiss, but accept it with a smile.

I cannot think of that hybrid production without recalling a conversation which took place one evening at the home of Bullinger, the Munich manufacturer. Bullinger, as we know, occupied the bel etage of an elegant apartment-house he had built in Wiedemayerstrasse; beneath its windows the Isar, that uncorrupted glacial stream, purled past in its well-regulated bed. The Croesus entertained some fifteen guests at seven-o’clock dinner; he kept open house, with a trained staff, and a lady housekeeper who presided with affectedly elegant manners and obviously would have liked to marry. The guests were mostly people in the financial and business world. But it was known that Bullinger loved to air his views at large in intellectual circles; and on occasion he would gather a selection of artistic and academic elements for an evening in his agreeable quarters. No one, myself included, I confess, saw any reason to despise his cuisine or the spacious amenities of his drawing-rooms as a setting for stimulating discussion.

This time the group consisted of Jeanette Scheurl, Herr and Frau Knoterich, Schildknapp, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Zink and Spengler, Kranich the numismatist, Radbruch the publisher and his wife, the actress Zwitscher, the farce-writer from Bukovina, whose name was Binder-Majoresku, myself and my dear wife. Adrian, urged by me and also by Schildknapp and Schwerdtfeger, was there too. I do not inquire whose plea had been decisive, nor do I flatter myself in the least that it was mine. At table he sat next Jeanette, whose society was always a comfort to him, and he saw other familiar faces about him as well; so he seemed not to regret having yielded but rather to have enjoyed the three hours of his stay. I remarked again with unspoken amusement the involuntary attention and more or less timid reverence paid to him. After all, he was only thirty-nine years old, and besides, but few of the guests present possessed enough musical knowledge for such an attitude on any rational grounds. It amused me, I say; yet gave me a pang at my heart as well. For the behaviour of these people was really due to the indescribable atmosphere of aloofness which he carried about wherever he went. In increasing degree, more and more perceptible and baffling as the years went by, it wrapped him round and gave one the feeling that he came from a country where nobody else lived.

This evening, as I said, he seemed quite comfortable; he was even conversational, which I ascribed in some degree to the effect of Bullinger’s champagne-and-bitters cocktail and his wonderful Pfalz wine. Adrian talked with Spengler, who was already in wretched health, his disease having attacked his heart, and laughed with the rest of us at the clowneries of Leo Zink, who leaned back at table and covered himself with his huge damask serviette like a sheet up to his fantastic nose and folded his hands peacefully atop. Adrian was even more amused by the jester’s adroitness when we were called on to look at a well-intentioned still-life by Bullinger, who dabbled in oils. To save the company the embarrassment of criticizing it, Zink examined the painting with a thousand acclamations and Good—graciouses which might mean anything and nothing; looked at it from every point of view and even turned it over and looked at the back. This gush of ecstatic yet wholly meaningless verbiage was Zink’s social technique; at bottom he was not a pleasant man, and this was his way of taking part in conversations that went over his head as dilettante painter and enthusiast of carnival balls. He even practised it in the conversation I have in mind, touching the fields of aesthetics and ethics.

It developed as a sequel to some gramophone music with which the host regaled us after the coffee, as we smoked and drank liqueurs. Very good gramophone records had begun to be produced, and Bullinger played several enjoyable ones for us from his valuable cabinet: the well-recorded waltzes from Gounod’s
Faust
came first, I remember. Baptist Spengler could only criticize them on the ground that they were drawing-room music, much too elegant for folk-dances on the meadow. It was agreed that their style was more suitable in the case of the charming ball-music in Berlioz’s
Symphonie fantastique
and we asked to hear a record of the latter. It was not there; but Rudi Schferdtfeger whistled the air faultlessly, in violin timbre, pure and perfect, and laughed at the applause, shrugging his shoulder inside his coat, in the way he had, and drawing down one corner of his mouth in a grimace. By way of comparison with the French somebody now demanded something Viennese: Lanner, Johann Strauss the younger. Our host gave us willingly from his store, until a lady—it was Frau Radbruch, the publisher’s wife—suggested that with all this frivolous stuff we might be boring the great composer who was present. Everybody, in concern, agreed with her; Adrian, who had not understood, asked what she had said. When it was repeated he made lively protest. In God’s name no, that was all a mistake. No one could take more pleasure than he in these things—in their way they were masterly.

“You underestimate my musical education,” said he. “In my early days I had a teacher” (he looked across at me with his deep, subtle, lovely smile) “crammed full of the whole world of sound; a bubbling enthusiast, too much in love with every, I really mean every, organized noise, for me to have learned any contempt from him. There was no such thing as being ‘too good’ for any sort of music. A man who knew the best, the highest and austerest; but for him music was music—if it just was music. He objected to Goethe’s saying that art is concerned with the good and difficult; he held that ‘light’ music is difficult too, if it is good, which it can be, just as well as ‘heavy’ music. Some of that stuck by me, I got it from him. Of course I have always grasped the idea that one must be very well anchored in the good and ‘heavy’ to take up with the ‘light.’ “

There was silence in the room. What he had said, at bottom, was that he alone had the right to enjoy the pleasant things we had been regaled with. They tried not to understand it thus, but they suspected that was what he meant. Schildknapp and I exchanged looks. Dr. Kranich went “H’m, h’m.” Jeanette Scheurl whispered “
Magnifique!
” Leo Zink’s fatuous “Jesus, Jesus!” rose above the rest, in pretended acclamation, but really out of spite. “Genuine Adrian Leverkühn!” cried Schwerdtfeger, red in the face from one Vieille Cure after another, but also, I felt sure, out of private chagrin.

“You haven’t by chance,” Adrian went on, “Delilah’s D-sharp major aria from
Samson
by Saint-Saens?” The question was addressed to Bullinger, who found great satisfaction in replying: “Not have it? My dear sir, what do you think of me? Here it is—not at all ‘by chance,’ I assure you!”

Adrian answered: “Oh, good! It came into my head, because Kretschmar, my teacher, he was an organist, a fugue-man, you must know, had a peculiarly passionate feeling for the piece, a real
faible
. He could laugh at it too, but that did not lessen his admiration, which may have concerned only the consummate-ness of the thing in its own genre. Listen.”

The needle touched the plate. Bullinger put down the heavy lid. Through the loud-speaker poured a proud mezzo-soprano voice, which did not much trouble about clear enunciation: you understood: “
Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix
” and not a great deal else. But the singing, unfortunately accompanied by a rather whining orchestra, was wonderful in its warmth, tenderness, sombre lament for happiness, like the melody, which indeed in both of the structurally similar strophes of the aria reaches its full beauty only in the middle and finishes in a way to overpower the senses, especially the second time, when the violin, now quite sonorous, emphasizes with pleasing effect the voluptuous vocal line and repeats the closing figure in delicate and melancholy postlude.

They were moved. One lady wiped an eye with her embroidered party handkerchief. “Crazy beautiful!” said Bullinger, using a phrase now in favour among stricter connoisseurs, who rejected the sentimental “lovely.” It might be said to be used here exactly in its right and proper place, and perhaps that was what amused Adrian.

“Well, there!” he said, laughing. “You understand now how a serious man can be capable of adoring the thing. Intellectual beauty it has not, of course, it is typically sensual. But after all one must not blush for the sensual, nor be afraid of it.”

“And yet, perhaps,” Dr. Kranich was heard to say. He spoke, as always, very clearly, with distinct articulation, though wheezing with asthma. “Perhaps, after all, in art. In this realm in fact one may, or one should, be afraid of the nothing-but-sensual; one should be ashamed of it, for, as the poet said, it is the common, the vulgar: ‘Vulgar is everything that does not speak to the mind and spirit and arouses nothing but a sensual interest.’”

“A noble saying,” Adrian responded. “We shall do well to let it echo for a bit in our minds before we think of anything to dispute it.”

“And what would you think of then?” the scholar wanted to know.

Adrian had made a grimace, shrugged a shoulder, as much as to say: “I can’t help the facts.” Then he replied: “Idealism leaves out of count that the mind and spirit are by no means addressed by the spiritual alone; they can be most deeply moved by the animal sadness of sensual beauty. They have even paid homage to frivolity. Philine, after all, is nothing but a little strumpet, but Wilhelm Meister, who is not so very different from his creator, pays her a respect in which the vulgarity of innocent sensuality is openly denied.”

“His complaisance, his toleration of the questionable,” returned the numismatist, “have never been looked on as the most exemplary traits of our Olympian’s character. And one may see a danger to culture when the spirit closes its eyes to the vulgar and sensual, or even winks at them.”

“Obviously we have different opinions as to the danger.”

“You might as well say I am a coward, at once!”

“God forbid! A knightly defender of fear and censure is no coward, he is simply knightly. For myself, I would only like to break a lance for a certain breadth of view in matters of artistic morality. One grants it, or allows it, it seems to me, more readily in other arts than in music. That may be very honourable but it does seriously narrow its field. What becomes of the whole jingle-jangle if you apply the most rigorously intellectual standards? A few ‘pure spectra’ of Bach. Perhaps nothing else audible would survive at all.”

A servant came round with whisky, beer, and soda-water on a huge tray.

“Who would want to be a spoilsport?” said Kranich, and got a “Bravo!” and a clap on the shoulder from Bullinger. To me, and very likely to some of the other guests, the exchange was a duel suddenly struck up between uncompromising mediocrity and painful depth of experience. But I have interpolated this scene, not only because I feel the close connection between it and the concerto upon which Adrian was then at work, but also because even then both concerto and conversation directed my attention to the person of the young man upon whose obstinate insistence the piece had been written and for whom it represented a conquest in more than one sense of the word. Probably it is my fate to be able to speak only stiffly, dryly, and analytically about the phenomenon of love: of that which Adrian had one day characterized to me as an amazing and always somewhat unnatural alteration in the relation between the I and the not-I. Reverence for the mystery in general, and personal reverence as well, combine to close my lips or make me chary of words when I come to speak of the transformation, always in the sign of the daemonic, the phenomenon in and for itself half miraculous which negatives the singleness of the individual soul. Even so, I will show that it was a specific sharpening of my wits through my classical scholarship, an acquirement which otherwise tends rather to take the edge off one’s reactions towards life, which put me in a position to see or understand as much as I did.

There remains no doubt—I say it in all calmness—that tireless, self-confident perseverance, put off by nothing, had won the day over aloofness and reserve. Such a conquest, considering the polarity—I emphasize the word—the polarity of the partners, the intellectual antithesis between them, could have only one definite character, and that, in a freakish sort of way, was what had always been sought and striven after. It is perfectly clear to me that a man of Schwerdtfeger’s make-up had always, whether consciously or not, given this particular meaning and coloration to his wooing of Adrian—though of course I do not mean that it lacked nobler motives. On the contrary, the suitor was perfectly serious when he said how necessary Adrian’s friendship was to the fulfilment of his nature, how it would develop, elevate, improve it. But he was illogical enough to use his native gift of coquetry—and then to feel put off when the melancholy preference he aroused did not lack the signs of ironic eroticism.

To me the most remarkable and thrilling thing about all this was to see how the victim did not see that he had been bewitched. He gave himself credit for an initiative that belonged entirely to the other party, and was full of fantastic astonishment at frankly reckless and regardless advances that might better be called seduction. Yes, Adrian talked about the
miracle
of that undaunted single-mindedness, undistracted by melancholy or emotion; I have little doubt that his astonishment went back to that distant evening when Schwerdtfeger appeared in his room to beg him to come back because the party was so dull without him. And yet in these so-called miracles you could always see poor Rudi’s “higher,” his free and decent characteristics as an artist, which I have repeatedly celebrated. There is a letter which Adrian at about the time of the Bullinger dinner wrote to Schwerdtfeger, who should of course have destroyed it but which, partly out of sentiment, partly as a trophy he did in fact preserve. I refrain from quoting it, merely characterizing it as a human document which affects the reader like the baring of a wound and whose painful lack of reserve the writer probably considered an uttermost hazard. It was not. And the way it proved not to be was really beautiful. At once, with all expedition, with no torturing delay, Rudi’s visit to Pfeiffering followed. There were explanations, there was assurance of the profoundest gratitude: the revelation of a simple, bold, and utterly sincere bearing, zealously concerned to obviate all humiliation… That I must commend, I cannot help it. And I suspect—and in a way approve—that on this occasion the composition and dedication of the violin concerto were decided on.